My Losing Season

Anyone who has ever sat in the bleachers and rooted for the home team will connect with this powerful sports memoir written by one of America's finest storytellers. From the first time Pat Conroy shoots a basket at 10 years old, he knows he's found his most important outlet. The feel of the basketball, the swoosh as it passes through the net, offer solace to the tormented son of a brutal father. Chuck Montgomery's performance is a winner. At home with the sports jargon used in the many on-court action sequences, Montgomery infuses energy into what could be a tedious recounting of statistics. Conroy uses basketball as the metaphor for his growth, personal awareness, and eventual acceptance of loss "as part of natural law." Montgomery makes us believers. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine

Starred review from September 30, 2002
"Loss is a fiercer, more uncompromising teacher, coldhearted but clear-eyed in its understanding that life is more dilemma than game, and more trial than free pass," writes bestselling author Conroy in his first work of nonfiction since The Water Is Wide
(1972). Conroy is beloved for big, passionate, compulsively readable novels propelled by the emotional jet fuel of an abusive childhood. The Lords of Discipline, The Great Santini, The Prince of Tides
and Beach Music
are each informed by a knowledge of pain and heartache taught to him by a Marine pilot father whose nickname was "the Great Santini." Here, in a re-creation of the losing basketball season Conroy and his team endured during his senior year at the Citadel, 1966– 1967, Conroy gives readers an intimate look at how suffering can be transformed to become a source of strength and inspiration. "I was born to be a point guard, but not a very good one," he admits. Drawing on extensive interviews with his teammates, he chronicles, game by game, their talent and his sheer determination and grit. In Conroy's hands, sports writing becomes a vehicle to describe the love and devotion that can develop between young men. Toward the end of this moving work, Conroy explains that writing books became "the form that praying takes in me." But readers will see how basketball can also be a way of reaching for something finer than a winning score. What emerges is a portrait of a young man who isn't a soldier but a knight with a great and chivalrous heart. Anyone who was a son or knows a son will be touched by this book.