My Losing Season

As much as I adored Pat Conroy's The Lords of Discipline, My Losing Season just took its place as my favorite.  I was teared up in the prologue, and the epilogue, and at words in between - so struck by his honesty and the sometimes harsh brutality of his life.  It is not a sappy book, per se, but Conroy has the great gift of drawing you in, weather it's breathtaking scenery or ugly human nature.  He shares so much of who he was and who he is; he gives insight to his other books.  This book makes me want to read anything of his I haven't yet read.


I was born to be a point guard, but not a very good one...There was a time in my life when I walked through the world known to myself and others as an athlete. It was part of my own definition of who I was and certainly the part I most respected. When I was a young man, I was well-built and agile and ready for the rough and tumble of games, and athletics provided the single outlet for a repressed and preternaturally shy boy to express himself in public...I lost myself in the beauty of sport and made my family proud while passing through the silent eye of the storm that was my childhood (1).

There is no downside to winning.  It feels forever fabulous.  But there is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.  The great secret of athletics is that you can learn more from losing than winning.  No coach can afford to preach such a doctrine, but our losing season served as both model and template of how life can go wrong and fall apart in even the most inconceivable places (394-395).