Word: shadows
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...knee (fourth-string Quarterback Sam Ansley came in to lead the team to a 44-14 win), Texas last week remained atop the college polls with the only undefeated record among the football powers. The No. 1 ranking has enabled Coach Fred Akers to emerge early from the long shadow of his legendary predecessor, Darrell Royal. It has also vindicated members of the university athletic commission who disregarded a Royal choice and picked Akers instead. Actually, they had good reason for their decision. Akers had prepped as a Royal assistant before moving into the head coaching job at Wyoming...
While Moore and most of the other fighters in Shadow Box are black, no one will mistake Plimpton for a Great White Hope. Rather he calls to mind the role Beau Bridges played in the early '70s film The Landlord: a rich, soft, and well-intentioned white boy mixing it up with blacks from the ghetto--emerging unscathed by some miracle, but not unchanged...
...Shadow Box has much the same spirit. And with its month-before-Christmas publication date, it will be a boon to the gift wrap industry. Yet in many ways Plimpton is writing for a narrower audience in Shadow Box. The usual sports figures vie for attention with literary and journalistic personalities. Readers looking for another Paper Lion may be stymied by Plimpton's pages on the death fantasies of contemporary literatteurs and the last words of their historical counterparts. Plimpton seems to be aiming at a readership more cultivated, perhaps, than the TV audience Paper Lion hit; readers...
...death is always a subject with grim overtones, the approach to it in Shadow Box is typically Plimpton--light-hearted, open-minded, and fanciful. Worthy and characteristic "last moments" are contributed by the likes of Terry Southern, Charles Addams, Allen Ginsberg, and Jules Feiffer. Plimpton's own fantasy takes place in Yankee Stadium. As an outfielder he runs into one of the monuments that used to stand in deep center field...
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...