My Losing Season

Part 3 of My Losing Season begins with Chapter 13 as the team is aboard a flight to play Loyola University in New Orleans. Excited to be visiting a place where great culture and literature flourished, Conroy read Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire on the plane. The game turned into a rout in Loyola’s favor, and Thompson put in the Green Weenies in the second half. The second unit played great, and especially Conroy, cutting the 34-point deficit to 10 by game’s end. After the game, Thompson announced that the Green Weenies would start the next game at the Tampa Invitational Tournament.

Conroy writes that “the atmosphere in the locker room felt like midnight at Gethsemane,” adding that Thompson’s halftime “tantrum seemed more nervous breakdown than halftime talk” (183). Disgusted by Thompson’s coaching, Conroy says that a voice was born inside him that night, and he attempted to rally his teammates with a speech of his own. In the second half of the game, before he got on the court, Conroy made a vow that he would no longer listen to Thompson, but instead play the game the way that he was born to play it, with “reckless abandon” (185).