Shadow Box: An Amateur in the Ring

by George Plimpton, Mike Lupica Narrated by Jeff Bottoms

Overview

George Plimpton makes his riskiest foray into participatory journalism -- stepping into the ring against a champion boxer -- in Shadow Box, repackaged and including never-before-seen content from the Plimpton archives.

Stepping into the ring against light-heavyweight champion Archie Moore, George Plimpton pauses to wonder what ever induced him to become a participatory journalist. Bloodied but unbowed, he holds his own in the bout -- and lives to tell, in this timeless book on boxing and its devotees, among them Ali, Joe Frazier, Ernest Hemingway, and Norman Mailer.

Shadow Box is one of Plimpton's most engaging studies of professional sport, told through the eyes of an inquisitive and astute amateur. From the gym, the locker room, ringside, and even in the harsh glare of the ring itself, Plimpton documents what it is like to be a boxer, an artist of mayhem.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The writer/journalist in the worlds of professional sports. (Oct.)

Library Journal

Initially reviewed in LJ 12/1/68, LJ 11/1/73, LJ 4/1/61, and LJ 9/15/77, respectively, Plimpton's volumes strove to offer the inside world of pro football, baseball, boxing, and golf to the average individual, not through mere observation but by personal participation. All armchair athletes dreaming of glory from the comfort of their recliners will enjoy Plimpton's popular forays into the world of professional sports.

From the Publisher

"Excellent sports reporting. The chapters on Muhammad Ali are delightful, and Ali is not easy to write about."—Time

"A delight—more entertaining, if possible, than I remembered... the reader leaves George Plimpton's wide world of sports with deep reluctance.... His prose is as elegant and seemingly effortless as Ted Williams's swing or an Arnold Palmer iron shot.... His teammates recede—like the old baseball players vanishing into the cornfield in Field of Dreams, taking their magical world with them but living on in fond memory."—Edward Kosner, Wall Street Journal

"Sports memoirs, like humor collections, rarely outlive their authors, but Plimpton's books have aged gracefully and even matured. Today they have the additional (and unintended) appeal of vivid history, bearing witness to a mythical era."—Nathaniel Rich, New York Review of Books

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170322404
Publisher:	Hachette Audio
Publication date:	04/26/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

I had two months in which to get a quite questionable apparatus ready for the confrontation with Archie Moore. I am not properly constituted to fight. I am built rather like a bird of the stitllike wader —the avocets, limpkins and herons. Since boyhood my arms have remained sticklike: I can slide my watch up my arm to the elbow. I have a thin somewhat fragile nose that bleeds easily. Once, in my military days, I brought up my hand in a smart salute which banged the tip of my nostrils and started a  nosebleed there in the ranks, like a drop at a shot bird's beak, before it fell to the dust of the parade ground.

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