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Decent Quality Since 1847

Plimpton!

5/15/2013

3 Comments

 
I've read a whole lot by George Plimpton.  Oddly enough (or not oddly), nothing in his high-end Paris Review magazine.  Just his books, in which he famously participated in various sports -- usually playing the most important, and therefore most risky, position, where the most could go wrong, and always did -- and then wrote utterly wonderful, intelligent, insightful, touching and funny works about what it was like to be a professional athlete, truly humanizing them.

There's a point to all this, but first a bit about Plimpton, a very erudite, high-class fellow from the social register, with a thick Boston accent.

His first book was Out of My League, about when he pitched to the all-star lineups of Major League baseball players.  They didn't play a real game, but was more a pitching demonstration.  And what it demonstrated most was that not just anyone can pitch in the major leagues.  The book It was fairly short, but a treat and so different from most other sports books.  And gave a hint of what was to come.

What first was to come was Paper Lion, considered one of the great sports books ever, when he trained with the Detroit Lions to be their quarterback, leading to him being put in for one set of downs in an actual exhibition game in front of a stadium-full of fans.  The book was subsequently made into a feature film with Alan Alda (a pretty good doppleganger) playing Plimpton.  The good thing about the movie is that Alex Karras was in it, an absence in the book since he'd been suspended from the NFL that year for gambling, but his larger-than-life presence is felt throughout the work.  (I suspect his scene-stealing appearance in the movie helped bring him to the attention to Mel Brooks who later hired him to play 'Mongo' in Blazing Saddles six years later.)  The one bad thing about the movie is that they made the downs he plays in the exhibition game "dramatically" silly.  A shame, because the real thing was bizarrely bad enough.  One interesting thing about Paper Lion is that Plimpton wasn't well-known at this point, so for much of the book, the other players think he's a really, truly a bad recruit from Harvard.  (When he'd screw up a play, he'd always say, "Well, that's how we did it at Harvard.")  Eventually, his cover is blown by one of the players who'd read Out of My League and thought he seemed familiar.

Other of his books I've read were --

The Bogey Man, when he briefly played on the PGA golf tour.  This was the one sport when Plimpton actually had a chance to not be pathetically awful.  And though he wasn't any good and had his share of mis-adventures, he wasn't pathetically awful, at least compared to the other sports.  Just, not good.  (I have to say, too, that whoever titled Plimpton's books always did a great job.)

In Open Net, he played goalie for the Boston Bruins, facing rocket-like pucks slammed at him,   Like Out of My League, it's pretty short, but very enjoyable.

And Mad Ducks and Bears was a sort of sequel to Paper Lion.  It wasn't participatory, more about what happens after, though it did include updates on some of his other participations.

Among those other were undertakings that he didn't write as books, but which were filmed for TV documentaries.  I haven't been able to find the TV broadcasts (a shame, but I keep looking), but if you can track them down, I recall that they did three, and they were all really wonderful.

Plimpton:  The Man on the Flying Trapeze had him training with the circus to be a trapeze artist, a job which, given his tall, angular body, he was woefully unsuited.

Another had him taking on acting.  I don't recall the name of the special, but he was given a bit part in a John Wayne movie, Rio Lobo.  His scene is still in the movie, as one of a group of bad guys who break in on Wayne and threaten him.  Throughout the documentary, the camera catches him rehearsing his one line whenever he has a spare, private moment.  "I got your warrant right here, mister," after which he's to hold up his rifle.  And then, at the last moment, right before filming, the director changes his line.  The look of panic on his face is a hoot.  But if you see the movie, the line is now -- "This here's your warrant, mister."

But perhaps my favorite (and again I can't recall the title, though they all began with "Plimpton!") is when he re-creates his tryout as quarterback with the Lions, something he didn't get to do on film.  So, this time, he goes through it all again, though with the Baltimore Colts.  (Now, the Indianapolis Colts.)  My recollection is that even though he's still lousy, he actually completed a short pass, or at least didn't fully embarrass himself..  But then, he'd had one training camp before to practice in.

Plimpton had some other "participatory journalism" exploits, smaller ones though, and not all sports, most which he wrote about for Sports Illustrated.  The most famous was boxing against heavyweight champion Archie Moore.

And now the point to all of this.

A documentary has been made about George Plimpton, and it's being released very shortly.  I love the full title.  Plimpton!  Starring George Plimpton as Himself.  Geez, great titles still follow him everywhere.

Picture
The documentary opens on May 22 in New York.  and then June 7 in Los Angeles.  (Very thoughtfully of the filmmakers, one of the L.A. theaters is three blocks from me.  So, thanks...)  The website also now notes an opening in Boston on June 21, so I'm sure there will be other cities -- most especially since the film was picked up by the Laemmle chain -- but eventually it'll show up on DVD and in Netflix, I'm sure.  I am going to make a big assumption that this will include quite a bit of footage from those TV specials.  First of all, how could it not?  Second, because the documentary is titled with the same "Plimpton!" as the TV shows, it seems that the producers have a kinship with them.  And third, the trailer has clips from some of them.  Maybe this will inspire some to release the TV documentaries.

Anyway, here's the trailer for the film.  Me, I can't wait.
3 Comments
Josh Newman
5/15/2013 03:14:14 am

Bob, at some point I mentioned (the late and truly great) A. J. Liebling to you, and I think I must have pointed you toward a piece he had written about the (late and also truly great) boxer Archie Moore and his match with (t. l. a. a. t. g.) Rocky Marciano for the heavyweight championship.

Which is itself a wonderful piece of writing, but that's neither here nor there. But having once mentioned Moore to you, I have to also mention that George Plimpton and Moore intersected too, when Plimpton decided to write about boxing and asked Moore -- at the time, the light-heavy world champion -- to work a couple of rounds with him at Stillman's Gym in NYC.

There were a number of things Plimpton didn't know, and one of them was that while he was trying to get into shape to sustain a high level of effort for three minutes and to learn to box a little …

<i>Moore had had lunch with Peter Maas, a journalist friend of mine. Over dessert, he asked Peter who I was -- this fellow he had agreed to go three rounds with. Maas, who knew about the arrangements -- I had invited him to Stillman's -- could not resist it: he found himself, somewhat to his surprise, describing me to Moore as an "intercollegiate boxing champion."</i>

<i>Once Peter had got that out, he began to warm to his subject. "He's a gawky sort of guy," he said, "but don't let that fool you, Arch. He's got a left jab that sticks, he's fast, and he's got a left hook that he can really throw. He's a barnburner of a fighter, and the big thing about him is that he wants to be the light-heavyweight champion of the world. Very ambitious. And confident. He doesn't see why he should work his way up through all the preliminaries in the tank towns. He reckons he's ready now."</i>

<i>Moore raised his eyebrows at this.</i>

<i>"He's invited all his friends," Maas went on gaily, "and a few members of the press. In front of all these people he's going to waltz into the ring and take you. What he's done is to sucker you into the ring."</i>

(Of course, other than that Plimpton was in fact a gawky sort of guy, none of this bore the slightest resemblance to the truth.)

<i>Maas told me all of this later. He said he had not suspected that he had such satanic capacities; the story came out quite easily.</i>

<i>Moore finally had a comment to offer. "If that guy lays a hand on me I'm going to pole-ax him." He cracked his knuckles alarmingly.</i>

(http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1092932/)

"Still crazy after all these years," and entirely worth spending a few minutes to read ...

Best,

-- Josh

Reply
Josh Newman
5/15/2013 03:36:20 am

Hm ... how did I miss that you had mentioned the Plimption vs. Moore event? I apologize ...

Reply
Robert Elisberg
5/15/2013 04:26:17 am

Josh, two things. First, yes, I did mention Plimpton fighting Archie Moore. And second, I'm glad you missed that because I loved your story. I actually think I remember hearing Plimpton talk about that, how a friend of his had primed Archie Moore as a joke, but I'd never known all the specifics. Thanks.

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    Author

    Robert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. 

    Elisberg is a two-time recipient of the Lucille Ball Award for comedy screenwriting. He's written for film, TV, the stage, and two best-selling novels, is a regular columnist for the Writers Guild of America and was for
    the Huffington Post.  Among his other writing, he has a long-time column on technology (which he sometimes understands), and co-wrote a book on world travel.  As a lyricist, he is a member of ASCAP, and has contributed to numerous publications.



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