THE PRICE OF PASSION.

• Date: 01 February 2023
• Author: Zirin, Dave
• Published date: 01 February 2023
• Author: Zirin, Dave

I recently lent a friend a memoir by the late Pat Conroy, about his last year of playing college basketball for The Citadel, a military college in South Carolina. My Losing Season vacillates from Conroy's irrepressible ardor for the sport to scenes of ugly confrontations between father and son.

He begins by waxing poetic about his passion for the game, asserting that, "I have loved nothing on this earth as I did the sport of basketball. I loved to break up a full-court press as much as anyone who has ever lived and played the game,... in the shades of Spanish moss, beneath the roiled heat and sunshine of Dixie." But then the underbelly appears: "Basketball provided a legitimate physical outlet for all the violence and rage and sadness I later brought to the writing table. The game kept me from facing the ruined boy who played basketball instead of killing his father."

I have been thinking a great deal about these passages lately, and about my own...