The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [164]
Jack easily could have affected a demeanor of such seriousness that it would have seemed natural for him to give up such silliness as touch football and adolescent roughhousing. But that was a part of him he was not willing to lose.
When Bobby came down for a visit, they got a gang together and went out in the park for a game of touch. On a sunny weekend afternoon the mall and parks in Georgetown were full of ad hoc games, the players sketching out their imaginary diamond or gridiron in the grassy expanses. The Kennedys had their own peculiar game of touch that gave them what they wanted, endless action, but took up a great deal of space. It was Kennedy football, passed on from brother to brother, and eventually from father to son. “They actually didn’t play the game as you normally play it,” reflected Dick Clasby, a Harvard football star who married Jack and Bobby’s cousin, Mary Jo Gargan. “They could throw the ball all over the field. You could throw it behind the line of scrimmage … and if you caught it you could throw it again.” The offensive team could keep passing the ball forward beyond the line of scrimmage until the player holding the ball was finally touched. Then, on the next play, as likely as not, one of the Kennedys would change the goal line.
Just down from Jack’s touch football game, a group of younger men played baseball. They thought that they had as much right to the grassy field as the football game, and on occasion a batter hit the ball into the midst of the football game. “You better stop that,” the young men were told.
The next time a baseball came flying over, one of the football players tossed the ball away. The young men came running over. Bobby squared off against one of the baseball players and they battled each other with bare fists. Other men joined in. Jack stood nearby, afterward rationalizing, “I was too dignified to fight.” Jack might pretend that he was a sturdy quarterback for an afternoon, but it would not have done for the congressman from Massachusetts to be arrested in a melee in the park.
Even a few years later, when Bobby was married and had children and a responsible position on a congressional committee, he still treated a football game as ritual war. On Sunday mornings, he often joined in the pickup touch football game at the Volta Street playgrounds near his Georgetown home. On one play, he came barreling in at the opposing quarterback from his blind side, decking the man before he had time to release the football.
“Excuse me. Do you know what game we’re playing?” asked the two-hundred-pound quarterback.
“What are you talking about?” Bobby sneered. “Can’t you take it?”
“Yeah, I can take it,” replied Bruce Sundlun, the hefty quarterback. “I just want to make sure you understood what game we were playing.”
A few plays later, Bobby came tearing in and again knocked Sundlun to the hard turf. This time Sundlun rushed toward Bobby and had to be pulled back. “Now wait a minute!” exclaimed Jim Rowe, a burly Washington lawyer. “Let’s stop this. This is touch football, and let’s just play touch football.”
“Yeah, and if you do this once more, sonny, you’re gonna get hurt,” Sundlun said, shaking himself off and knowing by the look in Bobby’s eyes that he would be coming again.
On the next play, Sundlun cocked his arm to pass and waited until his tormentor got within three feet of him, and then threw the ball with all his strength directly into Bobby’s face. Bobby’s head snapped back so forcefully that Sundlun thought he had broken his neck. Bobby lay there for a while, his nose and mouth bloody, and then jumped up to fight the quarterback. “Now wait a minute,” Rowe said, interjecting himself once again between the two men. “He told you if you did that once more, you were gonna get hurt. You did and you got hurt. Now stop this. If you can’t play according to the rules, then get the hell out of this game and go home.”
Bobby stood there thinking for a moment while wiping the blood off his nose. “Yeah, he did tell me, didn’t he? Okay, let’s go.”
“Years later when Bobby