My Losing Season

Coming-of-age is a common theme found in memoirs and autobiographical works, and that is certainly the case with My Losing Season. The memoir is largely a chronicle of author Pat Conroy’s 1966-67 senior basketball season at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina when he was 21 years old, but it also includes a chapter remembering his youth when he fell in love with the game of basketball, two chapters dealing with his high school years, and two chapters recalling his underclassman years at The Citadel. Each of these facets of the memoir represent a time when the author is dealing with drastic changes in his life and establishing the person who he would become as a man. As a literary theme, coming-of-age usually refers to a character’s transition from childhood or adolescence to adulthood. In the case of My Losing Season, Conroy is transitioning not only into adulthood, but also into the professional world in which he would become a teacher and eventually a respected writer.

Although coming-of-age themes typically have more to do with a character’s psychological growth, the author’s coming-of-age in a physical sense has much to do with this work because of its necessity to athletics. Conroy writes about his time in the ninth grade at Sacred Heart Academy in Belmont, North Carolina as a year that grew from five-feet-three inches tall to five-feet-ten, adding “it was the year I grew into the body that I would carry into adulthood” (51). That physical growth allowed Conroy to live out his first dream of playing basketball. Basketball, in turn, allowed him to grow psychologically and mature into a man because it allowed him shelter from his father’s abuse, building his confidence.

The coming-of-age theme in his memoir might be most evident through Conroy’s experiences at The Citadel. As might be the case with any university student, a certain amount of growing up and maturing naturally occurs because many students are on their own for the first time, but life for a cadet at a military academy is far different from that of the typical college student. At The Citadel, responsibility, masculinity, and a sometimes sadistic form of discipline were thrust upon cadets. While those rigors are difficult for any cadet, it was especially so for Conroy, who harbored dreams of a teaching and writing career rather than the military. Remembering his selection to the Honor Court by his battalion mates, Conroy writes:

[I]n those days I lacked all powers of insight or self-knowledge and saw myself as a kind of cipher, a hollowed-out shape of a boy waiting for personality to be poured into the empty shell of the man I might become. Inside, I thought something was developing in the depths of me the way diamonds formed under pressure in the earth’s crust, but I could not give it a name (305).