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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHow George Plimpton’s Sports Books Presaged the First-Person Media Age
The late authors seven books of participatory journalism, recently reissued, put the writer in the middle of the frame, auguring much to come.
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2016/04/george-plimpton-sports-books
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Everyone knew Muhammad Alis name, especially after the Terrell fight. And everyone seemed to know Plimptons name, whether they read his books or not. Plimpton was an omnipresence for much of American cultural lifeboth high and lowin the last third of the 20th century. He appeared in commercials for Oldsmobile and Intellivision, and appeared in the movies The Bonfire of the Vanities and Good Will Hunting and on TVs Married with Children. He was present when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, helping to tackle Sirhan Sirhan. He turned up as a character on The Simpsons. In a New Yorker cartoon from 1967, a man about to undergo surgery looks up at the doctor wearing a mask and asks, Wait a minute! How do I know youre not George Plimpton?
That Zelig-like identity rested largely on a series of seven books in which the New Yorkborn, Harvard-educated Plimpton threw himself both physically and intellectually into the professional sporting life. Decades before the onset of reality TV and the Twittersphere, Plimpton starred in his own Everyman story. And this year Little, Brown is reissuing all seven stories on the 50th anniversary of the most famous of the series, Paper Lion: Confessions of a Last-String Quarterback.
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Paper Lion, like the other sports books, came out of articles he wrote for Sports Illustrated, and here Plimpton, after approaching several football teams, convinces the Detroit Lions to take him on. He describes showing up at the private-school campus where the Lions are training. The 36-year-old writer pulls into the driveway of a boys boarding school called Cranbrook in a rented convertible. At the registration desk he is mistaken for a member of the other group dorming thereEpiscopalian bishops, in town for a convention.
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Plimpton wrote Paper Lion, Nicholas Dawidoff says in the books introduction, in what was still a Walter Mitty era of armchair fandom when from the bleachers all reveries were plausible. The private-school setting of Paper Lion, according to Dawidoff, highlighted that central juxtaposition of an amateur among professionals, elitist intellectual amid hard-hat muscle.
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Great stuff. Plimpton was fantastic.
TeamPooka
(24,229 posts)HuckleB
(35,773 posts)louis-t
(23,295 posts)was just an actor playing Plimpton. I was shocked to see a picture of Plimpton himself. One of the best scenes in the movie was Alda running a play, running back and forth in the end zone and finally smacking into the goal post and knocking himself out.
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)I've been wondering why his works have fallen by the wayside in the modern era... Plimpton was light-years ahead of his time, and you'd have thought a generation raised on "reality" television would be all over this...