George Plimpton Broke My Arm
The risky pleasures of Plimpton’s classic of participatory sportswriting, Paper Lion.
Almost twenty years ago, writing quirky sports pieces for the Village Voice, I decided to enter the world of championship arm wrestling. Like many young writers, I was inspired by the sports adventures of the gaunt but game George Plimpton, who had made a literary career out of placing himself in predicaments just beyond his athletic gifts. In 1959, though confessing he was built “rather like a bird of the stiltlike, wader variety,” Plimpton climbed into the ring with the light heavyweight champion Archie Moore for Sports Illustrated. In Out of My League he had managed to take the mound and face nine batters before flagging in an All-Star exhibition at Yankee Stadium, while in Paper Lion, he quarterbacked in an NFL pre-season game, giving away precious yards but surviving, body and wit intact.
As I interpreted the Plimpton books, good sports writing justified almost any bodily risk. I had already been swatted doing my own participatory stories as a boxer, even weathered a therapy session with Mike Tyson’s hypnotist, and I was less physically bird-like than Plimpton, who claimed he could easily slide his watch from wrist to elbow. How hard could arm-wrestling be?
The sport’s heavyweight champion, a 30-year-old former altar boy named Jason Vale, then lived in…
