To the Editor:
I was so fascinated by Brian Glanville’s review of Paper Lion [October] that I turned back to the cover of your magazine to verify it as COMMENTARY. . . . After reading, “Half the excitement of his [Plimpton’s] Mitty-like participation in practice matches and the public ‘scrimmage’ [sic! the quotation marks, that is] lies in the frisson [sic! the word! that is] of physical risk,” I was absolutely certain it was the Times Literary Supplement I was reading. . . .
Now, having become an appassionato of this review, I learned who “the greatest footballer in the world” was, how “Tommy Law-ton’s arrival at Everton” took place, and about “Dixie Dean, the Babe Ruth of his era, a prolific goal scorer.” Lawton’? Everton? DIXIE Dean? Babe Ruth and goals?! As passionate an appassionato as is passably permissible by now, I went on to learn that “American football seems, like so many American folk-phenomena [wow!], hung-up . . . on violence and a doubtful concept of masculinity.” With that, I was completely hung-up. Then I learned that Plimpton’s writing is “inevitably diminished” by his “wisecracks with the players” at the “jockstrap level.” Thinking that over, I went and burned my athletic supporter.
I believe Brian Glanville to be about “five feet eight inches, and 150 pounds” (or 172.72 centimetres, and 10 stone 17/100 (pebbles?)). I also believe Glanville is a jolly good fellow. He has to be. Only a jolly good fellow would quote DIXIE Dean’s words to Tommy Lawton, that one fateful day at Everton, wherein the latter was being transferred, not en masse, to the “ground staff” of a club as an apprentice professional because he was gifted, “You’ve come to take my place, son. Good luck.” ANY “infant prodigy of a center-forward” would recognize that!
May I expect, in the next issue of COMMENTARY, a review of Norman O. Brown’s writings by Zsa Zsa Gabor?
Mitchell Wojtycki
Chicago, Illinois
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To the Editor:
I am puzzled as to why an un-uninformed Britisher should be allowed to comment critically on our games. From beginning to end, he reflected basic prejudices and abysmal ignorance of both football and baseball. When he condemns football as a game as a result of reading George Plimpton’s tongue-in-cheek account of a one-game experience with the Detroit Lions, he ignores entirely the sport as played in our schools and colleges. Professional football is not the same game, and generalizations would not be drawn by anyone who understood what goes on.
In confessing that he is “an appassionato of soccer,” he reveals why he cannot fathom our enthusiasm for football. Comparing the two is as futile as saying that one prefers pinochle to chess. Glanville is insufferably condescending. . . .
Philip Marson
Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
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Mr. Glanville writes:
Would that I were as uninformed about football in the schools and colleges of America as Mr. Marson supposes. Alas, I am all too well aware of the corrupt anomaly of the athletic scholarship, the sham-amateurism of the college footballer, paid out of the college “slush fund,” the morbid insistence, among alumni, of success on the gridiron. I am aware of such incidents as the “gang bang,” perpetrated on a girl student by the members of a famous Midwest college football team some years ago, whose sequel was the expulsion from the university of . . . the girl. I am aware of the quasi-religious hysteria prevailing in high school football in such cities as Miami. Professional football may not be “the same game,” but it is a manifest extension of it. Where but at the college does it recruit its players? I agree that the direct comparison between soccer and American football is futile, but an examination of their respective mores and attitudes is pertinent and suggestive.
I am sorry that Mr. Wojtycki—a Notre Dame footballer himself?—burned his athletic supporter; one has visions of the auto da fé of a drum majorette. He is mistaken, however, when he guesses my height and weight. True, I still regularly play soccer myself, but I stand five feet, eleven and a half inches, and I weigh 184 pounds (not dollars).
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