I’m No Plimpton
The New York Times’s NFL blog, The Fifth Down, excerpts the first chapter of A Few Seconds of Panic, in which I compare myself to George Plimpton and find an NFL team willing to let me in:
Lord knows I’m no Plimpton. He was the tall, Mayflower-descended son of the founder of a white-shoe law firm. I’m the short, first-generation son of a Greek ship captain. By virtue certainly of the privileges he enjoyed but more of the personality that allowed him to capitalize on them, Plimpton was a presence. “He looked for ways in which he could make himself a ridiculous figure, and not only on the football field, but in all walks of life,” [the writer Peter] Matthiessen once said. “That made him a great storyteller.”
Still, I doubt that if Plimpton materialized as a young writer today he could pull off what he did in the late 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. Those were times when celebrity sportswriters like Plimpton and Dick Schaap could forge deep, personal bonds with a Muhammad Ali or a Joe Namath and enjoy unguarded conversation at the same gatherings. Athletes today are weary of the media invasion, schooled to handle it with bromides and banalities, and generally uncurious about its practices and provenances. Breaching the levee that separates Reporter and Jock is more difficult now.
Plimpton began Paper Lion with a declaration: “I decided finally to pack the football.” Those seven words quickly established the author’s Everymanhood. The message was that the workings of pro football are such a mystery that training camp very well might be BYOB, bring your own ball. “The Detroit Lions officials had not sent me the sort of list one remembered from boys’ camp—that one should bring a pillow case, a mattress cover, a flashlight, a laundry bag, etc.”
Forty-plus years later, such naïveté isn’t plausible. We are routinely escorted inside the locker stalls and medicine cabinets, the Armani-stuffed closets and Bose-loaded Hummers of today’s professional athletes. We are fed an endless cycle of sports news and blather, in print, on television, on talk radio, on the Internet. Every fan is a columnist, every columnist an expert, every expert a media star. In NFL equipment rooms, six-packs of official game balls are stacked from floor to ceiling like cordwood. I pay $74.99 for one at retail. I won’t pack it.
Tags: excerpt, New York Times, Plimpton