The afternoon that George Plimpton first humiliated himself in the name of participatory journalism, I was throwing a tennis ball at the garage door of my childhood home 21.7 miles and a world away from Yankee Stadium, where I, too, longed to pitch. When he took the mound with a borrowed glove in a motley approximation of a uniform to face American and National League All-Star teams led by Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle, I was toeing an imaginary pitching rubber, trying to decide how to pitch to the Say Hey Kid.
I was seven years old, a first-grader, exuberantly exercising my imagination in which I was Ryne Duren, the Yankees’ myopic relief pitcher, heaving a final warm-up pitch all the way to the backstop just to put the fear of God in Willie. Plimpton was the thirty-one-year-old editor of the Paris Review with the means and the moxie to make imagination real.
Toots Shor, the bon-vivant saloonkeeper, made the necessary introductions. Sports Illustrated provided the financial backing. Armed with little more than muscle memory and chutzpah, Plimpton contrived to pitch to the major league All-Stars prior to a previously scheduled exhibition game. The winning team would split $1,000.
The stadium announcer introduced him to 20,000 witnesses in the stands as George Prufrock. As in T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock”—a middle-aged man with an “overwhelming” question he can’t bring himself to ask.
Like Prufrock, Plimpton had a question: what’s it like to stand 60 feet 6 inches away from Willie Mays with a ball in your hand? Unlike Prufrock, he was determined to act, determined to get an answer to his question.
He approached his task with cheerful WASP sangfroid, given that he hadn’t picked up a baseball in ten years. At least I would have brought a glove. Gazing from the dugout at the vastness of the ballpark before taking the mound—five years later Sandy Koufax would say it was like pitching in the Grand Canyon—Plimpton mused: “For me the future was uncertain and perhaps the best I could hope for was survival without shame.”
Which is one way to describe the human condition.
Plimpton wasn’t the first author to essay participatory sportswriting; he was just the best. Mark Twain was paid twenty dollars by the Sacramento Union to attempt what was called “surf-bathing” in 1866. Following the example of the naked locals, he paddled a wooden surfboard out to the break in Hawaiian waters and immediately wiped out. “The board struck the shore in three-quarters of a second, without any cargo, and I struck the bottom about the same time,” Twain reported.
Twenty-some years earlier, Charles Dickens wrote about hiking through snow and ice to the summit of Mount Vesuvius in the dark—his wife, daughter, and a rotund Italian he called Mr. Pickle of Portici schlepped aloft in litters by guides who should have known better. Up, up, up they went until it seemed they were “toiling to the summit of an antediluvian Twelfth-cake,” he wrote in Pictures from Italy.
Determined to look into the molten maw of the fuming mountain, Dickens crawled through the ashes to gaze “into the Hell of boiling fire below.” After which he and his guides came “rolling down; blackened, and singed, and scorched, and hot, and giddy,” each with “his dress alight in half-a-dozen places.”
Plimpton names Paul Gallico as his inspiration. In 1923, Gallico was a cub reporter in the sports department of the New York Daily News. Hired as a favor to his late father-in-law by publisher and film buff Joseph Patterson, he had lost his first job as movie critic for having exercised his critical faculties too liberally. “Fire him,” Captain Patterson said.
The managing editor saw something in him and buried him in the sports department without a byline. That August, Gallico was sent to cover Jack Dempsey’s training camp in Saratoga Springs, New York, as the heavyweight champ prepared to meet Luis Ángel Firpo, “the Wild Bull of the Pampas,” in September.
It was there that Gallico conceived the notion that it was impossible to write “graphically and understandingly” about a heavyweight fight without having gone a round with said heavyweight. He wanted to know what thoughts go through a man’s mind when he can’t think at all.
He approached Dempsey with the proposition that they spar a round. “What’s the matter, son?” Dempsey asked. “Don’t your editor like you no more?”
Gallico left the ring bloodied, addled, and informed. “It seems I had gone to an expert for tuition,” he wrote when he came sufficiently to his senses, enough anyway to get to his typewriter. Knocked out cold and he still made his deadline. (Dempsey would have hired a ghostwriter.)
It was Gallico’s first byline as a sportswriter. A year later, Patterson made him sports editor.
I never tried my hand at participatory sportswriting. By the time I was of age, the era had passed. I played tennis with Billie Jean King in my stocking feet once. At the time, she was my boss and I never wrote about it. The closest I ever came to a Plimpton moment was a scheduled first pitch at a spring-training game. I worked for three months to get my arm in shape. No way was I going to be one of those wimpy girls standing on the grass between the mound and the plate, giggling at my own ineptitude. When I learned that Sandy Koufax was going to be in attendance, I asked if he’d relieve me in a pinch. “No fuckin’ way, Leavy,” he replied, which left me with a slight approximation of the loneliness Plimpton felt on the Yankee Stadium mound. In my last bullpen session, my catcher clanked a throw off my kneecap, sending me to the disabled list before I could set foot on the field.
Training and timing consigned me to the sidelines: an outsider, which is, after all, what a reporter is supposed to be. I never felt an overwhelming need to get punched in the nose, nor do I believe personal experience is a requirement for writing “graphically and understandingly” about pitching, punching, or, for that matter, the presidency. No one says you have to be queen for a day in order to write about the queen. Even Plimpton couldn’t have gotten that gig.
In today’s bloated sports economy, he couldn’t have gotten the gig at Yankee Stadium either. There’s no way any prima-donna athlete on any professional team will do anything for the $125 promised each of the victorious All-Stars.
One of the many seductive charms of reading Out of My League, an excerpt of which was first published in the April 10, 1961, issue of Sports Illustrated under the title “Dream of Glory on the Mound,” is to return to a cheaper, kinder, less self-serious time when access to professional athletes didn’t require a security clearance and ballplayers tolerated—and occasionally indulged—authors with a Walter Mitty complex.
Plimpton hadn’t thought to engage an umpire. Nor had it crossed his mind that major league hitters weren’t going to swing at just anything, not when money was involved. They were going to be selective, make him come to them, which, alas, he could not do. He threw seventy-some pitches to the first seven batters he faced, twenty-three of them to Ernie Banks, the National League’s Most Valuable Player. By way of perspective: a Boston Braves pitcher named Red Barrett threw fifty-eight pitches in a one-hour-and-fifteen-minute complete game victory in 1944.
In his exhaustion, Plimpton lost control of his fastball, his fingers, and then his mind, which decamped to a high “observation booth”—the press box, perhaps?—somewhere above his disintegrating physical self. As he hallucinated and dissociated—the narrative voice careening between the first and second person—his inner voice began talking out loud in a po’ white-trash Southern accent never heard at Phillips Exeter, Harvard, or Cambridge.
Midway through Plimpton’s eighth hitter, Ralph Houk, the Yankees coach—known as “Major” for his valor at the Battle of the Bulge—invoked the mercy rule. Ambling to the mound, he took the ball. Shell-shocked, Plimpton staggered to the bench, where he learned that players in the American League dugout were making book on when he’d keel over.
It was a precedent-setting appearance for literature and baseball. “Driven to the showers before the game had even started,” the Yankee trainer said when he saw Plimpton stumble across the locker room.
In its brief recap of the exhibition game the next morning, the New York Times discreetly omitted Plimpton’s pitching line.