My Losing Season by Pat Conroy

disappeared in the distance. I heard every joke Johnny Brasch carried in his vast repertoire that week and I listened to tales of the greatness of Bishop England and their six-foot-eight center, Tommy Lavelle, and the classiness of the undefeatable Cavaliers of Benedictine of Richmond who had won the Knights of Columbus tournament for two straight years. To my freshman ears the names “Bishop England” and “Benedictine of Richmond” sounded much like the words “Troy” and “Sparta” would sound to an Athenian child in ancient Greece. The Sacred Heart Ramblers ran in good order the four miles past the stone quarry and toward Ted Crunkleton’s car that sat on a slight rise beside a farmhouse on the Old Gastonia Road. Though none of us knew it on that final run on Friday, we were about to surprise our school, our coach, our league, and ourselves.
    In a dangerous ride through snow, we arrived at Charlotte Catholic just in time to get dressed for our game with Asheville Catholic. Though we had beaten Asheville Catholic twice during the regular season, both games had been closely contested, and their point guard, Jerry Vincent, was one of the best players in the league. I received a shock to my system when Coach announced that I would start the game in place of Buddy Martin, who had hurt his hand over the weekend and was in a cast. It embarrassed me to be starting when both of our co-captains, whom I hero-worshiped, were sitting on the bench watching me. Yet it was Martin and Vlaservich who slapped my fanny hardest when we gathered for the final pep talk by the bench.
    â€œWe’ve got a great team here,” Coach Crunkleton said. “I’ve known that all year long. Let’s prove it to ourselves and everyone else.”
    When we walked out on the court and I shook hands with Jerry Vincent, it surprised me that I was taller than he was. When Johnny Brasch came over to encourage me, I saw that I was an inch taller than Johnny. Our center, Sam Carr, controlled the tap and Ted Frazier made a jump shot for our first basket. Vincent answered with a jump shot from the top of the key. Despite their two losses to us, Asheville Catholic had come to play. Jerry Vincent played a smart swift game and his teammates lifted up with him to play their finest basketball of the season. I drifted through the first quarter, surprised to be there, feeling inadequate to fill the shoes of our co-captain Bud Martin. Then Carr took down a rebound, hit Wofford on the wing, who threw me a half-court pass after I slipped behind my man and took off downcourt. Bud’s pass was perfect and I took it over my shoulder, dribbled once, and laid the ball in. Running back downcourt, I passed our bench and both Martin and Vlaservich popped me on the fanny as I ran past them.
    In the second, third, and fourth quarters of the game against Asheville Catholic, something happened that had never occurred to me before in sport. I lost all sense of myself in the great tidal movements of the game itself, in the thrusts and retreats, the surges and falling back of teams rapturously engaged in a sublime submission to their game. I began taking long shots on the wing, half jump shots–half set shots, and I arched them high in the air and they came down without much backspin. The shots were without artfulness or beauty or much hope behind them. So high did I arch them, that they hung in the air for a long segment of time, then fell like fruit from the sky. They swished through the basket with the sound of torn fabric. I hit three in a row toward the end of the second quarter. In the fourth quarter I hit another three and my game had shifted into a high plane where it had never gone before.
    It took two overtimes to defeat the gallant team from Asheville Catholic. Frazier and Carr, our two big rebounders, pulled the game out for us in final overtimes. Ted Frazier and I had both scored fourteen points and were high scorers. I