Mad Ducks and Bears by George Plimpton

Author:George Plimpton [Plimpton, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

How often do Karras and Gordy come and see you?” a friend asked.

“Oh, every once in a while.”

“Jesus, it must be great to sit there and listen in on those people talking about football. Jesus!” He was a tremendous fan. “You must be getting all this great stuff.”

“The best thing is how funny they are,” I said.

“Funny?”

He looked at me in surprise, as if the word were inappropriate. He seemed miffed.

Humor has always been a major and somewhat neglected constant in professional sports—perhaps not a particularly high quality of humor, but pervasive, though not much discussed or written about since the popular view of professional football is that it is what my friend imagines—largely a grim, dedicated business.

Yet the humor was everywhere—in the good stories one heard, in the quick ripostes and the one-liners, the constant joshing and put-downs, invariably bawdy and raucous—all of it a hedge against the boredom and regimen. True, the most elaborate level of the humor was often the practical joke, considered a lowly form in most societies.

Authorities consider the Americans the world’s greatest experts at the practical joke, with the English a close second, the French a distant third, and no one else at all in the running. Latins are psychologically ill-equipped to perpetuate practical jokes, though they are splendid victims since an essential ingredient is the ability to imagine rather than witness the joke’s denouement. The American sense of detachment is more constituted to this. For example, an American can crate up a large barber chair and send it to a family in Malaya, say, with no return address or sender’s card—and sit back in his bath and bask in imagining the puzzlement of the family halfway around the world as the barber chair emerges slowly from its wrappings. The Latin, on the other hand, is too impatient to let his imagination satisfy him. He wants to be on hand to witness what is going on, and if he could, he would surely fly to Malaya to caper around in the flower beds outside the house, chinning himself so he can peer in over the windowsill to watch the chair being unpacked and to check the reactions of the bewildered family.

Of course the foremost perpetrator of practical jokes on the Lions was Alex Karras. But the odd quality of his tomfoolery was that it was marked by a strong Latin flavor. He was intensely curious about the effect of the joke on his victims, and also, I think, he was self-centered enough to wish to indicate publicly that he was the joke’s author, which is not at all in the spirit of the true American prank.

For example, I remember Karras at the motel where Detroit stayed when they came to San Francisco to play the 49ers—lying prostrate on the bed yawning, and then reaching for the phone and asking for John North’s room. North was the offensive end coach, a dedicated man with an abbreviated sense of suspicion, a fine dupe for someone of Karras’s deviousness.

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