My Losing Season

My Losing Season is a 2002 memoir by author Pat Conroy. The book largely chronicles Conroy’s senior season as the starting point guard and captain of the 1966-67 Citadel Bulldogs basketball team. The value of losing is the book’s overarching theme, and the author’s coming-of-age is a strong secondary theme. Conroy’s relationship with his abusive father, his love of basketball, and his team’s rapport with its authoritarian coach are the central focuses throughout the memoir. Long known for his bestselling novels and their film adaptations, My Losing Season was Conroy’s first nonfiction work in nearly three decades. It was a New York Times bestseller and a winner of an American Library Association Alex Award. 

When Pat Conroy was 10 years old, he fell in love with the game of basketball. He was living in Florida at the time and had already relocated countless times due to his father’s career as a United States Marine Corps fighter pilot. Conroy discovered that basketball helped to alleviate his loneliness, and he thought that it might make his father, a former player himself, love him. Conroy’s love of basketball became his saving grace, and being a point guard became his identity, but the sport also provided another way for his father to degrade him. Especially skilled at ball-handling and passing by the time that he was a senior in high school, Conroy drew only limited interest from major college basketball programs. His only true opportunity to continue playing at the college level was by accepting a walk-on offer from The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina. 

A free-thinker and aspiring poet and writer, Conroy was the polar opposite of the sort of student who typically enrolls to become a cadet at The Citadel. The plebe system, the organized form of hazing common to all freshmen cadets at military academies, was especially torturous for Conroy. Although the hazing officially broke him on one occasion, Conroy made it through his first year and made a vow that he would never torture another cadet. At the completion of his plebe year, Conroy won a full athletic scholarship from head coach Mel Thompson. Expectations were high for Conroy’s varsity years on the basketball team, but as is usually the case with military academies competing against typical colleges and universities, his team simply lacked the same sort of talent. By his senior year, Conroy was thriving as a cadet and a burgeoning writer and had even developed into a far better basketball player than his coach ever thought possible. In terms of personal achievement, the season was a successful one for Conroy, but his team struggled to win only eight of its 25 games.

Conroy breaks his memoir down into four parts, beginning with “The Point Guard Takes to the Court,” which details the first few weeks of the season as the team begins practice and prepares to play. The second part, “The Making of a Point Guard,” provides a detour from the author’s account of the season, as Conroy reminisces about his childhood when he fell in love with the game of basketball, his high school years, and his tumultuous first three years as a cadet at The Citadel. Part 3, “The Point Guard Finds His Voice,” returns to a straightforward chronicle of the team’s disappointing season in the Southern Conference. Conroy wraps up his memoir with Part 4, “The Point Guard’s Way of Knowledge,” which recounts the process that he undertook to write the book and his interactions with his former teammates and coach during the interviewing process.