MY LOSING SEASON (2002)

''I had never once considered the sadness of point guards,'' Conroy solemnly swears at the outset of a good and gooey memoir recapping his senior year as sad point guard for the Citadel basketball team in 1966, ''the year I woke up to the dream of my own life.'' That clanking there is The Prince of Tides author's brick prose, which often gets in young Pat's way as he leaves an abusive home, leads a punishing military college's b-ball squad, and tries to become a writer. Against great odds, finally, Conroy's maudlin story gets...moving. Our scrappy cager's gift for writ-large, hit-and-run sentimentalism will lunge for nostalgic readers' hearts just as greedily as it mangles so many of the book's sentences.