In my world, it seems like the universe smiles when I am bold, has a good laugh when I fall on my face, then has its heart go out to me when I get back up again. Is my world anything like yours?
Lately I have been thinking of George Plimpton. He was known to a sophisticated few as one of the founders of The Paris Review, the high-brow literary journal he edited from 1953 until his death in 2003. But it was his sports writing in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s that made him a best-selling author and media celebrity. Specifically, it was his unreasonable confidence that he could boldly participate in any professional sport and live to write about it. He found a large audience for his books, writing that often poked fun at himself, a flailing amateur among seasoned professionals, an intellectual effete falling on his face and getting up again, low comedy delivered with a patrician accent. He authored more than fifteen books and appeared in more than thirty films, including Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Rio Lobo (1970), and Good Will Hunting (1997).
I would like to be as bold and as resilient as Plimpton but I dislike the spotlight. Is the spotlight, too, a place to be bold? I imagine Plimpton daring to fail, a raw amateur at first, but after each public fall, rising to find a fresh revelation — that the audience not only laughs but wants us to succeed.
COMMENTS
Ellen D. wrote:
Great shot!
Mike C. wrote:
Thank you Danny,
William G. wrote:
My 89-year old friend Wayne P. has turned out to be a baseball enthusiast, so I’ve been printing Roger Angell’s baseball articles from the New Yorker archive. He really likes them, and I do too. My involvement in baseball dates to elementary school days, when it was what we boys did at recess. I was never good at it, possibly because my collar bones are vestigial. And I’ve never played the game since that time, though early in college I did return to Flint, Texas, where my erstwhile classmates were playing the team from the neighboring village. It was early evening on a balmy summer day. Joe Scritchfield was on the mound, and just as in elementary school, his throwing hand seemed to stretch all the way back to second base before his fast ball whapped into the catcher’s mitt. Perhaps part of Plimpton’s appeal is the strings of memory he plucks. My wife and I drove to Chaco Canyon, NM, and spent three nights sleeping in a tent. The ruins are powerful. Also, the stars were magnificent. I felt fortunate to get her to sleep in a tent, but she says no more tent this year. In addition to the pleasure of going and seeing, the place is subject of a lot of archaeological controversy, so there’s some interesting literature to peruse.
Photo Prayer 2026-12: Skateboarder, George Gordon Meade Memorial, Washington, D.C, 2015. Photo copyright 2015; text, 2026; by Danny Nelson Schweers. When Danny was briefly the managing editor of Image Journal, George Plimpton advised him over the telephone, not about writing but about how literary publications do not need libel insurance just to please nervous lawyers.
Click here to read my longer essay, “The Plimpton Syndrome”.