Supergeorge

PAPER LION by George Plimpton. 362 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.

Many men dream of being George Plimpton: handsome, rich, aristocratic, reasonably young (39), friend of Jackie Kennedy and Marianne Moore, sportsman, writer, world traveler, editor of Paris Review. Plimpton, on the other hand, dreams of being many men. He sees himself as a superathlete--or as several superathletes. His vision is not as remote as other Mittyesque mirages, for Plimpton has found a way of acting out his fantasies.

In 1959, he fought three rounds with Archie Moore, who gave him a bloody nose. In 1960, he pitched an endless inning to a line-up of major-league All-Stars, who toyed with him by fouling off as many as 20 pitches before delivering the coup de grace. In his latest adventure, Plimpton was last-string quarterback for the Detroit Lions during training season. This account of his adventure goes beyond an amateur's blushing recital to become a participant's picture of the sixties' hottest spectator sport.

On the field, Plimpton did the calisthenics and learned the playbook cold, but when the test came during an intrasquad scrimmage before a large crowd, his reflexes scattered and every play was botched. Along the way, the players came to like him and confide in him, partly because he took their skills as seriously as they did. Their descriptions of the intricacies of the various positions and their special moments of triumph are as authentic as only shoptalk can be. Said a player of the awesome Night Train Lane: "He's got pipes for legs, all bone, with just strings of muscle holding him together." Once, after being tackled, Y. A. Tittle "got off the ground and reeled back to the huddle and finally said, 'Christ, I don't . . , I can't think of any plays.' " Or the reticent Milt Plum, savoring a game-winning touchdown pass: "You pull off something like that, and there doesn't need to be anything else, ever." The armchair quarterback will readily agree --and be intensely jealous of Plimpton every page of the way.

Paper Lion is a rare publishing phenomenon: a successful sport book. It has sold nearly 50,000 copies, which makes it one of the few bestselling books on sport in the past two decades.

Doubtless the droves of football widows in search of Christmas gifts swelled the sales, but a better reason is that the book speaks eloquently to the nonfan as well.

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