NY, Sept 30: George Plimpton, the self-deprecating author of Paper Lion and a patron to Philip Roth, Jack Kerouac and countless other writers, has died. He was 76.
Plimpton died Thursday night at his Manhattan apartment, his longtime friend, restaurateur Elaine Kaufman, said Friday. She had no information on the cause.
"I saw him the other day. He was full of energy," said Kaufman, who said she had known Plimpton for 40 years. "He was talking about a trip he took with his family to the tip of South America." Said author John Updike, a longtime friend: "My goodness, he was so vital, full of fun."
Praised as a "central figure in American letters" when inducted in 2002 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Plimpton also enjoyed a lifetime of making literature out of non-literary pursuits. He boxed with Archie Moore, pitched to Willie Mays and performed as a trapeze artist for the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus. He acted in numerous films, including Reds and Good Will Hunting. He even appeared in an episode of The Simpsons, playing a professor who runs a spelling bee.
A native of New York, Plimpton held the parallel identities of insider and outsider. He was born into society -- diplomat's son -- and spoke in an upper-class accent worthy of a Harvard man. But the public knew him better as an amiable underdog, stumbling amid the feet of the giants of sports and other professions. Much of his career served as a send-up of Hemingway's famous credo: "Grace Under Pressure."
Starting in the 1950s, when he began his vocation as a "participatory" journalist, he practiced the singular art of narrating panic. In a culture where millions fantasized about being movie stars or sports heroes, the lanky, wavy-haired Plimpton dared to enter the arena himself, with results both comic and instructive. In Paper Lion, he documented his time training with the Detroit Lions in 1963. Allowed briefly to play quarterback, he remembered the crowd cheering as he left the field after a series of mishaps.

"I thought about the applause afterward. Some of it was, perhaps, in appreciation of the lunacy of my participation and for the fortitude it took to do it," he wrote, "but most of it, even if subconscious, I decided was in relief that I had done as badly as I had.

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"It verified the assumption that the average fan would have about an amateur blundering into the brutal world of professional football. He would get slaughtered. ... The outsider did not belong, and there was comfort in that being proved."

His other books included Bogey Man, Out of My League and Shadow Box. Plimpton could also take credit for at least one memorable fictional character: Sidd Finch, a baseball pitcher of unprecedented gifts (168 mph {270 kph} fastball) and unlikely background (reared in the mountains of Tibet) portrayed so vividly by Plimpton in a 1985 Sports Illustrated article that many believed he existed.

Bureau Report