Saralee Says
Pat Conroy, the author of The Great Santini, Prince of Tides and Beach Music is one of the world's best writers. Reading My Losing Season (Doubleday) was a combination of two of my greatest passions, reading a good book and learning more about what I think is today's best sport - college basketball. Get this book today to use as an armchair companion while you are completing your ballot for which teams will advance to Final Four. As you follow your favorite team, win or lose, see what players have the courage and determination of point guard Pat Conroy.
Before Conroy was a writer he was a basketball player. He learned to dribble at an early age and played in every pick up game he could as a boy. One of the most poignant lines Conroy writes in My Losing Season is "If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me." If you read The Great Santini, which is loosely based on Conroy's own family life, then you learned the author is the son of a career military father who used his fists freely on his children and abused them verbally as well. Losing Season is about the lessons that the Citadel basketball team learned from their losing season of 1966-1967 and how that season enabled them to become men of character and winners in life.
As you read and discuss this book, ask yourself how Conroy wrote in such detail the events of every basketball game–including high school and college games–played almost 40 years ago. Almost every game he ever played in is recounted in vivid detail, play by play. What about the way his father moved him from one high school to another? I wanted to cry when Conroy had to leave Gonzaga and move to Beaufort High. What did you think of Conroy's coach at the Citadel, Mel Thompson? Did he help build character or was he as abusive and destructive as Conroy's father? What about the deception by the Citadel to the men they recruited to play sports? These men got the surprise of their life. They did not think they would experience the harsh lives of the regular plebe or freshman because they were athletes but they were treated just like everyone else who is new at the Citadel–harshly.
How about the way Conroy handled his aspirations as a writer while also being a jock? It was refreshing to me to read about his ability to do both. Did you cheer for the blue team or the green weenies and why? Which member of the team was your favorite, the one who became a prisoner of war in Vietnam or Conroy and why? What about the way Conroy seemed to at last reconcile with the Citadel and his support of women as students there? Do you agree that Conroy's conclusion that we learn more by losing than winning and with his analogy that being a point guard helped him develop his skills as a writer? If you do then perhaps the season that the Vanderbilt men are experiencing now will produce one of their generations best writers.
Larry's Language
Pat Conroy is in such complete denial about his emotions and feelings that he thinks he has written a book about his senior year as a guard on the Citadel college basketball team when in truth the book, My Losing Season, is about surviving abuse and survivor's guilt. It is one of the best books I have read in years.
In his earlier fiction, The Great Santini, Conroy gave the frightening details of the horror of daily life growing up in a family where the father physically abused the mother, the author, and his younger siblings. This book provides more insight into Conroy's high school years and how his focus on basketball helped him endure. With some athletic talent and a lot of luck (bad and good), Conroy received a basketball scholarship to the Citadel where he was abused by the upperclassmen, emotionally abused by the basketball coach, and abused by his father whenever he showed up.
The brutality and violence failed to limit Conroy's spirit and rage and emotions have clearly fueled at least three of his previous books as well as this memoir which Conroy seems to think is about reuniting with his teammates from 40 years ago. There is really very little about his basketball buddies but a great deal about how their coach intimidated, frightened and ignored his players while the Citadel system hardened and shaped their souls.
The writing of this book flows almost as quickly as the pace of some of the ballgames that Conroy describes. The suspense for the reader is not which team is going to win but whether Conroy will self-destruct under these personal pressures. He begins this memoir with his account of how he recently contemplated suicide which demonstrates Conroy's outstanding talent as a writer because the spirit and tone of this book is engaging and ultimately uplifting.
Difficult questions for this Book Club jump off these pages. Can forces of violence and evil produce good effects? Do the few adults (the faculty at Gonzaga High School, the parents of one Beaufort High School classmate and one colonel at the Citadel), who reach out to protect Conroy as a young boy, deserve praise or condemnation for not doing more? What should Conroy's mother have done? Did she really try to protect him or was she only striving to keep her family together? How much guilt do you think Conroy suffers in his almost total neglect of what happened to his younger siblings after he went off to college?
Conroy's hero worship of his basketball teammates provides him an emotional retreat and shelter. The players' casual vulgarity and profanity are obvious shields among themselves to prevent the emotional fellowship that Conroy seems to achieve when he reunites with them 40 years later.
The startling revelation, however, is in the last pages of the book when Conroy attempts to defend and cover up his father's abuse, proving that we all want and need a happy ending, even when it is false.
Our next book selection is Suspicion of Vengeance, A Gail Connor and Anthony Quintana Novel written by Barbara Parker.
