Plimping for Fun

By John Skow

SHADOW BOX by George Plimpton Putnam; 351 pages; $9.95

Should the verb be "to plimp"? The participatory journalism of such books as Out of My League and Paper Lion, in which the amateur ventures lamblike among the wolves of professional sport--and then writes about how it feels to be a lamb chop--is unique to George Plimpton. Others have sedulously aped his ideas and style, but the author remains an original: a leaning tower of self-respect, plimping all the way to the showers.

His newest chronicle of utter failure recalls an adventure that occurred in 1959 when Plimpton, now 50 and frail, was 31 and frail. Friends had goaded him with the mischievous argument that if he was really serious about participatory journalism, he should fight a professional boxer. There was a nice, traditional quality to the idea. Hemingway had gone many rounds with pugs, and Journalist Paul Gallico once had his fillings loosened by Jack Dempsey.

So Plimpton persuaded Archie Moore, then light-heavyweight champion, to box with him, the results to be set down in a SPORTS ILLUSTRATED article. Plimpton found a trainer named George Brown. "I had been introduced to him by Ernest Hemingway, who always spoke of him with highest regard--as a boxer who could have been a champion if he had been able to accept the idea that he was going to be hit once in a while."

Brown told Plimpton that it was O.K. to shadowbox at a professional gym, like Stillman's, but he should get out of the ring immediately if anyone else got in. "Those guys'll hit anything moving," the author was warned, "the timekeeper, if he got in there; a handyman sent in to check the ring posts; anybody. And as for a writer, those guys'd smack a writer on the beak just to see what would happen." Plimpton sparred without disaster at the Racquet Club and studied a boxing manual he found in the library there, dated 1807. In time. Brown took loudly to calling Plimpton a "tiger," an example of untruth in advertising.

The fight itself was sedate. Moore, known as the "Mongoose," seemed puzzled, perhaps because one of the tiger's friends had told him that Plimpton was a former intercollegiate champion with a murderous hook and a savage nature. The contest lasted for two three-minute rounds and one two-minute round, the last one truncated by the thoughtful Brown, who pushed the hand of the timing clock with his finger.

Plimpton was rewarded with a bloody nose and a story. But an eight-minute fight cannot be spun out for more than a few chapters, and most of Shadow Box is more or less conventional, and excellent, sports reporting. The chapters on Muhammad Ali are delightful, and Ali is not easy to write about, as Wilfrid Sheed and Norman Mailer have amply proved.

Shadow Box is filled with anecdota.

After his fight with Moore, for instance, the author heard that the Duchess d'Uzes was delivered to the door of Stillman's Gym in a Rolls-Royce. "She paused at the turnstile, a lovely, graceful girl who always wore long light-blue chiffon to set off her golden hair. She peered into the gloom. 'Where's everybody?' she called . . . Lou Stillman approached. I don't know if he produced one of his in finitesimal spittles. Let us say he cleared his throat. 'Everybody is not here,' he said." Such stories have been unavailable since the days of A.J. Liebling's The Sweet Science. They explain why plimping is restricted to one man. -- John Skow

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