To Find What It’s Like, You Simply Let George Do It

“We’re going through!” The commander’s voice was like thin ice breaking. He wore his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye.

“We can’t make it, sir. It’s spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me.”

“I’m not asking you, Lieutenant Berg,” said the commander. “Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8500! We’re going through!”

The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.

--From “The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty”

It is said that George Plimpton is the ultimate Walter Mitty. He isn’t. Walter Mitty only dreamed about it. Plimpton does it.

Still, James Thurber would have loved George Plimpton. Lots of guys daydream about staring down the barrel at home plate and seeing Willie Mays or Frank Robinson there, guessing fastball, and wind up and throw him the curve instead. Plimpton didn’t imagine it. Plimpton did it.

I looked in at Robinson. I thought, “Well, why not? Now’s the time to unleash the curve ball, the hook. And perhaps if the hook works, I’ll chance the change of pace and maybe even the knuckler.”

I worked my fingers around the seam until I had the ball held properly for the curve. Robinson, the victim, was standing easily in the batter’s box. I pumped my arm twice and swung into the windup. As I came through, I failed to snap my wrist sufficiently and my hook got away from me in majestic style--sailing far over Robinson and (Catcher Elston) Howard’s heads to the wire screen behind home plate.

If it had hit a foot or so higher, the ball would have caught in the netting of the screen and run up into the press box. It was such an extraordinarily wild pitch that I felt I had to make some comment; what I’d done was too undignified to pass unnoticed, and so once again I hurried off the mound calling out “Sorry! Sorry!”

Howard and Robinson gazed out at me, both startled, I think, perhaps even awed by the strange trajectory of the pitch which was wild enough to suggest I had suddenly decided to throw the ball to someone in the stands. --From “Out Of My League”

Plimpton not only pitched in Yankee Stadium, he quarterbacked in the NFL for “Paper Lion,” tended goal in the NHL, got into the ring with Archie Moore, drove in the Baja 1000 and brought the ball upcourt for the Boston Celtics.

He played in the Crosby with Sam Snead. He was the daring old man on the flying trapeze for the Clyde Beatty circus. He ran with the bulls at Pamplona--Hemingway himself pushed him out there--and he did standup comedy at Caesars Palace.

He did everything everyone else did but marry Zsa Zsa Gabor. When Lyndon Johnson was in the White House, the New Yorker ran a cartoon showing him opening his mail and saying, “Letter from George Plimpton. He wants to be President for a day.”

Archie Moore broke his nose. The Detroit Lions almost broke his leg. No one broke his zeal to find out.

I leaned in over the center and said “Green right . . . on three . . . Break! Set! Sixteen! Eighty-eight! Hut, hut, hut!”

The ball slapped into my palm. I turned and started back. I could feel my balance going, and two yards behind the line, I fell down--absolutely flat, as if my feet had been pinned under a trip wire stretched across the field, not a hand laid on me. I joined the huddle. “Sorry, sorry,” I said.

“Last play,” George Wilson was calling. He had walked over with a clipboard in his hand. “The ball’s on the 10. Let’s see you take it all the way in.” One of the players asked , “Which end zone is he talking about?”

I spun slowly to the ground grabbing at my jaw. ( Carl ) Brettschneider . . . said: “The defense is going to rack you up one of these days, if your own team’d let you stand long enough for us to get at you. It’s aggravating to bust through and find you’ve already been laid flat by your own guys.” --From “Paper Lion”

George Plimpton was not a frustrated jock. He was a reporter who figured that he could not write “accurately or vividly” about a sport unless he experienced it first-hand. “Participatory journalism,” he called it.

It had been tried before. Paul Gallico, the author, in the days when he was a sports columnist, had climbed into the ring with Jack Dempsey--Dempsey bloodied him--and had driven a bobsled down a run at the Winter Olympics, where he crashed.

But Plimpton became a surrogate for Everyman USA. Long before the fantasy camps in baseball or businessman clinics in basketball or 10K races in city streets, Plimpton had figuratively vaulted over the stadium railings and onto the playing fields with America’s mythic sports figures.

He wasn’t Walter Mitty but he stood for the Walter Mittys of the world. Alan Alda played him in a movie and George joked that one day he wanted to play Alan Alda in his life story.

He wrote about his adventures with such rare insight and good humor that his books became best sellers. It was like Dorothy describing Oz. These were not exposes. Plimpton found the joy in sports, the fun.

George has finally found a sport he can play sitting down--harness racing. This orphan of the sports pages is as native American as pumpkin pie but suffers an identity crisis, since every other horse seems to be named Hanover.

George will drive in a celebrity race Saturday at Fairplex Park in Pomona, formerly known as the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds track, where Elliott Gould, Bob Seagren and Don Addams will be joining him.

“It’s all in the clucking,” Plimpton says of buggy racing. “You have to know how to make the right clucking sound to get the horse to run right.”

That’s all very well, of course. But a lot of people are waiting for the day when the horse turns around and says, “Psst! Plimpton! Knock it off with that clucking and whipping! I’m just a milk-wagon horse doing a story on what it’s like to be Dan Patch in a homestretch.”

Ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa . . .