Paper Lion

Foreword

by Nicholas Dawidoff

The problem with football writing has always been access, the fundamental elusiveness. How to overcome the crowd of armored players, the blur of motion, the anonymous wreckage after the tackle, the coded playbooks, the fenced-off team "facilities," the self-effacing conformity of it all? Secretive by nature, football defies anybody from the outside to get close enough to achieve the clarity and insight excellent writing requires.

In exclusion George Plimpton saw opportunity. Plimpton, the first editor of the Paris Review, was a privileged New Yorker who had spent his life in the most rarefied American communities. The quality that shines through Paper Lion, the greatest of all football books, is Plimpton's absolute conviction that he belongs. As a writer Plimpton was always more Paris than review, more safari-jacketed adventurer than urban belle-lettrist. That is to say, by procedural instinct he first walked among the fauna native to an exotic landscape—boxing rings, baseball diamonds, racetracks—and then returned to far East 72nd Street to convey their essence.

And so it was on fields strewn with (Detroit) Lions. Plimpton's solution to the problem of seeing football clearly was to get in the game. And while his playing pro football was assuredly a stunt, doing the daydream was also a terrific idea—so beautifully direct. Not only would participating in the Lions' training camp as a last-string quarterback help Plimpton to see behind the face mask, but it would also allow him to engage with the vicarious impulse at the heart of sporting spectatorship. Plimpton wrote Paper Lion in what was still a Walter Mitty era of armchair fandom when from the bleachers all reveries were plausible. The peerless baseball writer Roger Angell, who began covering his sport for The New Yorker by attending spring training in 1962, the year before Plimpton joined the Lions, said, "We used to think, with a little luck we could have been doing this. Nobody thinks that anymore. Today he'd get hurt." Angell considers it "amazing the Lions let him do it. They loved it. Could have been the opposite. He must have been extremely charming. George was very enthusiastic."

He was also an unlikely candidate for a mauling. A man about Harvard, the New Journalism cocktail circuit, and Kennedy administration skating parties (Muhammad Ali nicknamed him "Kennedy"), Plimpton's football pedigree was modest. He was built "along the lines of a stick" and had been cut from his high-school junior varsity. But all that was exactly the point here, and besides, Plimpton had other qualities. A youthful thirty-six when he joined the Lions, our man was tall, boyish, nervy, socially at ease in unfamiliar settings, and a person unlikely to allow his sense of self to become contingent on how well he played football. Among the Lions, Plimpton was always the confident, charming writer, glad to wear jersey number zero because he understood that his athletic incompetence was useful to his story.

All the best immersive reporters have a gift for self-fashioning, and Plimpton was a master. By 1963, he'd cultivated a patrician accent so affected even people who'd seen it all, like the writer Roy Blount, shook their heads in admiration. And yet Plimpton was also the sort of man capable of seamlessly dropping his y'alls from the moment he hit the Mason-Dixon Line. When Roger Angell was a boy growing up in New York, he admired the New York Giants' left-handed screwball pitcher Carl Hubbell above all players. Angell heard that the accumulated strains of breaking off his signature pitch meant that Hubbell's left palm faced permanently outward. So Angell began walking around with his arm to port similarly contorted. Angell's mother, alarmed, told him, "Don't do that, Rog." Angell recounted this to Plimpton, and soon enough word filtered to Angell of Plimpton, whose childhood love of Carl Hubbell was such that—get this!—he'd kept his arm bent in salutation until his mother told him to straighten up. Angell didn't hold this against Plimpton; inhabiting other people's lives was simply what Plimpton did.

At the Lions' training camp Plimpton insinuated himself with ease, retailing apocryphal tales of his amateur days as a member of the Newfoundland Newfs. If his throwing arm was weak, come evening the Plimpton leg was stout enough to keep up with the big cats out at the Dearborn, Michigan, watering holes. Most people are susceptible to admiration, and the Lions quickly embraced the sustained attention of such a shimmering, seductive appreciator. They didn't care that he was lousy at football. They admired him for risking it, and for making what they did seem worthy of personal sacrifice, staying with them through the rugged hardships of camp. And Plimpton was sedulous about doing nothing to compromise the mission: "I behaved, of course."

I read Paper Lion first as a boy, and I still have my old childhood copy, a ninety-five-cent Pocket paperback. To look again at those disintegrating pages with their pale pink edges, some of them loosened from the spine and jammed back in haphazardly, is to recall what heady entry into an adult world it provided, a physical world of men. The pros were professionally accomplished at so many masculine arts: banter, beer drinking, vomiting (too much beer), games of chance, pranks, and post-curfew sneak-outs. There were exciting gambits like calling in to a popular restaurant under the name of the team owner to cadge a reservation (only to come upon said owner). There were women to meet out at dance halls, in tight slacks and mohair sweaters the color of pink spun sugar, and women to revel in from afar while watching them play tennis. And there were men playing football, so much football so memorably described.

The campus of the Cranbrook School where the Lions lived and trained was a gift to the writer, the contrast of rough game and sylvan setting one of the many juxtapositions that threads through Paper Lion, enlivening that central juxtaposition of amateur among professionals, elitist intellectual amid hard-hat muscle. Plimpton relates football as a game of intricate physical actions that are also often amusing because the players are so big, the actions so unique to the activity. After Plimpton compares centering a ball to a cow at milking, who could ever consider the hiker without thinking Holstein? Similarly, as soon as we observe massive men attempting to sleep as they overflow dormitory beds designed for teenage schoolboys, the scale of human we are dealing with becomes indelible.

Plimpton is a collector of small interactions in a volatile world. When I reached back into my old Pocket book, treats from the football day-to-day were extracted again in a rush: the account of former Lion coach Buddy Parker responding to losses by disrobing and dispensing with his (unlucky) suits of clothing, sometimes by stuffing costly jackets, ties, and trousers out the windows of speeding trains; the way players thought about the after-practice vats of lemonade awaiting them on those scorching Michigan summer days; the anxiety of the rookies forced to stand during meals and sing their school fight songs for the veterans; the steep alps of food the players put on their plates; the exaggerated reactions of headman George Wilson and the other Lion coaches during their downtime games of liars' poker; the reserve quarterback Earl Morrall generously throwing after-practice passes to a line of children—one of them a swift, sure-handed ball thief.

Football is the national passion, ever changing. Yet fifty years later Paper Lion still feels contemporary. That's because the book is a tour de force of vivid characters who become the Ur–football team. A football roster is scores of men, yet from just the few weeks Plimpton spent with the team, there's the necessary illusion of comprehensiveness; we feel we know them all. Several of the best were absent from Cranbrook that summer. The unruly lineman Big Daddy Lipscomb and the bantam-cock quarterback Bobby Layne had by then retired. Alex Karras, a nearsighted All-Pro defensive tackle, was famed within the team for his impromptu skits and monologues. But Karras had been suspended by the league for his underworld consortings. Plimpton clearly perceived it as an advantage that the trio was offstage; all three became entirely his. The players surrounding him provided as well, none better than Dick "Night Train" Lane, the Hall of Fame cornerback we meet up with in his dorm room dressed in a siren suit of his own design, listening to his wife Dinah Washington's R & B records on a portable stereo. Lane holds forth on the art of defense with a barrage of suffixy linguistic formulations—his "captainship"—that allow Plimpton to forever make him football's Lester Young. From these men we grasp football's strange high-low counterpoint—the big business of roughhousing. And while Plimpton may have behaved, he doesn't duck the trouble he sees, writing well, if without strong judgment, about race, addiction, and the ruthless ways of management. A very clear picture develops of how the day-to-day professional game works.

We get a very clear portrait of Plimpton too. Old Number Zero is a complicated proposition, a football ethnographer, a football interloper, and a football foil. The action in Paper Lion reaches an anticlimax with the five plays Plimpton quarterbacks at the team scrimmage held at Pontiac stadium, a stricken sequence that gives way to Plimpton's gradual realization that the fans didn't understand "the lunacy of my participation" and thought his ineptitude was a gag, a football Al Schacht routine. But Plimpton was a committed competitor. It's just that he saw the playing field delimits a bit more expansively than a hundred yards of gridiron.

For all the world-class athletes at Plimpton's literary disposal, Paper Lion's top-billed performer is always Plimpton. His book is the culmination of a long game in which he is in unstated competition with all those Lion players, out to prove that his literary athleticism is even more entertaining than what they can muster on white-lined grass. He wins because he makes those forgotten practices involving distant players forever alive. Fleet, vain split end Gail Cogdill, lineman John Gordy called "the Bear" for a thick thatch of body hair, lady-killing defensive back Ricky LeBeau, the up-for-it utilityman Jim "Marine" Martin, the gregarious and tragic rookie lineman Lucien Reeberg—we remember them all because of skinny George. Of course Plimpton chose to be a quarterback. The quarterback is the writer, the one who makes it up, makes it happen. It was always going to be about him, and what lends the book its true imaginative distinction is Plimpton's inner life, those meandering within-the-helmet soliloquies, each of them funnier and more weirdly informative than the last.

As Plimpton recounts early on in Paper Lion, finding a football organization that would allow him to suit up was not easy. One team official told Plimpton, "You got to realize professional football is a serious business." Other teams thought the Lions were crazy to put themselves at risk by exposing themselves to a writer, but how provident for the Lions that they did. Such are the joys of the book, every Thanksgiving when the Lions play their traditional holiday game, generations of Paper Lion readers all over America take to their TVs to pull for the blue and silver.

Other writers' debts are on paper. By inventing an immersive genre, Plimpton gave otherwise obstructed observers the means for seeing distant subjects up close. As a young writer at Sports Illustrated, I traveled to Boston to talk hitting with Red Sox batting coach Walter Hriniak, an impresario of his time. It was challenging to understand the subtleties of Hriniak's methods, so at a certain point I asked if the coach might watch me hit a few and evaluate my swing. A look of dismay crossed his face. But fortunately for me there was a bystander who cried, "A Plimpton!" Just like that, Hriniak understood, and my encounter with the professional was assured.