Young children didn’t play basketball in the fifties because they were seen as too small, too weak to launch shots at ten-foot-high rims, so Ferguson’s education in the science of hoops didn’t start until the year he turned twelve, but he had been playing football steadily from the age of six, tackle football with helmets and shoulder pads, halfback mostly, since he was a determined if not especially fast runner, but once his hands grew large enough to grip the ball firmly, his position changed, since Ferguson and his friends discovered that he had a crazy talent for throwing passes, that the spirals he flung with his right hand had more speed, more accuracy, and went much farther than anyone else’s, fifty, fifty-five yards down the field by the time he was fourteen, and although Ferguson didn’t love the game with the same thoroughness and ardor that he loved baseball, he exulted in playing quarterback, for few sensations felt better than completing a long pass to a receiver running full-tilt toward the end zone thirty or forty yards from the line of scrimmage, the uncanny sense of an invisible connection through empty space was similar to the experience of sinking a twenty-foot jump shot, but even more satisfying somehow, the connection being with another person as opposed to an inanimate object made of twine and steel, and so he endured the less appealing aspects of the sport (the rough tackles, the murderous blocks, the bruising collisions) in order to repeat the never less than thrilling sensation of throwing the ball to his teammates. Then, in November 1961, as a fourteen-and-a-half-year-old ninth grader, he was sacked by a two-hundred-and-fifteen-pound defensive lineman named Dennis Murphy and wound up in the hospital with a broken left arm. He had been planning to try out for the high school team next fall, but the problem with football was that you needed your parents’ permission in order to play it, and when he came home from his first day of high school and presented the form to his mother, she refused to sign. He pleaded with her, he denounced her, he cursed her for behaving like a hysterical, overprotective mother, but Rose wouldn’t budge, and that was the end of Ferguson’s career as a football player.
I know you think I’m an idiot, his mother said, but one day you’ll thank me for this, Archie. You’re a strong boy, but you’ll never be strong enough or big enough to turn into a lummox, and that’s what you have to be to play football — a thick-bodied lummox, a lunkhead who enjoys smashing other people, a human animal. Your father and I were so upset when you broke your arm last year, but now I see it as a blessing in disguise, a warning, and I’m not about to let my son crack up his body in high school so he can hobble around on a pair of damaged knees for the rest of his life. Stick to baseball, Archie. It’s a beautiful sport, and you’re so good at it, so exciting to watch, and why risk losing baseball by injuring yourself in a meaningless football game? If you want to go on throwing those passes of yours, play touch football. I mean, look at the Kennedys. That’s what they do, isn’t it? The whole family up there in Cape Cod romping around on the lawn, flinging footballs left and right, laughing their heads off. It sure looks like a lot of fun to me.
THE KENNEDYS. EVEN now, as an independent, free-thinking, occasionally rebellious fifteen-year-old boy, he marveled at how well his mother continued to understand him, how deftly she could pierce through to his heart when the situation demanded it, his ever blundering and conflicted heart, for even though he was unwilling to admit it to her or anyone else, he knew she was right about football, that he was temperamentally unsuited to the protocols of blood combat and would be better served by concentrating on his cherished baseball, but then she had turned the crank another notch and brought up the Kennedys, which she knew was a subject of real importance to him, far more important than the ephemeral issue of football or no football, and by deflecting the conversation from scholastic sports to the American president, the conversation had become a different conversation, and suddenly there was nothing more to be said.
Ferguson had been following Kennedy for more than two and a half years by then, beginning with the announcement of his candidacy for the Democratic nomination on January 3, 1960, precisely two months before Ferguson’s thirteenth birthday and three days after the start of the new decade, which for some reason Ferguson had been looking forward to as a sign of ecstatic renewal, the whole of his conscious life having been spent in the fifties with an old man as president, the heart attack — prone, golf-playing ex-general, and Kennedy struck him as something new and altogether remarkable, a vigorous young man out to change the world, the unjust world of racial oppression, the idiotic world of the Cold War, the perilous world of the nuclear arms race, the complacent world of mindless American materialism, and with no other candidate addressing those problems to his satisfaction, Ferguson decided Kennedy was the man of the future. He was still too young at that point to understand that politics is always politics, but at the same time he was old enough to understand that something had to give, for those early days of 1960 were filled with news about the lunch-counter sit-in staged by four black students in North Carolina as a protest against segregation, the disarmament conference in Geneva, the downing of the U-2 spy plane in Soviet territory and the arrest of pilot Gary Powers, which led Khrushchev to walk out of a summit meeting in Paris and ended the Geneva disarmament talks with no progress made on halting the spread of nuclear weapons, followed by growing hostility between Castro and the United States, which cut its imports of Cuban sugar by ninety-five percent, and then, seven days after that, on the evening of July thirteenth, Kennedy won the nomination on the first ballot at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles. That was the first of three consecutive summers Ferguson spent at home in New Jersey playing American Legion baseball with the Montclair Mudhens, four games a week as leadoff hitter and second baseman that first year, since he was the youngest player on the team now and was starting from the bottom again, the lone thirteen-year-old on a team of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds, and all through those hot months of July and August, as Ferguson read newspapers and books such as Animal Farm, 1984, and Candide, listened closely to Beethoven’s Third, Fifth, and Seventh Symphonies for the first time, loyally kept up with each new issue of Mad magazine, and played and replayed the Porgy and Bess album by Miles Davis, he continued to stop in at his mother’s studio and his father’s store for impromptu visits, and after those brief hellos he would walk to the local Democratic Party headquarters a block and a half down the street, where he would help the adult volunteers lick stamps and envelopes in exchange for an endless supply of campaign buttons, bumper stickers, and posters, which he affixed with Scotch tape to every vacant spot on the four walls of his bedroom, so that by the end of the summer his room had been transformed into a shrine to Kennedy.