I had to write an extended book review for my Sports Lit class on Paper Lion, George Plimpton’s account of his experiences on the Detroit Lions football team during the preseason of 1963. This is not a normal book review, but an extended one with summary, author bio, critical reception, etc. It is much longer than most reviews, but since I was planning on reviewing Paper Lion here anyway, I decided to post this. Enjoy.
Football is a sport that many know and love, but few of its followers have actually experienced the drives and dedication it takes to play the game. Instead, most fans are happy with sitting back and watching the game with food and a beverage, rather than enduring the grueling conditions, intricate plays, and rigid scheduling that football players must work into their lives. It takes a certain mindset to want to play a game in which injuries are bound to occur and where no play is ever considered “mastered,” or where anything can go wrong simply because of timing. In this regard, it might seem as though football players are a masochistic bunch, almost enjoying the pain and suffering that they are forced to undergo for the game.
However, one ordinary sports reporter decided to put aside fears of physical contact and embarrassment to join a football team. This man was George Plimpton, a writer for Sports Illustrated, Esquire, and author of a variety of sports-related books. Plimpton was determined to join a football team for one season and understand the game from a player’s perspective, rather than an audience member. Plimpton’s goal was to uncover the truth about a football team and its players – not just what the game of football was and how to play it, but also who the players that make up the game really were and why they were so interested in the game. After his encounters in football, he wrote the novel Paper Lion, one that is widely considered an important asset to sports literature.
George Plimpton was born March 18, 1927 in New York City to Francis Plimpton and Pauline Ames. He attended Harvard University until 1945, where, at 18, he joined the Army to fight in World War II. After his time in the Army, he went back to Harvard to finish his degree, and then attended both Cambridge University and King’s College for two more degrees. He became editor of The Paris Review in 1953, which helped him progress to various other magazines such as Horizons and Sports Illustrated.
At Sports Illustrated, Plimpton began writing pieces that required him to join in on various sports. Plimpton was interested in putting himself in different situations; the research and writing that Paper Lion consists of were not the only times that Plimpton put himself in the shoes of a player. Before his stint as a football player, Plimpton took up the pitcher’s position in a baseball event where he pitched to the National League, which became the book Out of My League. He also went on to write more participatory sports books, a golfing book called The Bogey Man, Open Net (a hockey book), and Shadow Box, which focused on boxing.
While Plimpton’s first foray into participation in professional sports focused more on enduring the sport as a whole, Paper Lion is more a look at the culture of football in general. In the book, Plimpton is invited to join the Detroit Lions football team in its 1963 season. To get the overall feel for the game, Plimpton wants to learn the spot of quarterback, since much of the game centers around this position. Although he only stays on with the team through its preseason training, Paper Lion does provide a hilarious account of Plimpton’s struggle at quarterback in an exhibition game.
Plimpton has much trouble being accepted at any football league, and writes that many teams are wary of accepting a journalist who might divulge their secrets to the public. However, Plimpton writes in his foreword to the 2003 edition of the book that he did not “peek into closets or put his feet up onto the nearest sofa.” Instead, Plimpton reports what he feels are both an important aspect of the game and the real story of who the players are.
Throughout the course of preseason training, Plimpton is forced to learn football maneuver as well as how to fit in with the team and take notes relevant to his book. Plimpton writes of the hardship that this meant; rookies are treated as “little brothers” to the veteran team members, who force Plimpton and others to sing their college anthems, play pranks on them, and force them to undergo other normal rites of passage. Practices are grueling and embarrassing, especially for a man who has had little to no experience playing regulation football. Even the players tend to view him as a joke, laughing at his size and ability.
Plimpton tries to keep his personal motive a secret, although most of the players pick up on the fact that he is not a real football player. Over time, Plimpton makes friends with some of the team members on the squad, becoming involved with both their personal and football lives.
One of the first members that Plimpton writes about is the head coach of the Lions, George Wilson. Plimpton describes him as a “wide-shouldered” and “deeply-tanned” man who is more than just his bulky appearance. Plimpton has a tendency to get right to the heart of a man with his intelligent and detailed descriptions of personality, and George Wilson is outlined as being a very gentle, free-spirited man with his players. At one point, Plimpton writes of how there are two different ways of coaching: either to be very strict as to what the players can and cannot do, or to be lenient with them and to allow them to do what they want, but with guidelines. Wilson is the latter of these two, and his players respect and respond well to it. Even Plimpton, with his short time on the team, comes to regard Wilson with some sort of respect. When Wilson is forced to make team cuts the day after a scrimmage, he does so while during a team meeting, having a teammate act as a harbinger of sorts who motions them out of the room, the rookies then dispatched by Wilson. Plimpton at first comments that Wilson’s method seems a bit cruel, and then recants, wondering if there can ever be an easy way to dash a man’s dream. Wilson is every bit a player’s coach, and even treats Plimpton as such during his time on the team. Without Wilson, Paper Lion might never have been written.
But most of Plimpton’s time on the team is not spent with Wilson; instead, he is lodged with the players, both rookie and veteran. One of the things that Plimpton writes about most is his association with the players, both about football and team stories. Part of being on a team like the Lions is the fact that each player has his own perspectives on the game of football and stories that have been picked up from experiences on the team. In his attempts to gain perspective on how to play football, he talks to the players about their strategies.
Plimpton meets Night Train Lane, a defensive back veteran on the Lions team, as a way to get a feel for what he might face in a scrimmage situation that he has to play. First, Plimpton asks about Lane’s life and how he got into football, just as curious about the player as he is about the game. Lane gives tips on styles and where to look to understand the player. What is interesting about Plimpton’s notes here is that he did not just focus on his position at quarterback, but tried to uncover details about all of the different positions on the field.
Other players also help Plimpton out in his quest at understanding the game. Harley Sewell, a guard, tried to cheer Plimpton up after he had a devastating time as quarterback in a big scrimmage game. Sewell is portrayed as a man who will not take no for an answer, almost as if his job is to make Plimpton feel better. He brings up the fact that many people have bad games, as if he is a father reassuring his son. Plimpton bonds with the rookies as well, especially a young player named Lucien Reeberg, who actually asks Plimpton what he thinks of his ball playing. After cuts have been made, Plimpton is even asked to host and create a rookie show, where the rookies get to release their stresses and have fun for a night of parodying and partying.
Throughout the course of the book, Plimpton makes the reader feel as if the Lions team is a welcoming group of men all attracted to the same activity. Each player has his own biases and likes and dislikes, but when they live together as a team, they drop their previous feelings to accomplish the one goal of football that they all agree on: winning. This emphasizes the important role that communication plays down on the field itself. Joe Shmidt and Wayne Walker, both linebackers, talk of the importance of knowing the teammate and how they will respond in game situations. “The big thing is knowing the guy’s with you,” Walker says, “so that if he does something separate you can compensate, and cover for him.” Paper Lion’s message is clear here – one player does not make a team. In essence, it is every player that makes or breaks the team, which is made even more apparent during Plimpton’s failure at the scrimmage; the team realizes that even if Plimpton is a very small part of the team, it is still important that morale stays high.
Plimpton progresses through the season steadily with few problems, making time for both practice and work. However, as time gets closer and closer to the scrimmage where Plimpton has to actually participate in team play, he talks of the stresses of the game. It is not just the rookies who get stressed. Alex Karras, as player who is suspended the season that Plimpton stays with the team, would always get physically sick before a game. There is a story told about a rookie quarterback who forgot what he was doing and punted a ball on a first down while on the field. Plimpton writes that the stresses of the game are normal, probably because of how much knowledge and thought must go into every football play made.
As Plimpton makes his way to the end of the preseason, he finds that football is not his forte. In the scrimmage, he calls five plays, hilariously being knocked down by his own teammate, falling on his own accord, almost relinquishing a fumble, overthrowing a pass, and having his play already read before he even attempts it. Plimpton also tries to get into an exhibition game against the Cleveland Browns, but to no avail, as the coach will not allow it. Discouraged by his lack of football skills, Plimpton leaves the Detroit team early, his accomplishments minimal but his knowledge better from his experiences.
Throughout Plimpton’s book, he gives his opinions on the state of football. But what is most interesting about Plimpton’s experiences is how he shows the team’s bondage into one cohesive whole. Written football games can fail because the author lacks the skills to showcase both the finesse and the tension of the game. Plimpton, however, manages to include both of these because he puts himself in the situations, rather than watching from the sidelines. Paper Lion could have just as easily been another run-of-the-mill journalistic piece on a specific football team, covering the wins, losses, and statistics of the team. In this case, though, Plimpton’s sociological experiment provides the reader with insight into both human emotion and the sport of football, which is of course more interesting to both sports fans and non-sports fans alike. There is something about Plimpton’s ability to recall vivid details that draws the reader to his descriptions; his ability to recount stories with the original humor and emotion makes the reader feel as if they are participating right alongside these old football players, even if the events did happen forty years ago.
The book also shows the plight that football players go through that the general public might not understand unless actually subjected to the game. Plimpton partly undergoes this experiment to see what a football player actually has to go through to play the game, and in fact hears many stories that give him the sense that the job the players work at is not all money and fame. At one point, Plimpton writes that during the exhibition game against the Browns, players deposited their valuables with a coach, and he received “a substantial pile of teeth.” Humility is one of the big emotions that Plimpton finds is an important concept in football. The game must always have some sort of humiliation – either you humiliate your opponent or he humiliates you. The winner is the one who wants to humiliate the other player more. Bruce Maher, a defensive halfback, tells Plimpton that “it’s probably [the other player’s] mistake that’s made you look good.” There is always some sort of embarrassment on the field, and it is part of what makes up the game of football.
What Plimpton seems to take home most from his time at Detroit is not the fun or the friendships that he has made, or the fact that he is now somewhat addicted to the Lions, but the extreme conditions that the players face, the prides and embarrassments, and the pain that the football players hate and love at the same time. Plimpton puts it better than any other words can say in his epilogue, referring to inhuman screams that he heard coming from the players on the football field: “I remembered from my last day with the team when I walked up from the practice field – the long bleat from the players being whistled together by the coaches, almost one of sorrow.” It is that drive to play a game that is not exactly pure fun that Plimpton goes into the book not understanding, and when he ends his time with the team, it is still elusive to him. But that does not make his experiences moot – instead, he has told the stories of the players, and given them a voice. He may have even succeeded in giving others a drive to play the game.
The worth of Paper Lion is immeasurable. Plimpton provides his audience with rich detail that simply could not have been written about by any sports magazine. His infiltration of football is both courageous and telling of his spirit. Plimpton may make friends in the book, but it feels like they are the audience’s friends as well, and when it is told that Lucien Reeberg soon dies after the events in the book, one feels the loss as if he knew Reeberg himself. It is Plimpton’s writing, and his ability to tell a story, that sucks the reader in. But another reason why Paper Lion has so much worth is the fact that the reader can draw from the book what they want to. There are a lot of football criticisms thrown around throughout the course of the book, and sports fans and players alike can gain tips and insight into the game, just as Plimpton does. The human condition, though, is the more important factor in the book, one that Plimpton takes away from the experience more than the football, and Plimpton’s words help paint a picture of a football player’s psyche. From high emotions to the limits of a human being, Paper Lion speaks to our culture itself. The acts of the football players – the pranks, the humor, the (at times) rowdy behavior – are all things that the public has stereotyped, yet Plimpton shows that the players do it for a different reason. They are not the stupid humans the public believes they are; they must be smart and physically sound to play their game. Their emotions get the best of them at times like any other individual, and in most regards, they are still just working men. Plimpton brings out the football player’s bravery and individuality, though, which makes his book stand out from the rest as one of the more telling aspects of the sport.
Paper Lion was received quite well by the critics. W.C. Heinz, a sportswriter, is quoted as saying it is “the best book of football I’ve ever read.” Book Week reviewed it with a similar quote. Eliot Fremont Smith from The New York Times said that it is “a tale to gladden the envious heart of any ‘average weekend athlete.’” The book was eventually made into a film in 1968, which was received with the same amount of praise. It starred Alan Alda as Plimpton, and the Lions team played themselves.
Plimpton’s book is one that must be recommended. There is so much depth to the book that it cannot be expressed in just one review, or acknowledged in just one read-through of the book. Paper Lion is unusually detailed, and speaks to an individual rather than the masses. There is something that will get to the heart of every reader, no matter how different they are. Plimpton is able to meld football into a critique of society, and that is where his book really succeeds – instead of an outsider’s view of the game, the audience is brought right down on the field, deleting that gap between fan and player.
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