August 10, 1963: The Detroit Lions run a practice session at their preseason training camp, in the Detroit suburb of Pontiac, Michigan. George Plimpton runs a series at quarterback. It doesn't go well. But it forms the basis of one of the most famous books ever written about football: Paper Lion.
George Ames Plimpton was born on March 18, 1927 in Manhattan, and grew up a rich kid on the Upper East Side, the son of a diplomat, with several prominent ancestors, including Mayflower passengers on both sides. On his mother's side, these ancestors included Benjamin Franklin Butler and Adelbert Ames, both Union Generals of the American Civil War who became Governors of Massachusetts.
It explained why, to the end of his life, despite living most of his life in Manhattan, Plimpton maintained an upper-crust New England accent. His son, Taylor, described it as a mixture of "old New England, old New York, tinged with a hint of King's College King's English."
Despite this background -- or, perhaps, leaning into his General ancestry, because of it -- he served in the U.S. Army between World War II and the Korean War, as a tank driver. He graduated from Harvard University, having written for the Harvard Lampoon, and from King's College at Cambridge University in England.
Interviewed for Ken Burns' 1994 Baseball miniseries, he said he was at Cambridge, playing chess and listening to Armed Forces Radio to hear the 1951 National League Playoff between his beloved New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, and when Bobby Thomson hit the Pennant-winning home run, he was so thrilled that he pounded his fist on the board, and sent the chess pieces flying. His English opponent didn't understand. He also described his feeling of the 1957 move of the Giants to San Francisco, and the accompanying move of the Dodgers to Los Angeles, as "a deep, deep sadness."
In 1952, Plimpton was hired to write for, and edit, The Paris Review, a quarterly English-language magazine that promoted several American writers. Its poetry editor was Donald Hall, a prep-school classmate of Plimpton's, who would also be interviewed by Burns for Baseball.
In 1960, Plimpton, who loved sports but had never been an athlete, arranged to pitch to a lineup of professional baseball players in a preseason (but All-Star) exhibition at Yankee Stadium, presumably to answer the question, "How would the average man off of the street fare in an attempt to compete with the stars of professional sports?" He tired easily, and had to be relieved. In 1961, he got into the ring with Light Heavyweight Champion Archie Moore. This turned out to be a painful mistake. He chronicled these experiences in his book, Out of My League.
In 1958, Plimpton had interviewed Ernest Hemingway for The Paris Review. In one of the last of his writings published before his death, Hemingway -- himself a boxing fan who had tried sparring with professionals, with similar results -- wrote for The Paris Review that Out of My League was "beautifully observed and incredibly conceived, his account of a self-imposed ordeal that has the chilling quality of a true nightmare... It is the dark side of the moon of Walter Mitty," the daydreaming character created by James Thurber, and played by Danny Kaye in the 1947 film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.
To write Paper Lion, Plimpton repeated the experiment in the National Football League in 1963, joining the training camp of the Detroit Lions, on the premise of trying out to be the team's third-string quarterback. He was 36 years old, on the old side for a professional football player, and he showed how unlikely it would be for an "average" person to succeed as one, at any age. The book is an expanded version of Plimpton's two-part series which appeared in back-to-back issues of Sports Illustrated magazine in September 1964.
Plimpton had contacted several teams about his idea, including his hometown New York Giants and New York Jets, and the Baltimore Colts. The Lions finally agreed to host Plimpton in their training camp.
The coaches were aware of the experiment -- it has been unfairly called a "deception" and a "publicity stunt" -- but the players, most of whom hadn't heard of Plimpton, were not, until it became apparent that Plimpton did not know how to receive the snap from center. Despite his struggles, Plimpton convinced head coach George Wilson to let him take the first five snaps of the annual intra-squad scrimmage. Plimpton managed to lose yardage on each play.
Feeling confident he could do better, Plimpton hung around training camp one more week as the team prepared for its first pre-season game against the Cleveland Browns, being sure that, if the Lions had a big enough lead near the end of the game, Wilson would let him play. However, team officials informed Plimpton at halftime that NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle, an erudite man who had heard of him, would not allow him to play under any circumstance. The next day Plimpton packed up and ended his experiment.
With Earl Morrall as the starting quarterback, Milt Plum as the backup, and Sonny Gibbs as a 3rd-stringer who did not appear in an NFL game until the next season, the Lions went 5-8-1 in the 1963 season, after having gone 11-3 the year before. No one blamed Plimpton, although they were hurt by the absence of Alex Karras, their great defensive tackle who had been suspended for the season for gambling offenses. (Paul Hornung of the Green Bay Packers was also suspended for the season. Both men cooperated fully with Rozelle, and were reinstated for the next season.) In 1964, with Karras reinstated, they went 7-5-2.
Paper Lion was made into a film in 1968, with a pre-M*A*S*H Alan Alda playing Plimpton. That year, Plimpton campaigned with his Harvard classmate Robert F. Kennedy, and was there at the assassination in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Along with Olympic decathlon Gold Medalist Rafer Johnson and football star Rosey Grier, Plimpton wrestled the accused assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, to the floor so that he could be arrested. That time, nobody minded Plimpton joining actual athletes in action.
Plimpton revisited pro football in 1971, this time joining the Colts, defending Super Bowl Champions, and actually seeing action in an exhibition game against his previous team, the Lions. These experiences served as the basis of Mad Ducks and Bears (1973), although much of the book dealt with the off-field escapades and observations of football friends Karras (nicknamed "Mad Duck") and John Gordy ("Bear").
Plimpton's The Bogey Man (1968) chronicles his attempt to play professional golf on the PGA Tour. Among other challenges for Sports Illustrated, he attempted to play top-level bridge (a safe, if frustrating, pastime), and spent some time as a high-wire circus performer (less safe).
Some of these events, such as his stint with the Colts, and an attempt at stand-up comedy, were presented as TV specials on ABC. His 1985 book Open Net saw him train as a goalie with the Boston Bruins -- wearing uniform Number 00, as opposed to the single zero he wore with the Lions and the Colts -- and even playing part of an NHL preseason game.
He went on to write serious books about Hank Aaron's chase of the career home run record, a history of fireworks, and a biography of writer Truman Capote.
In the early 1980s, he did commercials for Mattel's Intellivision video game system. In 1985, he returned to Sports Illustrated to write an article titled The Curious Case of Sidd Finch, about a Buddhist monk from England who could supposedly throw a baseball 168 miles per hour, and was trying out with the New York Mets. It was an April Fool's gag, later expanded into a novel that showed what might have happened if it had been real.
On a 1997 episode of the NBC sitcom Suddenly Susan, Plimpton appeared as one of the poker buddies of magazine publisher Jack Richmond, played by Judd Nelson. The other "poker buddies" -- like Plimpton, playing caricatures of themselves were tennis star John McEnroe, actor Mr. T, Mayor Willie Brown of San Francisco (where the series took place), and Donald Trump. Somehow, as the caricature of himself, Plimpton managed to be more annoying than any of the others. Yes, even more annoying than Judd Nelson. That same year, he began playing John Truman Carter Sr., grandfather of the surgeon played by Noah Wyle, on ER.
His first wife, whom he married in 1968 and divorced in 1988, was Freddy Medora Espy, a photographer's assistant. They had two children: Medora Ames Plimpton and Taylor Ames Plimpton, who has published a memoir entitled Notes from the Night: A Life After Dark. In 1992, Plimpton married Sarah Whitehead Dudley, a freelance writer.Plimpton and Dudley were the parents of twin daughters Laura Dudley Plimpton and Olivia Hartley Plimpton.
Plimpton once wrote, "The smaller the ball, the better the writing about the sport. There are many excellent books about golf, some very good books about baseball, not many good books about football, and hardly any good books about basketball. There are no books about beach balls."
He was wrong. Reading about golf is almost as boring as watching it. And there have been plenty of good books about football -- including Paper Lion -- and basketball.
Another sportswriter, Roy Blount Jr., who wrote a very good book about football (About Three Bricks Shy of a Load, about him covering the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 1973 season), once, however unwittingly, expanded on Plimpton's size-of-the-ball judging of writing about a sport, when he remarked that there were no good novels about bowling. He received several recommendations, and admitted that some of them were good.
George Plimpton died on September 25, 2003, of a heart attack at his Manhattan apartment, at the age of 76.
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August 10, 1963 was a Saturday. British-American political scientist Andrew Sullivan was born. Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, the 1956 Democratic nominee for Vice President, died. This was also the day that Stevie Wonder hit Number 1 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 chart with "Fingertips -- Part 2," making him, at 13, the youngest performer ever to top that chart. I have a separate entry for that event.
Football, as I said, was in preseason. The NBA and the NHL were in their off-seasons. These baseball games were played:
* The New York Yankees beat the Los Angeles Angels, 2-1 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, where the Angels were groundsharing with the Dodgers while waiting for their stadium in Anaheim to be built. Whitey Ford outpitched Dean Chance. Bobby Richardson drove in the Yankee runs with a single in the top of the 9th inning. Mickey Mantle appeared as a pinch-hitter, and drew a walk.
* The New York Mets lost to the Chicago Cubs, 4-0 at the Polo Grounds. Larry Jackson pitched a 7-hit shutout. Ron Hunt got 3 of those hits. Ernie Banks did not play for the Cubs, but Ellis Burton hit a home run for them.
* The San Francisco Giants beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 7-6 at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia. Willie Mays went 2-for-5. Harvey Kuenn, Orlando Cepeda and Felipe Alou each got 3 hits.
* The Washington Senators beat the Baltimore Orioles, 6-5 at District of Columbia Stadium (later renamed Robert F. Kennedy Stadium) in Washington. Brooks Robinson appeared as a pinch-hitter, and did not reach base. Despite being so close, and in the same League, neither the Senators nor the Orioles ever considered the other a rival, although they might have if there had ever been a serious Pennant race between them.
* The Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Houston Colt .45's, 3-2 at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. Roberto Clemente went 1-for-4 with an RBI. The Colts became the Houston Astros in 1965.
* The Kansas City Athletics beat the Cleveland Indians, 6-3 at Cleveland Municipal Stadium.
* The Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Cincinnati Reds, 10-3 at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. Don Drysdale went the distance for the win, striking out 13 and walking none. Frank Robinson went 1-for-4. Pete Rose, soon to be named National League Rookie of the Year, went 2-for-4.
* The Chicago White Sox beat the Detroit Tigers, 5-1 at Comiskey Park in Chicago. Al Kaline went 2-for-4 with an RBI.
* The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Milwaukee Braves, 6-5 at Milwaukee County Stadium. Stan Musial, in his last season as a player, had an RBI on a pinch-hit single. Hank Aaron went 3-for-5 with 2 RBIs.
* And the Minnesota Twins beat the Boston Red Sox, 5-3 at Metropolitan Stadium in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota. Harmon Killebrew went 0-for-3, but had an RBI on a sacrifice fly. For the Red Sox, Dick Stuart hit 2 home runs, and even played errorless ball at 1st base; but Carl Yastrzemski went 0-for-4.
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