In 1963, Lions head coach George Wilson allowed Paris Review writer and editor George Plimpton to play out that fantasy.
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With a Sports Illustrated contract in hand, Plimpton convinced Lions management to allow him to enter preseason training camp at Cranbrook, the private boys’ school in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. His plan was to go undercover as a rookie quarterback for a magazine article that would reach a dramatic culmination when he called a series of plays in a professional football game.
No one expected the amateur athlete to survive long in a field with real-life Lions. But by writing about the experience, Plimpton turned off-field fanaticism and on-field stumbles into literary gold.
His resulting 1966 book, “Paper Lion: Confessions of a Last-String Quarterback,” became a bestseller that was praised by The New York Times as “one of the best books written about sports and the most gripping book on any subject in recent memory.”
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A 1968 film based on the book starred Alan Alda as Plimpton and members of the 1967 Lions team as themselves.
Decades before I became a journalism professor at Miami University in Ohio, I discovered Plimpton’s sports writing by reading the paperback versions I found on my parents’ bookshelves. Plimpton was a leading member of a class of mid-20th-century literary journalists, including Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Gay Talese, and Norman Mailer, who were becoming known for applying novelistic techniques and sometimes personal, subjective perspectives to nonfiction.
While other literati tackled heavy topics, Plimpton’s engaging, conversational prose moved outside professional sports. Many of his books followed the same formula of “participatory journalism.” He wrote about pitching against MLB stars, traveling with the PGA tour, boxing against Archie Moore and playing with the Boston Bruins.
Those were just the complete books. In other television and magazine projects, Plimpton competed in tennis and bridge; perform monologues; act in a western; performing with the New York Philharmonic; and try to be a trapeze artist in the circus.
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However, he is best known for trying his hand at quarterback for the Lions.
The elegant writer meets the playing field
In some ways, Plimpton seemed like exactly the wrong person for this job. Possessed of a distinctive accent of old money and wealth and patrician manners, he was founding editor of The Paris Review and by 1967 a mainstay of the literary salons in Paris and New York. “Author, critic, interviewer, party animal… friend to all, talented, affable, energetic, brilliant, witty, rich, a legend in his time,” gushed The New York Times.
Just the sort of person the average football fan would like to see taken down.
Plimpton joined a team he described as recovering from the scandal. After finishing the 1962 season with an 11-3 record and a win in the NFL’s third-place Playoff Bowl, the NFL commissioner’s office fined six Lions for betting on the championship game between Green Bay and New York. More importantly on the field, the commissioner suspended Lions great defensive tackle and future Hall of Famer Alex Karras for one year. Without him, the Lions would finish the 1963 season 5-8-1.
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Plimpton made his way onto the team by promising to “just stay on the periphery of things and not bother anyone, just try to participate enough to feel things.”
Wilson agreed, and Plimpton arrived at training camp a few months later with his own football, purchased at an Army and Navy store in Times Square, and a “light fiction” about having played quarterback at Harvard and for the nonexistent Newfoundland Newfs.
Plimpton’s attempted deception could raise ethical questions; However, the joke is always on him. The coaching staff seemed to have thought it would be hilarious if someone on the team actually took the lanky 36-year-old with the nasal accent as a professional soccer player. It seems unlikely that anyone did it.
“I never had the temerity to pretend I was something I wasn’t,” Plimpton wrote. “The team caught on pretty quickly.”
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At camp, Plimpton hung around the dining room and sat in the back of team meetings. A master of small talk, he allows the reader to eavesdrop on conversations with Hall of Famers Karras, Dick “Night Train” Lane and Joe Schmidt.
Plimpton takes us with him one night to a bar frequented by trainers, where we listen to games of liar’s poker with Wilson, Scooter McLean and Les Bingaman. We join him as he chats with Karras at Lindell’s AC, the bar the player owned in downtown Detroit at the time.
Determination Lessons
On training camp, Plimpton faced ridicule from players, but earned respect by standing up to the brutality of the sport and persisting despite the inevitability of pain. He never played football in school, beyond a beer game between Harvard Crimson and Harvard Lampoon, and didn’t know the basics of playing quarterback.
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Several days into camp, he was allowed to participate in a play in which, as a quarterback, he was supposed to quickly pass the ball to another player.
“At ‘two’ came the movement,” Plimpton wrote. “I started spinning without a proper grip on the ball, moving too nervously, and lost it, gaping, with my mouth half open, as it fell and bounced twice, once away from me, then back, and swung happily back and forth at my feet. I threw myself on it (…) and heard the strange, sharp thud of the equipment, the grunts, and then a sudden, rapid weight knocked the wind out of me.”
The same thing happened when Plimpton was allowed to take the field in an annual intrasquad game played in Pontiac. On his first three plays he lost 20 yards when he fell, was knocked down by his own teammates, and was literally picked up off the ground by an enthusiastic defender. On the bus home, Plimpton admitted to Wilson that he didn’t like being hit.
The coach gently explained that a “love of physical contact” was necessary to succeed in professional soccer.
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“When kids, in a park, choose sides to tackle instead of touch, kids who want to be wingers and catch passes, or even quarterbacks, because they subconsciously think they can get rid of the ball before they get hit, those guys don’t end up as football players,” Wilson reflected. “They become great tennis players, skiers or high jumpers. That doesn’t mean they lack courage or competitiveness.”
“But the guys who strive to be tackles or guards, or defensive backs who don’t run for daylight but for trouble, those are the ones who are going to succeed as football players.”
Plimpton celebrates this quality of great football players – an irrational enthusiasm for forceful physical contact – in the veteran Lions who bring him into their orbit. He befriends Karras and offensive lineman John Gordy, in particular, and discusses topics ranging from the NFL commissioner to Adolf Hitler.
In a later book, Plimpton goes with the couple to a crazy golf tournament and begins a ridiculous business venture, suggesting that the on-field madness necessary to succeed in football also extends to life off the field.
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But it’s not Plimpton’s way of delving into the psychology of his idols. Rather, listen as they tell stories that show how reckless grown men who run into trouble really are.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent, nonprofit news organization bringing you trusted data and analysis to help you understand our complex world. It was written by: Stephen Siff, University of Miami
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Stephen Siff does not work for, consult with, own shares in, or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond his academic appointment.