George Plimpton RIP
Three years ago, on the eve of my debut in the ring – a fight against a 58-year-old with a dodgy ticker in a New York gym – I made a pilgrimage to George Plimpton’s gorgeous townhouse overlooking the river on the Upper East Side. On the ground floor, half a dozen young acolytes were frantically putting the finishing touches to that month’s Paris Review, so we retired to a large room on the first floor filled with books and memorabilia, including a photograph of his famous fight in 1959 with world light-heavyweight champion Archie Moore, the most celebrated of Plimpton’s “participations”.
He freely admitted he hadn’t invented the genre – the great sportswriter Paul Gallico had once boxed a round with heavyweight champ Jack Dempsey, spending much of the time on the canvas. “What are you going to write about?” ringsiders had asked Gallico. “I don’t know,” he replied dazed. “I can’t remember anything.”
Plimpton went three rounds with Moore and remembered them too – his report for Sports Illustrated is funny, elegant, poised, a title-winning piece of reportage. “As he [Moore] moved around the ring he made a curious humming sound in his throat, a sort of peaceful aimless sound one might make pruning a flower bed, except that from time to time the hum would rise quite abruptly, and bang! he would cuff me alongside the head.”
A later recollection of challenging Moore encapsulates his dry, self-deprecating humour and the languid prose than seemed to match his tall, stately, patrician appearance. “I wrote a polite letter to Moore, known in the fight game as ‘the Mongoose’. I did this despite some disagreeable facts about him in the record books – namely that he had knocked out more opponents than anyone else in the history of the ring, starting off with a man called Piano-Mover Jones. Why was I going into the ring against someone who had beaten a man with such an awesome name as Piano-Mover Jones?”
Plimpton treated the fight comically, but had trained in deadly earnest for six months: sparring, running round the reservoir in Central Park, giving up smoking. His main advice to me, though, was to cultivate the timekeeper: Moore was getting bored by the third round and only an early bell saved Plimpton. As I was leaving, one of Plimpton’s assistants, of proudly Hispanic descent, looked at me pityingly. “White man’s nose,” she said. “Easily broken.”
← Farewell to the voice
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