Word: plimptonly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
SHADOW BOX by George Plimpton Putnam; 351 pages...
Should the verb be "to plimp"? The participatory journalism of such books as Out of My League and Paper Lion, in which the amateur ventures lamblike among the wolves of professional sport-and then writes about how it feels to be a lamb chop-is unique to George Plimpton. Others have sedulously aped his ideas and style, but the author remains an original: a leaning tower of self-respect, plimping all the way to the showers...
...newest chronicle of utter failure recalls an adventure that occurred in 1959 when Plimpton, now 50 and frail, was 31 and frail. Friends had goaded him with the mischievous argument that if he was really serious about participatory journalism, he should fight a professional boxer. There was a nice, traditional quality to the idea. Hemingway had gone many rounds with pugs, and Journalist Paul Gallico once had his fillings loosened by Jack Dempsey...
...Plimpton persuaded Archie Moore, then light-heavyweight champion, to box with him, the results to be set down in a SPORTS ILLUSTRATED article. Plimpton found a trainer named George Brown. "I had been introduced to him by Ernest Hemingway, who always spoke of him with highest regard-as a boxer who could have been a champion if he had been able to accept the idea that he was going to be hit once in a while...
Some of the hidden drama in Plimpton's life no doubt revolves around how he was able to take a gentleman's preoccupation with the proper use of leisure and turn it into journalistic subject matter capable of engaging his abilities to the fullest. Shadow Box is another Plimpton tour de force, and a vindication of one American boy's determination to never grow...