A Conversation with
George Plimpton by Hank Nuwer

Excerpted from Rendezvousing with Contemporary Authors by Hank Nuwer (Idaho State University Press)


    George Plimpton is the world’s best-known participatory journalist. The author’s latest book, Open Net, is the story of the professional amateur’s invasion of the world of big-time hockey. He dons the mask and clunky paraphernalia of a hockey goalie to play for the Boston Bruins in an exhibition game against the Philadelphia Flyers. Plimpton spent most of his five-minute stint against the Flyers flat on the ice, the puck flying past him at will. The experience, like all Plimpton’s forays into professional sports, left him humiliated, but he shrugs off his embarrassment once safely behind his typewriter.

    Unlike Walter Mitty, to whom Ernest Hemingway once compared, the participatory journalist’s life is not so secret. Born March 18, 1927, the son of a wealthy attorney who once toiled us deputy United States Representative to the United Nations, the writer enjoyed a tweedier-than-thou existence. He attended all the right schools, including Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard and King’s College at Cambridge University.

    Seen in retrospect, the first major event in Plimpton’s life was when author Peter Mathiessen—then an expatriate in Paris—named him editor of a new literary journal called The Paris Review. Under Plimpton’s rather loose direction, The Paris Review prospered, becoming famous for its “Writers at Work” interviews. Plimpton’s career as a participatory journalist likely began when his friend Hemingway commanded him into a bullring to learn the manly art of flailing a cape at El Toro. His public debut as an amateur athlete among professionals began in 1958 when he convinced Sports Illustrated editor Bob James to put up $1,000 to allow the writer to pitch to a contingent of American and National League All-Stars in a post-season game. The resulting article was expanded a few years later into a book, Out of My League, and a strange career was born. Plimpton has found no end of projects with which to busy himself and amuse readers the last 25 years. His greatest fame, of course, came in Paper Lion, an account of his foray into the violent world of professional football.
    
    In the following interview, George Plimpton slouches behind his oversized desk to give his insights into participatory journalism and the world of professional athletes. He died in 2003.

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NUWER: I’d like to go back in time to your young man’s dreams when living in Paris and starting The Paris Review. Would the George Plimpton of those days have been satisfied with the accomplishments you’ve had so far? Or did he have different dreams and goals?

PLIMPTON: I don’t think you know at any age. Life is so much a matter of strange opportunities that are seized. Sometimes things work out; sometimes you regret that you haven’t done [something]. I’ve been awful lucky. If you asked me when I was twenty-four years old what I was going to be doing now, if I thought I’d be writing books—well, I didn’t even know I was going to be a writer. I thought I was going to be an editor. I thought I was going to end up as a television executive somewhere if I were lucky. I thought maybe I’d be an editor of a magazine like Harper’s, not the editor, but an editor. Or [I thought I might end up] in a book publishing company. I could have sworn that’s how I was going to end up because it didn’t seem to me that there was any other alley. Then I wrote a children’s book [The Rabbit’s Umbrella], and I wrote some pieces for Sports Illustrated, and all of a sudden I wrote this one book [Out of My League], which changed my life. And then the other thing that changes you is when you do television. Suddenly you’re not writing for an audience of 100,000; you’re suddenly on television in prime time. I did eight [documentary] shows for [famed producer] David Wolper [including The Great Quarterback Sneak, the story of Plimpton’s participatory experience with the Baltimore Colts]. Then all of a sudden you’re being looked at by twenty million people, and your life changes instantly. You walk down the street the next day and it’s different. I don’t think there’s any way I could have guessed that when I was twenty-three and starting off in Paris. I’m not a very ambitious person, but I don’t think that people who suddenly find themselves in a very particular spotlight ever really quite know what they’re going to be in it. Maybe if you’re Norman Mailer [chuckles] you do, but most people don’t.

NUWER: Has this role-playing as a participatory journalist in these athletic events helped you as an actor in such films as Reds and Volunteers?

PLIMPTON: No, I think they’re absolutely separate. I think you get used to being in front of cameras though. I think that helps, just being a bit more comfortable in front of crowds. Public speaking helps you—anything where you can lose your fear of being spied at is a help.

NUWER: When you were a percussionist [with the New York Philharmonic], did you ever do a book about the experience?

PLIMPTON: No, I did a television show about it. I should. I will.

NUWER: Ernest Hemingway respected your work as evidenced by the interview he gave you for The Paris Review, and the glowing review of Out of My League he wrote in 1961. What, in retrospect, are your thoughts about him?

PLIMPTON: I didn’t know him terribly well, but I used to go to see him in Cuba. He was awfully nice and helped me with that interview which is in The Paris Review. He was very interested in my career. Somehow he thought I was getting ready to be a boxer, and he wanted me to come out to train with him in Ketchum [Idaho]. He wanted me to meet some really big heavyweights. He was a hugely competitive man. We always had a good time. He always called up when he came to New York, and I deeply admired him and liked him. He was a tremendous figure, certainly, to have in the background of one’s life. You know he was going to read what you’d written. He was an inspiration and a very exciting man to be around. He just shoved me into a bullring and took me out fishing on the Gulf Stream. It was a big brother relationship; he wanted to show me what things were like, everything from pigeon shoots to horse racing. That [relationship] was a rare privilege.

NUWER: I understand that he brought you into a bullring with him. Do you a humorous war story about that?

PLIMPTON: (laughter) No, except that I wouldn’t have done it unless he pushed me into the ring.

NUWER: Hemingway’s quote in his review about Out of My League is that the book showed the dark side of Walter Mitty—

PLIMPTON: —“dark side of the moon of Walter Mitty.” I think that’s it, yes.

NUWER: Did you like that quote?

PLIMPTON: Yes, it’s a wonderful quote; it’s actually accurate, too. Because [the James Thurber character] Walter Mitty was somebody who in his dream-life were these great moments of triumph: shot down in a Fokker, crossing the trans-Atlantic in an airplane, or he’d perform the operation, or whatever it was he did. His daydreams always worked out, whereas if you try to do those things as I did, you find that’s not what happens at all. You get destroyed. So, it was a very accurate description.

NUWER: Have you ever forgiven [then New York Yankee coach, and later manager, Ralph] Houk for coming out to the mound to yank you out of the baseball game you participated in for Out of My League? There must have been mortification there.

PLIMPTON: There was. All these things are mortifying finally. That [getting unceremoniously yanked from the game by Houk] is what happened. I think I would have fainted out there if he hadn’t come out.

NUWER: The crucial thing that went wrong, it seemed to me, is that you didn’t have an umpire out there [to call balls and strikes. Players such as Ernie Banks waited an eternity for Plimpton to groove a strike down the middle of the plate.] It would have been better to have called some umpire out of the dugout in retrospect.

PLIMPTON: It would have been better. It would have been better.

NUWER: It intrigued me in Out of My League that you admitted experiencing moments on the field that completely escaped your consciousness. You had to rely on a statistician to tell you what happened when you pitched to Bill Mazeroski of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Did you forget some of what happened during your experience playing hockey?

PLIMPTON: When you try to put it down afterwards, I don’t think you can remember every single incident. That day, playing hockey [for Open Net], happened to be such a crowded one, because not only was that great fight going on, but there were huge regrets about [missing] that [fight]. I remember the regrets almost drowning out all the interesting things that had happened. I had missed an available opportunity to write about and to experience. In the hockey book I tried to make light of it, but it really was terrible. I had to put it in a way which made it seem funny, to imagine what might have happened out there if I had skated out into this brawl. But to have skipped all that was a missed opportunity.

NUWER: Did your friendship with Mary Hemingway outlast Hemingway’s death?

PLIMPTON: Yes, of course, although she’s not very well now. In fact, she’s very sick. I haven’t seen her in a long time. The last time I went around to see her was the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Paris Review [published in 1981] when we had a piece of Hemingway’s that his executors did not want us to publish. I went around to see her very early in the morning when she was compos mentis. She allowed us to publish it. She was always great fun. I liked her and admired her and felt that her protective attitude about her husband was honorable.

NUWER: I want to make a reference to The Paris Review. Could you tell me a little bit of your recollection of Harold L. (Doc) Humes who, because his name was removed from the masthead, got hold of some first issues and stamped his name on them in red ink?

PLIMPTON: He [Humes] has always been a tremendous friend, and this was very sad when this happened to him. Whatever the reason for it, he felt a very proprietary interest in the magazine, which was understandable, because he’d been in on it from the very beginning—before I was, really. We used to have these terrible fights and feuds with hum because we didn’t think he was pulling his oar, so to speak. In a rather childish way, we put him down, demoted him, on the masthead because he had done nothing, on his theory that we had to learn to do this ourselves. So we gave him a position that was completely spurious, circulation manager, which eh had less to do with than anything. He got very upset when the copies turned up in New York, taking personally, because he had worked on it and it had been a dream of his. The thing had come out, and we behaved very badly, but he overreacted and went down there and stamped these things with a red stamp. He got into the warehouse where all these things were. [Humes] stamped a rather exorbitant title—executive editor, founding editor, or something—on the page. Bang, bang, bang! He stamped about 2,000 of them. And I suppose it makes the things [first issues of The Paris Review] more valuable now. When you go to rare bookstores to buy the think, sometimes you can see that red stamp with his name.

NUWER: Was it particularly satisfying for you to discover the likes of Terry Southern or Philip Roth? Did you have a part in their discovery?

PLIMPTON: Oh, yeah, only in reading the material and saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got to publish this.’ That was not very hard to do because they were all very powerful writers. [Plimpton’s cat, Shadow, jumps up on Nuwer’s lap.] Hope you don’t mind that cat.

NUWER: No, not at all.

PLIMPTON: That’s the pleasure of The Review, of course, finding people of that caliber.

NUWER: When the likes of James Jones, Irwin Shaw, William Styron and other writers visited you in Paris, did you feel that you were in the epicenter of a movement in Paris such as Gertrude Stein was?

PLIMPTON: Oh, no, no—not even an inkling of it. No, Gertrude Stein had a famous sort of salon, and she was surrounded by a whole group that included painters and musicians. I think she sort of set herself up as an older advisor to all these people, most of them her junior. That wasn’t us at all. We were all only twenty-three, twenty-four. But there was Natalie Barney [a Ben Franklin look-a-like who was a wealthy patroness of French writers and musicians, including George Antheil]; she had a salon there. She was an older woman; I never went to that one. But that’s entirely different; I mean that’s being a host, gathering people and serving them drinks and so forth. Here [in Plimpton’s New York home with office in the same building], at one point, this place became sort of a constant gathering place for writers [Read Gay Talese’s “Looking for Hemmingway” in Talese’s book, Fame and Obscurity], before domesticity [Plimpton’s marriage to photographer’s assistant Freddy Medora Espy] took over and ruined it all. (Laughter) But, certainly, not in Paris.

NUWER: What is your wife’s reaction to your encounters? I know you married a little later in life.

PLIMPTON: We got married about the time I was playing for the Boston Celtics. She goes occasionally. She went to the hockey game, but not usually. She knows I’m going to be spending so much time thinking about what I’m going to be writing about that if she came and stayed at the training camp, it just wouldn’t work.

NUWER: It wouldn’t? Too distracting?

PLIMPTON: Yeah. I’ve got a great relationship with my wife, but it [research for Open Net] just wouldn’t have been as interesting.

NUWER: In the end of Open Net, your roommate, Jim “Seaweed” Pettie, fails his shot at playing goalie in the pros and ends up working in a factory. You didn’t comment in your book, but I thought that was [a] sad [scene]. What were your thoughts?

PLIMPTON: I thought it was [sad] too, when I went out to see him. But he’s one of those wonderfully cheerful people. I just thought no matter where he’s working, he’s one of those people who enlivens the area around him.

NUWER: I’m fascinated by players like Seaweed and Joe Charboneau, [the one-time baseball Rookie of the Year] with Cleveland who slipped back to the minors and now is still playing ball somewhere in the bushes in his thirties.

PLIMPTON: Those are usually people who love the game to a great degree. It doesn’t matter where they play.

NUWER: Are you able to get better interviews with athletes [than the non-participatory journalists] because, unlike a daily columnist, you are not their natural adversary?

PLIMPTON: I think it helps. I’ve got a more intimate relationship. I think if you play with a team it sort of knocks down that barrier of the reporter with his notebook and his hat. Also, the questions you tend to ask are different from the ones that are asked by reporters who are dealing with daily stories. They tend to want to know what’s happened that day or the day before, or salaries, or things that are of very little interest to me, so that the sort of questions that I would want to ask them comes out of this relationship. Therefore, it’s easier to ask.

NUWER: In general, how have the players you’ve written about reacted after seeing what you wrote?

PLIMPTON: My own feeling is that I’ve tried to reflect them in the most positive light, so I think most of them are pleased. The only one I ever heard being critical was a fellow called Harley Sewell whom I wrote about in Paper Lion. He was angry because he thought I’d made him look too soft. He’d come to try to help forget the horrors of my first scrimmage. He woke me at seven in the morning; he said I’d wake up wrong if I didn’t come with him. He gave me this wonderful breakfast. His family was there. It was a very gracious and sweet thing to have done, and I wrote about it.

NUWER: Was that the player who [in Paper Lion] invited you to come to his ranch?

PLIMPTON: Yes, he wanted me to wrestle his steers. But I’d heard he was upset because it [the book] made him seem unlike an offensive guard; it made him seem too soft.

NUWER: I didn’t think you made him seem too soft—

PLIMPTON: --I didn’t either. (Laughter) I couldn’t have been more startled. But then, football players—athletes—tend to be sensitive. I haven’t heard many of the comments of the Bruins [after Open Net was published]. The communication is funny once you do something like this. You hear secondhand that they liked it or didn’t; they don’t write you letters.

NUWER: Do you have any theories about the psychology of sport—how society affects sport, how sport affects society?

PLIMPTON: I think people tend to make too much of a comparison between the two [sport and society], trying to make an equation which I’m not sure exists. There are people who say sports is a direct reflection, or could be a great reflection, on life. If you all behave like Chicago Bears, you’ll succeed. Well, the answer is it isn’t like that at all, because life is much too complicated. The whole idea of winning and losing at something ahs become too much of a thing in the psychology of sports. In actual fact what one should get out of sport, and also watching sport, is a great vicarious thrill that one gets seeing people perform to such a degree of perfection. I mean, that’s the pleasure of seeing. I went to see the [Boris] Becker-[Ivan] Lendl final the other day. It didn’t make any difference who won; it was just such marvelous tennis to watch. My son [Taylor] was very much for Mr. Becker because he sat next to Becker and saw his [Becker’s] name on his shoes, and he thought that was the height—to have his own shoes with his name branded on it—and he supported him violently. But it was terrific tennis, wonderful tennis.

NUWER: What qualities and attributes must a participatory journalist have?

PLIMPTON: He has to realize always that he’s a reporter; that’s the most important thing. One tends to forget when you get involved with these teams the reason for being there. The temptation is to spend too much time trying to perfect your meager skills rather than listening to the ballplayers and filling up your notebooks about this world that you’ve been privileged to enter that no one else is.

NUWER: So the writing isn’t peripheral, the playing isn’t the most important part of the experience?

PLIMPTON: No, the writing is what’s important. The experience itself is peripheral.

NUWER: Did you give Donald Hall [poet, Paris Review editor, and sometimes participatory journalist] any hints before he went out to play baseball with the Pittsburgh Pirates [recalled in Hall’s book, Playing Around]?

PLIMPTON: I did. He called me up, and what’d I say?…It’s in his book. ‘Do a lot of listening,’ I said.

NUWER: He was funny to look at in a baseball uniform.

PLIMPTON: Yeah, with that great big belly and everything [untamed hair and beard].

NUWER: I want to mention that I played minor league ball for a magazine article. I managed to make a putout [as a first baseman], but I struck out twice with [the Denver Bears] the [Montreal] Expos’ organization.

PLIMPTON: Oh, dear.

NUWER: One I struck out on was on a three-and-two count. The pitcher [for the Orlando Twins] threw a curve ball that was so far outside, the catcher lunged for it and missed it. He got enough of the glove on it that he was able to throw me out as I lumbered to first. I could have had a walk.

PLIMPTON: Actually, that’s not a walk, that’s a strikeout. Strikeout and error to the catcher.

NUWER: It would have been a strikeout, sure, but if I hadn’t swung, it would have been—

PLIMPTON: Oh, that would have been a walk, yes.

NUWER: You’ve remarked that part of the identification process with you, the narrator, for the reader is that when you fall flat on your face in a game, the reader identifies with you. But in your game in Philadelphia, you stopped a shot on goal [by Reggie Leach] and, in effect, came through. Does that shoot your old theory down?

PLIMPTON: Well it may not shoot it [the theory] really, because it may well be that Mr. Leach just put the puck [intentionally] in my pads. I never asked; I would never dare ask. But it wouldn’t matter anyway. I think every once in a while [in my career] there are tiny moments of success. I once had Pancho Gonzales love-thirty on his serve. He served a double fault to make it love-fifteen, and then he lost the next point. There are little moments of triumph, but it doesn’t ever illusion me to the point where I think I can do these things myself. There’s a great abyss between the amateur and the professional.

NUWER: When you’ve done these participatory experiences, have you done your actual best? Or, because you’re thinking about what you’re going to write later, does it obstruct you so that you can’t do your best?

PLIMPTON: No, you do your best and then you recollect in tranquility afterwards as Mr. [William] Wordsworth said. Oh no, you get absolutely absorbed in the moment.

NUWER: Implied in all you do is that you risk crippling injury or disfigurement. What are your thoughts on the risks you take, these, as you once called them, violent pursuits that doubtless could be well enough left alone?

PLIMPTON: I speak for myself, but I think it’s true of all people [who participate in sports], you just don’t think very much of injury. First of all, in all these sports, you’re not supposed to be injured. You’re wearing an awful lot of equipment to keep you from being injured. It [crippling injury] happens every once in a while, but it’s relatively rare. Of course, I don’t play all that much. If I were in there for sixty minutes a game, day after day after day, there’s no doubt that some sort of injury would be inevitable, but my forays are somewhat sporadic, and therefore, the chances of injury are small. I think most people think more about humiliation than they do about injury. That’s what you get scared of; that’s what you hope you’re no going to go through.

NUWER: Do you find that the Stanley Cup is one of the more wonderful symbols in sport?

PLIMPTON: Oh, yes, sure, it’s marvelous. The Cup itself is only worth about twenty cents. It sits on top of that great column. I’ve seen it close to. In fact, I’ve seen Wayne Gretzky stare at it as if it were a talisman of incredible value, and certainly, for the Canadian culture, it is. It’s one of the great trophies there is [in sport].

NUWER: What are your feelings about the tradition of the Stanley Cup?

PLIMPTON: A trophy is always hallowed by the expenditure of the number of years it’s been struggled over, and by the [players’] effort, and so forth. Amore people know what it looks like than say the Lombardi Trophy, the trophy that’s symbolic of winning the Super Bowl. It seems to have that great tradition of skating it around on the ice and holding it up. I think everybody in the world probably knows what he Stanley Cup is. Ice hockey, being a universal game, would tend to be known by more people. I think the most vivid memory I have is of [Wayne] Gretzky looking at it, looking for his name there, as if he could scarcely believe it was there. There is the whole history of the game tucked away there on one trophy. That’s not true of other trophies, oddly. America’s Cup doesn’t have the list of the combatants on it. Neither does the Lombardi Trophy for the matter, nor the baseball trophy [awarded the world champion team]. I don’t know what the baseball trophy looks like. It’s a lot of bats I think. I don’t even know what it’s called, but the Stanley Cup has all the teams and all the players.

NUWER: What will they do in ’99 when they run out of room to put the names of players?

PLIMPTON: They’ll just put another base on the bottom. It’ll just get longer and longer and longer. There’s something about that trophy which epitomizes what a trophy should truly be.

NUWER: By the way, what are all those cups that line your shelves in this office?

PLIMPTON: All of those are all authentic cups, most of them for good sportsmanship (laughter) or something like that. I bought them to drink out of.

NUWER: I’ve come to the conclusion that all great athletes, ultimately, are wonderful genetic freaks. Would you agree with that observation?

PLIMPTON: Physically?

NUWER: Yes.

PLIMPTON: Oh, I don’t think so. The one ingredient they all seem to have is that they are superb athletes. I suppose if you looked at their mothers and fathers you could see the genetic possibilities there. But there are too many examples of that not being so to suggest that it’s a cut-and-dried rule. There were some people I was playing with on the Baltimore Colts who didn’t look anything like football players. Don Nottingham – He used to be called the human bowling ball – didn’t look anything like a football player. John Unitas didn’t look anything like a football player, and he was the most famous football player in the land. He had these bandy legs and a humped back; he looked as though you could beat him up in a street brawl. In fact, I wrote a chapter on how the Baltimore Colts all looked as though they came out of the YMCA locker room. They weren’t sculpted. [Vince] Lombardi, on the other hand, when he was with the Green By Packers, always wanted his players to look like football players, so they looked as though they all came out of a Michelangelo studio.
  No, I think a lot of it has to do with determination and concentration. Tom Matte was a halfback for the Baltimore Colts. He didn’t look anything like a running back; he wasn’t very fast. But he made up for it with his savvy and studied, rather than instinctive, moves. Somehow it was more the mental process, than it was a physical one that made him as good as he was. Then you have great physical specimens who turned out to be rather poor players. Joe Don Looney was a famous one with Detroit Lions. He was a terrific physical specimen, but he had a crazy mind, which kept him from being a superstar. Joe Don Looney had a football coach as a father. He had the sort of thing [background] that would suggest he would be a genetic marvel, but while he was awfully good, he never made it as much as he should have.

NUWER: Do you consider yourself a humorist?

PLIMPTON: Yeah.

NUWER: I find your books extremely funny.

PLIMPTON: I think the one thing that I may have discovered, or if I haven’t discovered it, that’s always struck me, is how much humor there is in professional sports. No one’s really concentrated on perfecting it somehow. Maybe if I’ve done any good it’s to show how much fun these cats all have. It’s really a sort of protective never they have to put on.

NUWER: Stylistically, do you use anecdotes to move your story forward?

PLIMPTON: Yes, I’m a storyteller.

NUWER: What’s in your typewriter, what’s in progress? It is true that you are expanding your Sports Illustrated April Fool’s joke article [1989] into a novel? [Plimpton authored a controversial magazine hoax which claimed the Mets had discovered a flame-throwing Buddhist pitcher named Hayden (Sidd) Finch who was having trouble reconciling “the two religions”: baseball and Buddhism. More than 2,500 letters pro and con flooded the publication’s office in response to the piece.]

PLIMPTON: Yes, I’m working on that and I’m working on this book about Truman Capote. Those are the two big projects.

NUWER: What is the Capote book?

PLIMPTON: It’s sort of an oral narrative. It’s mostly edited interviews, which give a sort of portrait.

NUWER: Speaking of Capote, have you ever thought of writing a nonfiction novel?

PLIMPTON: Well, the nonfiction novel, presumably, is nonfiction using the techniques of a novel. That’s what Truman Capote said In Cold Blood was. It was simply reportage, which was hardly a new form of writing. I mean, any autobiographical adventure story, in a sense, uses the techniques of the novel. He doesn’t use the first person to be sure, and my books are all in the first person. So if that’s the distinction, then I haven’t got any plans to write one and haven’t written one. But I would think that I certainly use as many techniques of the novel as I possibly can. It’s sort of interesting in writing this novel about Sidd Finch – this [baseball-playing] Buddhist monk – not to think of it as a novel, but to think of it as if I were writing a piece of reportage on this guy that’s turned up in the Mets training camp and can throw the ball that fast.

NUWER: Do you have more of the working habits of a journalist than a novelist? In other words, writing best as a deadline approaches?

PLIMPTON: Yeah, I really do need an assignment. I find writing very hard and not much fun. The reporter, however, is required to get the thing in, so it helps to have an editor with a whip.

NUWER: Finally, as you enter your sixties, can I assume that your participatory career is at its end?

PLIMPTON: No, because there are a certain number of things I can yet do: opera, ballet, painting. I’m not going to go into my nineties trying other people’s things. But there are a couple of things I want to do.