Six Degrees of Webster

Pittsburgh is unique among the cities I’ve visited or lived in, in that it has a surprising number of homeless literati-lookalikes. While running through Schenley Park last summer, I saw the homeless Samuel Beckett sitting on a bench, his creased and weary hatchet face staring off across the tennis courts. I wasn’t aware of the writer Richard Yates, but a recent photo reminded me vividly of a man I see often around Squirrel Hill, frequently talking to himself. There’s a woman I sometimes see muttering on the street with the same vivid white skunk-stripe that cut across Susan Sontag’s hair.

But there is a special place in my personal pantheon for the George Plimpton of bums. He has the grayish-white hair, patrician face and carriage of the late George Plimpton, editor of The Paris Review and author of such gonzo sports journalism works as Paper Lion and The Bogey Man. He is shorter, though, a little stouter, and in general doesn’t seem to be in as bright a mood as Plimpton often broadcast to the world. I see him in my neighborhood and in Oakland, where Pitt is, haunting coffee shops, Subways, or standing on street corners, waiting patiently to cross but appearing to have no destination in mind.

It happens that I’m in the middle of Paper Lion, for which Plimpton spent training camp with the Detroit Lions as their “last-string quarterback,” and which is great so far. Earlier this week, I was reading it in a coffee shop and, looking up, noticed that the George Plimpton of bums was sitting twenty or so feet away. Perhaps because of the coincidence, I was attuned to all the other ones–even if they were only coincidental within the framework of my life and experience–that popped up as I continued reading.

Plimpton spoke at length to defensive back Dick LeBeau of the Detroit Lions, now retired and a defensive coordinator for . . . the Pittsburgh Steelers. The year that Plimpton went to training camp with the Lions, their other great defensive back, Alex Karras, was suspended for the season (for gambling). Although Plimpton only spoke to him later on, Karras looms as a kind of shadow over the book, with then-current players recalling anecdotes about Karras’s meal-time theatricality, his exaggerated responses to practical jokes, and his ballerina-like agility on the field.

Reading about Karras’s theatrical abilities and hammish tendencies was a bit weird because Karras would go on to have something of an acting career, probably more of one than Plimpton had. Most notable in Karras’s resume, of course, is the TV series Webster, where Karras played former football great George Papadopolis (whose name is weirdly similar to that of a former Greek dictator), who’s stuck raising Webster, a minuscule, insufferably cute black orphan played by Emmanuel Lewis.

Rather than distracting me from Plimpton’s day-by-day account of football camp with the Lions, all this extra-textual stuff has made the reading really fun and a lot weirder than Plimpton probably intended the book when he wrote it forty or so years ago.

(Post-script: I might be wrong about Webster being Karras’s most notable role: I just learned he also had a small role in Porky’s. Let’s call that a toss-up.)