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My Losing Season |  | Author: Pat Conroy
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Seller: bookoodles
Rating:  165 reviews
Sales Rank: 293898
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Pages: 416
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.7
ISBN: 0385489129
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.32363092
EAN: 9780385489126
ASIN: 0385489129
Publication Date: October 15, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
PAT CONROY–AMERICA’S MOST BELOVED STORYTELLER -- IS BACK!
“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.”
So begins Pat Conroy’s journey back to 1967 and his startling realization “that this season had been seminal and easily the most consequential of my life.” The place is the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, that now famous military college, and in memory Conroy gathers around him his team to relive their few triumphs and humiliating defeats. In a narrative that moves seamlessly between the action of the season and flashbacks into his childhood, we see the author’s love of basketball and how crucial the role of athlete is to all these young men who are struggling to find their own identity and their place in the world.
In fast-paced exhilarating games, readers will laugh in delight and cry in disappointment. But as the story continues, we gradually see the self-professed “mediocre” athlete merge into the point guard whose spirit drives the team. He rallies them to play their best while closing off the shouts of “Don’t shoot, Conroy” that come from the coach on the sidelines. For Coach Mel Thompson is to Conroy the undermining presence that his father had been throughout his childhood. And in these pages finally, heartbreakingly, we learn the truth about the Great Santini.
In My Losing Season Pat Conroy has written an American classic about young men and the bonds they form, about losing and the lessons it imparts, about finding one’s voice and one’s self in the midst of defeat. And in his trademark language, we see the young Conroy walk from his life as an athlete to the writer the world knows him to be.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 165
 Conroy pulled off a great feat December 12, 2009
S. G. Fortosis (North Port, Florida)
Probably 98% percent of sports books are about winners. I mean, how many athletes want to lay out their worst moments in public for all to acknowledge. Conroy takes on the challenge as he writes of his basketball career at the Citadel. Instead of reading one painful chapter and laying the book gingerly aside, I had to read more. He captivated me by opening up his increasingly ravaged emotions and presenting that rare description of what the athlete goes through who fights like heck, yet loses game after heart-wrenching game. Amazingly, Conroy succeeds so well, that I surmise some non-athletes could pick up the book and be entertained. Some say Americans are so consumed with the winner mentality, the happily ever after syndrome, that we will not dare enjoy a book that reveals the dark side. This book proves them wrong.
Conroy fan October 21, 2009
Rod L. Fowler (ftworth)
I watched "Great Santini" and I cried. Someone else knew what I had felt. Pat had succeeded where I had failed. My Dad expressed his disgust regularly with me while I was at home. I was insufficiently manly for him from grade school to high school. I preferred the library to giving someone brain trauma on the gridiron. I got an appointment to West Point and it was complete repudiation for him. I just wanted him to be proud of me but he saw it as me eclipsing his star in the most spectacular fashion. He didn't make it to my swearing in on the Plain-he was busy. This book was validation for me. I guess I can't be clinical in my dissection of this piece but it did it for me. I had read it while I was in a mudlogging trailer in the Permian Basin. I just had to have my own copy. Yes, I recommend it.
Insight into Pat Conroy October 16, 2009
Patricia Caswell (Zephyrhills, Fl)
If you are a Conroy fan, this book will give you an insight into his life. Expands on The Great Santini. I throughly enjoyed this book even though I am not a basketball fan.
A Loser's Turn to Win September 30, 2009
Gary Taylor (Houston, TX USA)
"Parents and players. I would like to introduce our special guest speaker for this year's high school athletics awards banquet. In his brief three-year career, former Coach Henry Terwilliger amassed an amazing won-lost percentage of .367. Even when one of his teams had a player recruited by the state university, it lost more games than it won. Now, of course, Coach Terwilliger is a successful automobile insurance salesman. But he's agreed to kick off our banquet tonight by offering a few inspirational words for the future from his vast experience while distributing business cards in the back of the auditorium."
How often I yearned to hear an introduction like that during the years I attended numerous high school athletic banquets with my kids. Instead, it was always a presentation by some coach who was a winner--the kind of leader to inspire everyone else to also become a winner. Don't they know that somebody has to lose? And, more importantly, don't they know that losers learn more than the winners? They just have less fun learning it and more reluctance sharing those experiences. That's why we need this book by Pat Conroy.
Anyone who has had the guts over their lifetime to get out there and compete at anything knows you have to lose more than you win. A good baseball hitter swings and misses at three times as many pitches as he hits. Individually, he loses two or three times for every time he wins. But he becomes a winner if he uses those losing swings to learn about the pitcher.
Conroy's brilliant memoir of his lost 1966-67 season as a senior point guard for the Citadel uses basketball instead of baseball to make that same point on a larger scale. As a result, it becomes much more than a sports memoir. It becomes required reading for the game of life. Forget Coach Terwilliger. Just read Conroy instead.
Best Sports Memoir Ever Written September 7, 2009
G K McGill (Washington, D.C.)
This book reflects, to an astonishing degree, why many turn to sports to escape the humiliations and persistent degrading insensitivity of certain adults. Neither a monster of a father nor an indifferent and incompetent coach can extinguish the indomitable spirit of Pat Conroy as a basketball player at the Citadel. His love for the game and recognition of his own ability generated a self-confidence that served Mr. Conroy well through his college years. It is a great story of perseverance, hard work, and pure guts.
For the basketball fan, there are terrific passages describing games at summer basketball camp and during the season. Obviously, the psychological drama of his weathering attacks from the two adults who normally would be a boy's role model - his father and coach - set this book apart from other sports books. There are no cliches here, which makes Conroy's story of his triumph that much better.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 165
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