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...funniest part is that none of these situations, the last one excepted, is totally beyond the limits of the talent or imagination of George Plimpton, the world's consummate amateur. Sometimes, indeed, it is difficult to decide whether Plimpton is an amateur professional or a professional amateur, so intense is his desire to succeed in alien fields. He always loses but, in a larger sense, he always wins, proving that even in an age of constricting specialization a man can do almost anything he sets his mind to, if only for a moment. It is Plimpton's triumph...
There is no such confusion in Manhattan, where Plimpton's parties and partygoings are assiduously chronicled by the columnists and where he conducts one of America's few literary salons in his East Side apartment. Among other things, he is editor of the Paris Review, a fine literary quarterly. Until his marriage to Freddy Espy 21 years ago, at the age of 41, Plimpton was probably the most sought after bachelor in the U.S.-the escort, at one time or another, of Jacqueline Kennedy, her sister Lee Radziwill, Ava Gardner, Jane Fonda, Jean Seberg and Candice Bergen...
What neither the Plimpton haters nor the Plimptonphiles realize is that he is something else as well. Behind his several masks and costumes lurks an excellent and greatly underrated writer. His primary problem is that almost nobody takes a book on sports seriously. The public, to be sure, has bought his books-Out of My League, Paper Lion and The Bogey Man have sold nearly 2,000,000 copies in both hard-cover and paperback-and the critics have generally been enthusiastic. Yet both readers and reviewers have inferentially relegated Plimpton to the special, segregated subcategory of journalism reserved...
...Plimpton's books are undeniably about sports. Paper Lion, the product of his month in training camp with the Detroit Lions, tells more null the inner world of pro football than any other book ever written. The Bogey Man, similarly, may be the most complete explanation of that infuriating game called golf. Out of My League is the detailed account of only one afternoon Plimpton spent in Yankee Stadium, but it nonetheless offers a keen insight into the mechanics and mystique of baseball. To say merely that the books are about sports, however, is to tell the plot without...
...formula of Out of My League has been repeated, with varying degrees of success, in every other Plimpton venture into Mittydom. It is always the comic-terror story of the amateur trying his hand at a craft not his own and, without exception, suffering defeat and humiliation when he attempts to master it. "I think he has an idea that there's a kind of mystery one can get to, a really professional mystery of an altogether exciting kind," says Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books and one of Plimpton's closest friends...