George Plimpton
George Plimpton
George Ames Plimptonwas an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review. He was also famous for "participatory journalism" which included competing in professional sporting events, acting in a Western, performing a comedy act at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and playing with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and then recording the experience from the point of view of an amateur...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth18 March 1927
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
The pleasure of sport was so often the chance to indulge the cessation of time itself--the pitcher dawdling on the mound, the skier poised at the top of a mountain trail, the basketball player with the rough skin of the ball against his palm preparing for a foul shot, the tennis player at set point over his opponent--all of them savoring a moment before committing themselves to action.
Give me good books, good conversations, and my Trek Y-Foil, and I shall want for nothing else.
As happens with people who love a thing too much, it destroys them. Oscar Wilde said, 'You destroy the thing that you love.' It's the other way around. What you love destroys you.
The smaller the ball used in the sport, the better the book.
Golf cannot be played in anger, or in any mood of emotiional excess. Half the golf balls struck by amateurs are hit if not in rage surely in bewilderment, or gloom, or in cynicism, or even hysterically - all of those emotional excesses must be contained by the professional. Which is why balance is one of the essential ingredients of golf. Professionals invariably trudge phlegmatically around the course - whatever emotions are seething within - with the grim yet placid and bored look of cowpokes, slack-bodied in their saddles, who have been tending the same herd for two months.
I never understood people who don't have bookshelves.
I have never been convinced there's anything inherently wrong in having fun.
He was interviewed in the early '60s by a young novelist, Pati Hill.
That is one of the problems with oral biography, in that many different points of view are offered: contradictions, refutations, and so on.
They did not specify that I had to run the race from the beginning, ... about a block and a half from the finish - and I entered it immediately behind the fellow who was leading the race. He looked over his shoulder and there I was, fresh as a daisy. This poor man put on a desperate sprint, which is quite a feat if you've run 26 miles, and he managed to cross the finish line before I did, which gives you some sense of my speed.