George Plimpton claimed to have only once seen a person in the act of buying the Paris Review, the literary magazine he edited for 50 years. In a bookshop in Paris in 1953 he watched Ernest Hemingway pick issue No 1 off a shelf and make the purchase. Plimpton, aged 26, took the opportunity to persuade Hemingway to be interviewed for the second issue. In some ways Hemingway was the guiding spirit of Plimpton’s subsequent literary career. Like the bullfighting and marlin-fishing and boxing Nobel prizewinner, Plimpton believed that a man of letters might also be a man of action. That belief saw Plimpton write these six often wonderful books, describing his efforts over three decades to experience the great American sports – baseball, gridiron football, ice hockey, golf, boxing – at a professional level.
Plimpton approached that “participant journalism” in a very different spirit to Hemingway, his mentor, however. Despite three years in the army in which he had seen service as a tank driver in Italy, he had no pretensions to alpha male status. He wanted to describe how it might feel for a reasonably athletic amateur sports fan to suddenly find himself out there under the floodlights. Plimpton’s genius was not for hand-eye coordination, or brute strength, or lightning speed, rather it was for charm and persuasion. With this gift, and a coward’s reckless courage, he managed by turns to pitch an innings to Mickey Mantle and the rest in front of a full house at Yankee stadium (Out of My League); to train for a close season and get some game time as quarterback for the Detroit Lions in the NFL (Paper Lion) and as goaltender for the Boston Bruins in the National Hockey League (Open Net); to go three rounds with the world light heavyweight champion Archie Moore (Shadow Box) and to partner Arnold Palmer in a pro-am tournament (The Bogey Man).
These books have never all been in print in the UK, presumably on the short-sighted basis that British readers won’t read about American sports. Yellow Jersey has righted that particular wrong to mark 50 years since the best of them, Paper Lion, was first published. To suggest they have achieved classic status would be to devalue their still very immediate pleasures. Plimpton – who died in 2003 aged 76 – was a lyrical, precise observational writer, with a keen eye for human absurdity, especially his own. I had read a couple of the books before, but rereading them now back to back was to be reminded of the comedy and warmth of that authorial voice. It brings to mind another George – George Bailey, Jimmy Stewart’s great American everyman in It’s a Wonderful Life, profoundly decent, brimful of life, beset by anxieties, loved by all.
Like Stewart, Plimpton stood 6ft 4in – gangliness was his trademark. “I am built rather like a bird of the stiltlike, wader variety — the avocets, limpkins, and herons,” he observed. “I can slide my watch up my arm almost to the elbow.” He enjoyed an elite education at Harvard and Cambridge, and was at ease in exalted social circles: his father had been JFK’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations. (Muhammad Ali, whom Plimpton befriended in training for the Rumble in the Jungle, called him simply “Kennedy”.) None of these attributes, however, could be seen as a positive advantage when facing down a major league hitter from the pitcher’s mound or standing knock-kneed in a hockey net with the combined might of the Philadelphia Flyers racing toward you. On one of the many occasions that he was flattened in training by a 300lb linebacker on the football field Plimpton was surprised to hear himself emit the childish curse “Ye gods and little fishes!” in what sounded like an English accent. A phrase subsequently played back to him in the locker room remorselessly.
You could say these books invented a genre – it is hard to imagine the immersion and attitude of Geoff Dyer’s writing, say, without them. But also they captured the end of one idea of professional sport. Plimpton began his quest by having his nose broken by Archie Moore in 1959; by the end of it in 1978 with the Boston Bruins he is 51 and mostly sprawled inelegantly on the ice. In all cases though, the professional players treat him if not as an equal then at least as a fellow pro, taking the knocks to make a living. The hard men of the Detroit Lions seem as fascinated by the writer as he is by them. And though they are superior to him in every aspect of physical grace and courage, their game and culture is still recognisable to his amateur eyes: the players have not yet been removed from everyday cares by exorbitant salaries, or physically transformed to otherworldly proportions by steroids and weights. Money seems hardly an issue in any of the books, and fame still means a cigarette card rather than a social media strategy.
As a result, in the climactic moments when Plimpton gets called into the action for a few minutes to perform – in pre-season warm-up games, but in full intent – his vividly drawn teammates appear to be rooting for him just as much as any reader will undoubtedly be doing. “Football’s all humiliation,” one pro tells him by way of consolation. By that point Plimpton doesn’t need reminding.
The books by George Plimpton are published by Yellow Jersey Press (£9.99). Click here to order a copy of any one for £8.19
