My Losing Season by Pat Conroy

for those of you with a faint pilot light flickering in the stove, it might offer you a path to enlightenment.”
    Before I left for college, I had marked all one hundred of those Monte-championed books off my list. Joseph Monte hit me like an ice storm, and I still think that great teacher was sent into my life by God who saw the directionless, blemished slide my life was taking in my disfigured household. The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning everything he wished to share or impart, but I didn’t know how to ask. All I knew was, I was not the same boy who walked into Gonzaga that previous fall.
    In November I had gone out for the junior varsity basketball team, drawing down the wrath of my father who wanted me to try out for the varsity. I explained to him that only one sophomore had been invited to try out for the varsity and only because he had excelled on the freshman team the year before. Coach Mike DeSarno cut the JV team down to sixteen and I breathed a sigh of pure gratitude when I saw my name on the list. There was no scene I dreaded more than that imaginary one where I’d have to return to my house to inform my father I’d been cut from a team.
    By making that JV, I began the hardest and least manageable part of my Gonzaga experience. The freshman basketball team started their practice at four in the afternoon, followed by the varsity at five, then followed by my JV team at six. When practice ended at seven, I walked to Union Station to take a train into Alexandria where my father would meet me every evening at eight o’clock for a twenty-minute ride to our house in Annandale.
    Before practice I would often go to the National Gallery of Art to do homework on one of the benches in one of the garden rooms. Admission was free and soon the guards grew accustomed to my presence as I did my Latin and algebra and biology homework amidst the palms and the sound of falling water. If I finished my homework early or just grew bored, I could wander through the galleries, studying the paintings and trying to memorize the names of the artists who painted them. So often did I come to their gallery during basketball season that year, that whenever I return as a grown man, it has the feel of a homecoming to me.
    It was not a successful year for me as a basketball player, nor was it a total bust either. The squad I played on was a very good one, and all sixteen of us could play the game at a fairly high level. It was the most evenly matched team I was ever a part of, but we could not seem to find our identity. My coach, the itchy, unreadable Mike DeSarno, was a man more comfortable with football than basketball. He carried himself with great authority, was careful in his grooming and dress, and ran a quick and efficient practice. When Coach DeSarno shot the basketball, he displayed exceptional style and form, his mechanics were flawless, but the ball almost never went into the basket.
    The team was explosive and erratic. DeSarno told us all year long that we had the makings of a great team. He could never make up his mind about a starting lineup, and we had a dizzying series of changes over the year. I started a third of the games, but DeSarno would always taunt me with the fact that I was a military brat who could disappear overnight.
    â€œConroy, what does Gonzaga get out of it? I mean, I could be playing a kid who’ll be here for four years instead of one. I’m making you a better basketball player for another school that neither of us even knows about. Argue with me. Tell me where I’m wrong.”
    â€œMy parents think I’ll be here three years, Coach,” I said.
    â€œCan you promise me that?” Coach DeSarno said. “Can you put it on paper?”
    â€œNo, sir. We might go to war or something.”
    â€œThen I can’t start you.