Plimpton - Shadow Box

M y fondest memory of George Plimpton came at an annual charity softball game at Herrick Park in East Hampton, N.Y., the Artists and Writers game. It involves a simple line-drive single to the outfield. That might not sound like much. Trust me, it was. So often with moments like it, you had to be there.

And in the end, isnt that the best thing about sports? The best moments get burned into our memories, and imaginations, and even our hearts, and then stay there forever. George understood that as well as anyone Ive ever known. Its why he played the game.

He was a brilliant writer and editor and patron of the arts and actor and character and friend. Maybe his truest and most lasting genius was simply being George Plimpton. He became famous for writing sports books, like this one and Paper Lion and The Bogey Man and Open Net, books in which he stoodand stood infor all of us, by actually getting into the ring; by getting into the game. There was even the time when he put one over on all of us, in as famous a Sports Illustrated piece as anybody has ever written, by inventing a gifted oddball baseball player named Sidd Finch, and convincing the whole world that Sidd was real.

But there was this one Saturday afternoon in August, not so terribly long before the world was diminished so mightily by Georges passing, when I was reminded of how much he really did love being a jock. How much he really did love being in the game.

The Artists and Writers game is a fine tradition that began in another time in the Hamptons, and somehow has survived time and traffic and the hedge-funders clich that the South Fork of eastern Long Island has become. Two weeks before Labor Day, a bunch of us still get together and raise money for worthwhile local charities, and enjoy the fellowship of the occasion, on a softball field behind a Waldbaums market. What the day has always been, truly, is a town meeting of softball, an end-of-summer tradition that was somehow in place before $50 quarts of lobster salad.

George was in the game and on the Writers team long before I joined the team in the early 1980s. But then he had so much history in this part of the world, including his annual Fourth of July fireworks party. The fireworks display, as you can imagine, was big. Everything George did was big.

We didnt know he was going to show up that day in 2000. He just did. I was thrilled to see him. Everybody was. From the time I first met him, when I was in college in Boston and writing for the Boston Phoenix and we sat together in the bleachers at Fenway Park one afternoon, he had made any trip to the ballpark better. He was about to do it again.

He was greeted like a rock star by players from both teams, and by the people in the crowd, so many of whom had shown up to see some of the singers and actors who so often would end up on the Artists team. The late, great Roy Scheider was their starting pitcher for years and years. One year Paul Simon knocked in the late Christopher Reeve with the winning run in the bottom of the 9th. But the fans sure knew who George Plimpton was. They knew he was a star. I had known since the first time I had ever read him as a kid.

I forget what inning Ken Auletta, our captain, sent him up to hit. My recollection is that it was early, because George said he couldnt stay for the whole game. I hadnt seen him in a few years, and could tell that he had aged, and was moving slowly. But he was, by God, going to get at least one more swing in the Artists and Writers game. And if he put the ball in play, Ken wanted me to run for him.

If you were Georges age, or had some kind of injury, or simply hadnt played softball for a long time, tradition would give you a runner, and sometimes from home to first. The runner would take a spot behind the catcher, to make it fair for the guys in the field if the batter actually did put the ball in play.