A Lowcountry Heart by Pat Conroy

Author:Pat Conroy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-10-24T16:00:00+00:00

The Best Night in the Life of This Aging Citadel Point Guard…

JANUARY 2015

I’ll not pretend this is not one of the greatest nights of my life and one of the most surprising. In the history of American letters, no writer has had such a troublesome and controversial relationship with his college. I’m personally responsible for much of that tension and I’m fully aware of that. But, when I was a cadet at The Citadel, I decided I was going to try to become an American writer and I found myself encouraged to do this by my English professors Doyle, Carpenter, and Harrison, with a generous push from the history department of Conger, Martin, and Addington. I took every course taught by the magisterial Oliver Bowman, who let me in on the secrets of human psychology. Though I often lamented not going to an Ivy League college, I’ve talked to many of my contemporaries who did. They talk of great parties, drunkenness, and the great pleasure of midnight conversation and easy sex. I survived the toughest plebe system on earth, was taught by professors who cherished and loved me, and I was at my desk during Evening Study Period for four straight years. Now I think I had the best preparation to write novels of any writer of my time. I brought some of The Citadel’s fighting spirit into my life of words with me. From the beginning, I’ve told journalists that I planned to write better than any writer of my era who graduated from an Ivy League college. It sounds boastful and it is. But The Citadel taught me that I was a man of courage when I survived that merciless crucible of a four-year test that is the measure of The Citadel experience. I’m the kind of writer I am because of The Citadel.

Though I was not welcome on this campus for thirty years, my name will now be on a plaque hanging in McAlister Field House in perpetuity. It will hang there because I am a writer. But to me, it will be there because once I was young and raring to go and could bring a basketball up court and do it fast. Once I was a Citadel basketball player with the name of my college spelled out on my jersey and I think the happiest boy that ever lived on earth.

In 2002, I published a book called My Losing Season after I saw the brilliant shooting guard John DeBrosse in a bookshop outside of Dayton, Ohio. That day we talked about our 1966–67 team long into the night, and I realized that year still carried all the agonies and splendors of sport in a single tormented season. I started to write that book, and visited all the teammates I had abandoned after we lost a heartbreaking game in overtime to Richmond in the Southern Conference tournament.

I had fallen in love with my teammates that year and never had the human decency to let them in on the secret.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.