“I was never a very good player, but the sport allowed me glimpses into the kind of man I was capable of being.” 

In his Prologue, Conroy is expressing to readers how much he loved the game of basketball, how much it meant to him, and how the sport itself shaped the man that he eventually became. A point that Conroy makes throughout the work is that he really was not a very talented player, but basketball still was a source of pride for him and allowed him to become confident. 

“If not for sports, I do not think my father ever would have talked to me.” 

Conroy introduces readers to his stormy and violent relationship with his father in his Prologue. Conroy’s father, who had been the main subject of one of the author’s most famous novels, The Great Santini, was also an excellent basketball player as a college student. As Conroy explains, basketball was the only reason that his father ever communicated with him. 

“Each player would have to submit himself to trial by Mel Thompson, a season-long initiation in which our coach would search for the soft spots and breaking points of his newest players, then would go to work on them with a cruel finesse.”

In Chapter 2, “First Practice,” Conroy is describing the new varsity players coming in for The Citadel, a talented group of players who excelled on the freshman team the previous season. Because freshman athletes were ineligible for varsity athletics at the time, this would be their on-court introduction to Mel Thompson, an abrasive and strict disciplinarian head coach.