Paper Lion: Confessions of a Last-String Quarterback (edition 2006)

Written in the mid-1960s when professional football was only 40 years old and football organizations operated more loosely, "Paper Lion" is the story of George Plimpton's excursion into the world of quarterbacking. Plimpton trains as a quarterback and is allowed to run a series of five (disastrous) plays in an intra-squad exhibition. Yes, football was a business, but it was still fun.

The sense of fun is woven throughout the book, with Plimpton telling many stories of high-jinks and hanging out with the other players, talking, singing, playing cards, and pranks. In discussing coaches, he focuses on how each coach's character is revealed by how he plays cards.

Throughout the book, there are tips from top players of the time. Plimpton covers quarterbacking, defensive safety, and playing on the line.

Plimpton is a keen observer of human quirks and uses them to bring people to life on the written page. He has a light, breezy style, which makes this a fun book to read.

Readable and enjoyable tale of a geeks adventure into jockland- before the apothoesized themselves. Things in sports were better then, and this book is a fine example of the difference. ( )

Excellent writing about being a outsider in the Detroit Lions camp. One of Plimpton's earliest and best examples of participatory sports journalism. ( )

Forty-five NFL seasons have passed since writer George Plimpton convinced the Detroit Lions to let him experience the NFL, firsthand, as a last-string quarterback. In addition to fluid writing, gallows humor, and unconventional journalism, this classic offers an irresistible portrait of professional football was a game, not an industry.
Plimpton’s takes us inside a smoking, drinking NFL where plays are improvised in the huddle and America’s best athletes network for summer jobs. Whether you’re a football fan or not, ‘Paper Lion’ will be a Sunday afternoon well-spent. ( )

Hopefully there is a worthy biography of the late George Plimpton coming soon but in the meantime, the Paper Lion is a great place to start. Alan Alda played Plimpton in the movie adaptation of this book and that should give you some sense of its humor and playfulness. It is a very enjoyable read and evokes a different time (the pre-radical 60's), place (NYC, etc.), lifestyle (Ivy League "preppie" before the word preppie entered the larger lexicon) and era in professional sports (pre-tattoo, dreadlocks and the need for drug tests). Plimpton, who was very slight and not overly athletic, eventually had a series of these books where he put himself in the midst of large, skilled professional athletes with predictable results. He was looking for a good story and hoping to come out alive - he achieved both. If you enjoy humor and have even a mild interest in sports, you will like this book very much. ( )

This interesting tale of the writer who joins the Detroit Lions for preseason training is a bit dated now. George Plimpton writes about his experiences in the training camp, mainly as the "last string quarterback," but also his attempts to learn other positions. Most of the book consists of descriptions of the other players and how they interact with each other: the hazing of the rookies, for example.

I'm not a fan of football, and know next to nothing about football in the late 1950s or early 1960s (with which this book is primarily concerned), so a lot of the information was probably lost on me. I didn't recognize the players' or coaches' names and I didn't get the references to big plays of the past. I read the book because I had heard of it as a classic in the genre of sports writing and I wanted to find out more. The writing was very good; I just didn't understand the football. The idea of an ordinary guy trying out for the professional football team has some appeal, though it seems completely ludicrous, and that's pretty much what Plimpton discovers: he isn't nearly as good as he would need to be to make the team at any position.

The other interesting aspect of the book (aside from the juicy football gossip) was the glimpse into a time gone by. The summer of Plimpton's experiment was long before I was born, so I was curious to find out how people (at least professional football players) lived then. The picture I saw was more working class, more urban, and simpler than my own life today. The players drink a lot of beer, they go to dance halls in the evening and practice actual dance steps together, they play cards, they do isometric exercises and there is no discussion of weight lifting or jogging, and they avoid milk and other foods that are bad for the "wind," whatever that means. In the off-season, they have regular jobs because football doesn't pay much. They drive beat up old cars and they are always one bad game away from being off the team. In fact, most of the professional teams do not even have their own stadiums to play in: the Lions played in Tiger Stadium, for example!

In summary, I think a sports fan, especially a football fan, would get a lot more enjoyment out of this book than I did. ( )

A talented journalist joins the Detroit Lions to get get a greater insight into what it is to be a professional American football player. Some amusing moments because of his ineptitude.

This was a top class team dominanting their opponents, so they wangled an agreement that if they got a big enough lead they could put George in as a last string quaterback.

Top quality sportswriting work here. ( )