On the strength of that call, Ferguson was granted an audience with the moody, dyspeptic editor in chief, and although he came armed with two samples of his writing in order to prove that he was not an illiterate numskull (an English paper on King Lear and a short, jocular poem that ended with the lines If life is a dream, / What happens when I wake up?), the bulbous, balding Imhoff barely glanced at them. I assume you know something about basketball, he said, and I assume you can write a coherent sentence, but what about newspapers — do you even bother to read them? Of course he read them, Ferguson replied, three papers every day. The Star-Ledger for local news, the New York Times for world and national news, and the Herald Tribune because it had the best writers.
The best? Imhoff said. And who in your opinion are the best?
Jimmy Breslin on politics for one. Red Smith on sports for another. And the music critic Gilbert Schneiderman, who happens to be the uncle of a close friend of mine.
Bully for you. And how many newspaper articles have you written, Mr. Hotshot?
I think you already know the answer to that question.
Ferguson didn’t care. Not about what Imhoff thought of him, and not even if Imhoff turned him down for the job. His mother’s boldness had emboldened him into a position of absolute indifference, and indifference had power, Ferguson realized, and no matter what the outcome of the interview, he wasn’t going to let himself be pushed around by that bilious sack of haughtiness and bad manners.
Give me one good reason why I should hire you, Imhoff said.
Because you need someone to cover the game on Tuesday night, and I’m willing to do it. If you didn’t want me to do it, why would you be wasting your precious time talking to me now?
Six hundred words, Imhoff said, as he slapped his palms against the desk. You fuck up, and you’re out. You cut the mustard, and you get to live another day.
Writing a newspaper article was going to be different from any other kind of writing Ferguson had done in the past. Not just the writing of poems and short stories, which were so different from journalism they didn’t even belong in the discussion, but also the other forms of nonfiction writing he had been engaged in for most of his life: personal letters (which sometimes reported on real events but were predominantly filled with opinions about himself and others: I love you, I hate you, I’m sad, I’m happy, our old friend turns out to be a despicable liar) and papers for school, such as his recent essay on King Lear, which was essentially a group of words responding to another group of words, as was the case with nearly all scholarly endeavors: words responding to words. By contrast, a newspaper article was a group of words responding to the world, an attempt to put the unwritten world into words, and in order to tell the story of an event that had occurred in the real world you paradoxically had to begin with the last thing that had happened rather than the first, the effect rather than the cause, not George Bliffle woke up yesterday morning with a stomach ache but George Bliffle died last night at age seventy-seven, with something about the stomach ache two or three paragraphs down. The facts above all else, and the most important fact before all other facts, but just because you had to stick to the facts didn’t mean you were supposed to stop thinking or weren’t allowed to use your imagination, as Red Smith had done earlier that year when reporting on the defeat of Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title: “Cassius Marcellus Clay fought his way out of the horde that swarmed and leaped and shouted in the ring, climbed like a squirrel onto the red velvet ropes and brandished his still-gloved hand aloft. ‘Eat your words,’ he howled to the working press rows. ‘Eat your words.’” Just because you were confined to the real world didn’t make you any less of a writer if you had it in you to write well.
Ferguson knew that sports were of no consequence in the long run, but they lent themselves to the written word more readily than most other subjects because each game had a built-in narrative structure, the agon of competition necessarily resulted in a victory for one team and a defeat for the other, and Ferguson’s job was to tell the story of how the winner won and the loser lost, whether by one point or by twenty points, and when he showed up for the first game of the season on that Tuesday night in mid-December, he had already figured out how he was going to shape his story, since the central drama of the Montclair basketball team that year was the youth and inexperience of its players, not one member of the starting five had been a starter last season, eight seniors had graduated in June and with one exception the current squad was composed entirely of sophomores and juniors. That would be the thread that ran through his coverage of the team from game to game, Ferguson decided, charting whether a collection of raw beginners would evolve into a solid unit as the season unfolded or simply stagger along from one defeat to the next, and even though Imhoff had promised to boot him out if the first article failed to deliver the goods, Ferguson wasn’t planning to fail, he most emphatically was not going to fail, and therefore he looked upon that first article as the opening chapter of a saga he would go on writing until the season ended after the eighteenth game in mid-February.
What he hadn’t expected was how inordinately alive he would feel when he walked into the school gym and took his seat beside the official scorer at the table that straddled the midcourt line. Everything was suddenly different. No matter how many games he had seen in that gym over the years, no matter how many physical education classes he had attended there since entering high school, no matter how many indoor practice sessions he had taken part in there as a varsity baseball player, the gym was no longer the same gym that evening. It had been transformed into a site of potential words, the words he would write about the game that had just begun, and because it was his job to write those words, he had to look at what was happening more closely than he had ever looked at anything, and the sheer attentiveness and singularity of purpose that sort of looking required seemed to lift him up and fill his veins with massive jolts of electric current. The hair on his head was sizzling, his eyes were wide open, and he felt more alive than he had in weeks, alive and alert, all lit up and awake in the moment. He had a pocket-sized notebook with him, and all through the game he jotted down what he was seeing on the hardwood court, for long stretches he found himself seeing and writing simultaneously, the pressure to translate the unwritten world into written words was pulling out the words with surprising quickness, it was utterly unlike the slow, brooding agonies that went into writing a poem, all was speed now, all was haste, and almost without thinking about it he was writing down words such as a short, redheaded ball handler with the quickness of a hamster and a skinny rebounding machine with elbows as deadly as sharpened pencils and a foul shot that fluttered in and out of the rim like an indecisive hummingbird, and then, after Montclair fell to Bloomfield in a closely fought 54–51 defeat, Ferguson concluded the story with: The Mountie faithful, unaccustomed to losing after an autumn of football perfection, shuffled out of the gym in silence.