A gentleman among players

I once played in something called the Writers’ World Cup. A lot of people in publishing (novelists, journalists, editors, agents) like to think that if their lives hadn’t been poisoned by books, they might have really made something of themselves — as ballplayers, among other things. This is probably one of the more pleasant delusions. The star of the tournament was a stocky bull-chested essayist who, rumour had it, used to play in some Hungarian minor league. Nobody could take the ball off him. Afterwards the writers got together in some theatre that the organisers had hired and talked for several hours in turns about the meaning of football. I guess this is what we were good at.

George Plimpton spent a large part of his writing career putting this delusion to the test. Yellow Jersey Press are reissuing several of his books of ‘participatory journalism’, as the phrase is — beginning with Out of My League, his brief experiment in major-league baseball, which gave him a taste for the whole enterprise.