Books: Antic Imposter

THE BOGEY MAN by George Plimpton. 306 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.

In a New Yorker cartoon, a horrified patient looks up from the operating table and asks the masked doctor, “How do I know you’re not George Plimpton?” How, indeed? The author of Paper Lion and Out of My League has played as a bumbling quarterback for the Detroit Lions and performed as an inexpert pitcher in Yankee Stadium.

The tall lanky editor of the Paris Review has also offered up his body for three boxing rounds against Archie Moore, suffered humiliation across the tennis net from Pancho Gonzales, floundered in the watery wake of Swimmer Don Schollander, lost at bridge to Oswald Jacoby, and banged percussion instruments with the New York Philharmonic. He is, in effect, the actor of the average man’s Walter Mitty dreams—the real-life agent of vicarious thrills. And now, in The Bogey Man, Plimpton records the humorous agonies of his experience as a mock-professional golfer.

A Shank! As part of a series of articles for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, Plimpton set out to play in three tournaments against such golfing greats as Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. What happens to him in the process shouldn’t happen to a golf ball. His nerve synapses collapse at the thought of the next day’s match. His mind invents a nightmarish fantasy in which a team of inept Japanese admirals, located somewhere in his brain, shout useless instructions through the imaginary voice tubes of his creaking body machinery in an effort to help him hit the ball correctly:

“The whole apparatus, bent on hitting a golf ball smartly, tips and convolutes and lunges, the Japanese admirals clutching each other for support in the main control center up in the head as the structure rocks and creaks. And when the golf shot is on its way the navymen get to their feet and peer out through the eyes and report: ‘A shank! A shank! My God, we’ve hit another shank!’ ”

Lefty’s Fury. Plimpton spends his nights talking over golf lore with other tour members and reads an extensive list of golf books, all of which only confuse him more but give the reader comic insights into this special form of sportsworld hysteria. There are tales about golfers attacked by rams on the course, golfers breaking their legs after mighty swings, distance records for balls rebounding off caddies’ heads, and the inevitable stories about the golfer’s rage. Some golfers knock themselves out in their anger at a missed shot. Some punish their clubs, threatening to drown them or actually torturing them. Some, like the famed Lefty Stackhouse, spend their fury on the nearest object:

“One day, after a frustrating round, he demolished the Model-T Ford in which he traveled to and from tournaments, scaling the windshield off in one direction, a car door in another, the seats, and then he opened up the hood and went to work on the engine, shouting imprecations as he did so.”

Plimpton, a fine writer, tells it with the same witty style that made his Paper Lion such a success. However, golf is not basically a team sport, and the nature of the golfing beast is such that his personality must remain submerged if he is to maintain his concentration on the course. Consequently, Plimpton never really has the opportunity to make the scenes as dramatic as they were in his experience with the Detroit Lions. But he has probably provided as funny a golf book as could be written. And if he does not succeed in being a great imposter, he is always an antic one.