On September 29, 1954, Ferguson stayed home from school. He had a fever of 101.6 and had spent the previous night throwing up into an aluminum stew pot his mother had put on the floor beside his bed. When she left for work in the morning, she told him to stay in his pajamas and sleep as much as he could. If he couldn’t sleep, he was to remain in bed with his comic books, and whenever he had to go to the bathroom, he should remember to put on his slippers. By one o’clock, however, the fever had dropped to 99 and he was feeling well enough to go downstairs and ask Cassie if he could have something to eat. She made him scrambled eggs and dry toast, which went down without disturbing his stomach, and so rather than go upstairs and return to his bed, he shuffled into the small room next to the kitchen that his parents alternately referred to as the den and the little living room and turned on the television. Cassie followed him in, sat down on the sofa beside him, and announced that the first game of the World Series would be starting in a few minutes. The World Series. He knew what that was, but he had never watched any of the games, and only once or twice had he watched any regular-season games, not because he didn’t like baseball, which in fact he enjoyed playing very much, but simply because he was always outside with his friends when the day games were on, and by the time the night games started he had already been put to bed. He recognized the names of some of the important players — Williams, Musial, Feller, Robinson, Berra — but he didn’t follow any particular team, didn’t read the sports pages in the Newark Star-Ledger or the Newark Evening News, and had no idea what it meant to be a fan. By contrast, the thirty-eight-year-old Cassie Burton was an ardent follower of the Brooklyn Dodgers, chiefly because Jackie Robinson played for them, number 42, the second baseman she always called my man Jackie, the first person with dark skin to wear a major league uniform, a fact that Ferguson had learned from both his mother and Cassie, but Cassie had more to say on the subject because she was a person with dark skin herself, a woman who had spent the first eighteen years of her life in Georgia and spoke with a heavy southern accent, which Ferguson found both strange and marvelous, so languid in its musicality that he never tired of listening to Cassie talk. The Dodgers weren’t in it this year, she told him, they had been beaten out by the Giants, but the Giants were a local team as well, and therefore she was rooting for them to win the Series. They had some good colored players, she said (that was the word she used,
colored, even though Ferguson’s mother had instructed him to say the word Negro when talking about people with black or brown skin, and how odd it was, he thought, that a Negro should not say Negro but colored, which proved — yet again — just how confounding the world could be), but in spite of the presence of Willie Mays and Hank Thompson and Monte Irvin on the Giants’ roster, no one was giving them a chance against the Cleveland Indians, who had set a record for the most wins by an American League team. We’ll see about that, Cassie said, not willing to concede anything to the oddsmakers, and then she and Ferguson settled in to watch the broadcast from the Polo Grounds, which started out badly when Cleveland scored twice in the top of the first inning, but the Giants got those runs back in the bottom of the third, and then the game evolved into one of those tense, well-pitched struggles (Maglie versus Lemon) in which no one does much of anything and all can hinge on a single at-bat, which elevates the importance and drama of every pitch as the game wears on. Four consecutive innings with no one crossing the plate for either team, and then, suddenly, in the top of the eighth, the Indians put two runners on base, and up stepped Vic Wertz, a power-hitting left-handed batter, who tore into a fastball from Giants’ reliever Don Liddle and sent it flying deep to center field, so deep that Ferguson thought it was a sure home run, but he was still a novice at that point and didn’t know that the Polo Grounds was an oddly configured ballpark, with the deepest center field in all of baseball, 483 feet from home plate to the fence, which meant that Wertz’s monumental fly ball, which would have been a home run anywhere else, was not going to make it to the bleachers, but still, it was a thunderous blast, and there was every certainty it would sail over the head of the Giants’ center fielder and bounce all the way to the wall, good enough for a triple, perhaps even an inside-the-park home run, which would give the Indians at least two if not three more runs, but then Ferguson saw something that defied all probability, a feat of athletic prowess that dwarfed every other human accomplishment he had witnessed in his short life, for there was the young Willie Mays running after the ball with his back turned to the infield, running in a way Ferguson had never seen a man run, sprinting from the second the ball left Wertz’s bat, as if the sound of the ball colliding with the wood had told him exactly where the ball was going to land, Willie Mays not looking up or back as he sprinted toward the ball, knowing where the ball was throughout its entire trajectory even if he couldn’t see it, as if he had eyes in the back of his head, and then the ball reached the top of its arc and was descending to a spot some 440 feet from home plate, and there was Willie Mays extending his arms in front of him, and there was the ball coming down over his left shoulder and landing in the pocket of his open glove. The moment Mays caught the ball, Cassie jumped up from the sofa and started shrieking, Hot damn! Hot damn! Hot damn!, but there was more to the play than just the catch, for the instant the men on base had seen the ball leave Wertz’s bat, they had started running, running with the conviction that they were going to score, that they had to score because no center fielder could possibly catch such a ball, and so right after Mays caught the ball, he spun around and threw it to the infield, an impossibly long throw that was thrown so hard that he lost his cap and fell to the ground after the ball left his hand, and not only was Wertz out, but the lead runner was prevented from scoring on the fly ball. The score was still tied. It seemed inevitable that the Giants would win in the bottom of the eighth or ninth, but they didn’t. The game went into extra innings. Marv Grissom, the new relief pitcher for the Giants, held the Indians scoreless in the top of the tenth, and then the Giants put two men on in the bottom of the inning, prompting manager Leo Durocher to send in Dusty Rhodes as a pinch hitter. What a good-sounding name that was, Ferguson said to himself, Dusty Rhodes, which was almost like calling someone Wet Sidewalks or Snowy Streets, but when Cassie saw the thick-browed Alabaman take his warm-up swings, she said: Look at that old cracker with the stubble on his chin. If he ain’t drunk, Archie, then I’m the queen of England. Drunk or not, Rhodes’s eyesight was in excellent form that day, and a split second after the arm-weary Bob Lemon delivered a not-so-fast fastball over the middle of the plate, Rhodes turned on it and pulled it over the right-field wall. Game over. Giants 5, Indians 2. Cassie whooped. Ferguson whooped. They hugged, they jumped up and down, they danced around the room together, and from that day forth, baseball was Ferguson’s game.