When one thinks of George R.R. Martin, they think of magnificent castles, spurious knights, and political strife. Dressed in a fisherman’s cap and suspenders, one doesn’t immediately think of Martin as an avid fan of both the NFL and MLB. Yet, growing up in Bayonne, New Jersey, Martin was a huge fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers, now the New York Mets. He also follows NFL’s New York Jets and New York Giants every season.
When his schedule permits, the author finds time to sit down and catch up on his favorite team. Like his books are to fantasy readers, he finds an escape through sports, taking a break from work to blog about the ups and downs of the Giants’ season.
In an interview with two-time Super Bowl champion Chris Long, Martin retells the experiences that brought him to where he is today. The discussion leaves questions about Game of Thrones behind in place of a friendly conversation about some of the greatest moments in sports history. It also pulls the curtain back a bit on how he thinks as a writer.
This Skype interview is quite long, clocking in around 40 minutes, so we’ve broken it down into interesting chucks that pop up along the way. For example, the guys talk about another famous Bayonne, New Jersey native: Chuck Wepner, the inspiration for the movie Rocky. In real life, Wepner fought Muhammad Ali and lost. But he gave him a much better fight than people thought, which inspired Sylvester Stallone to write the script. “The very fact that they made a second one sort of undercut the first one, though,” mused Martin. “The whole point of it is Rocky realizes that he’s just not good enough to beat Apollo Creed, but he’s gonna go 15 rounds with him, which nobody else has ever done. And that was basically the Chuck Wepner story.”
Martin appreciates the underdog story, but he also loved the realism. Likewise, the Starks were certainly underdogs, and they gave the Lannisters a better fight than anyone thought possible, but in the end they still suffered defeat.
And that brings us to another underdog Martin loves:
I’ve been a Giants fan for a long, long time. And the Giants’ two Super Bowl wins in recent memory. They were both amazing over the Patriots. And we were huge underdogs in both of those games, which made the win so much sweeter.
Martin’s love for the Giants even finds its way onto the pages of A Song of Ice and Fire. In a passage from A Dance with Dragons, George sneaks in a subtle jab at head coach Bill Belichick by referencing the shocking defeat of the undefeated Patriots by the dark horse New York Giants years ago. “The galley was also where the ship’s books were kept… the fourth and final volume of The Life of the Triarch Belicho, a famous Volantene patriot whose unbroken succession of conquests and triumphs ended rather abruptly when he was eaten by giants.”
And the football references in Song of Ice and Fire don’t stop there. After losing a bet to a friend and Cowboys fan, he put the guy into the books: look out for Ser Patrek, who has a blue shield with a silver star, the emblem of the Cowboys. Ser Patrek, naturally, is killed by a giant named Wun Wun, who is most likely a reference to Giants player Phil Simms, who wore #11.
Elsewhere in the interview, Martin talked about the childhood circumstances that sparked his creativity:
My creativity was spurred by Bayonne. Um, we were poor through most of my childhood… we never went anywhere, we didn’t own a car. We didn’t go to vacation down in Jersey Shore like some of my friends. I just stayed in my apartment. But I had books. I could see the world with books. I could go to a Paris or a London on historical levels. I could go to Mars with Edgar Rice Burroughs, or to Middle Earth with J.R.R. Tolkien, or The Hyborian Age, Robert E. Howard. And so, even though my borough was five blocks long in the real world, through comic books (I love comic books as well, Batman, Spiderman, you know, Gotham City and Metropolis. And all that stuff.) I got to visit some pretty amazing places in my imagination. And then, very early, I started making up my own stories. You know, sort of mixing these places that I’ve read about with things that I made up entirely.
As for specifics, the origins of Martin’s fantasy stories begin with…turtles. “Living in the projects, we were not allowed to have dogs or cats,” he explained. “They were prohibited in the public housing that we lived at. So, the only pets that I could have as a kid were, you know, like fish, tropical fish. We could have goldfish and guppies and stuff like that. And we got these little turtles, red-eared turtles, the dime-store turtles. You got them at Woolworth’s and Kresge’s. They came in a little plastic bowl with a palm tree in the middle. And half of it was gravel and half of it was water. And they sold you turtle food to feed them. And it happened that two of those plastic bowls fit exactly in this toy-castle I had. So, I could put the two plastic bowls in the courtyard of this toy-castle that was right by my window. So, that’s where I kept them. And since they lived in a castle, and all of that stuff.”
But I don’t think the turtle food that they gave you, when you bought the turtles, was the healthiest thing. Because these turtles died very easily. And I was a kid so I needed an explanation for this. I wasn’t sophisticated enough to blame the crummy turtle food they gave me. So I decided that the turtles were competing for the crown. And when one of the turtles died, they must’ve been killed by the other three turtles. And I started writing this whole story about, you know, this king the was killed by that king — And then somebody else took the crown and all that. So, my first epic fantasy was “Turtle Castle.”
And that’s the closest thing society has to a cross between Game of Thrones and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Hidden within the interview is the tale of how George R.R. Martin’s career might have taken a completely different turn. The author is famous for his fantasy stories, but he has always had a great passion for science fiction and comic books. In fact, he almost landed a job at Marvel Comics itself.
I actually started writing stories about superheroes when I was in high school, for comic book fanzines, you know. I wasn’t paid anything for them. But I wrote my stories and I sent them in. And they were published and people liked them. Which was very important to me because it gave me a lot of confidence. I published a story and people are saying it was good. So, that was very encouraging to me. And of course, the first stuff of mine ever published in a professional publication, were letters to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and the Fantastic Four and Spiderman and The Avengers, and they published my letters to the editor.
In 1971, when I got out of Northwestern University, I got a bachelor’s and a master’s in journalism and I was looking for a job. One of the places I applied was Marvel Comics. But sadly, they didn’t hire me. They brought me in for an interview cause I was fairly well-known within the little world of comics fandom because of all my amateur stories. But, they had a full writing staff and they didn’t need anyone else. But I often thought, “Well, how would my life had been different if they had hired me.” And it would’ve been very different. I think I would’ve probably made up a lot of superheroes and supervillians. I would’ve had a career like, maybe my friend Len Wein, who created Wolverine and the new X-Men and Swamp Thing. Or Marv Wolfman or Gerry Conway or some of the other people who broke in that. I could’ve had that sort of career.
But I think it’s probably better the way it turned out. One of the things, if you wrote for Marvel or DC then, they owned everything you created. So you know, Len as brilliant as he was, never received any money for Wolverine. Despite all the giant moves made. Everything was owned, you worked for a salary. You worked for paid rates and everything you got was owned by the company. I think it’s better these days. You know, comics have changed a lot since the ’60s and ’70s. So, creators have a lot more rights and they have a lot more ownership with the properties that they create.
I’m glad that my career went the way it did. And that I’m able to, you know, have “Game of Thrones” and I have “A Song of Ice and Fire,” and all the other things I create, too. And my pension to my love for superheroes does have a way of expressing itself into Wild Card books.
Could you imagine some of the superheroes Martin would have come up with? Scary to think, but in that alternate reality, Thanos probably won in Endgame.
It’s always nice to see Martin enjoying a life beyond his fantasy. The fame of his series must weigh on him, and viewers can tell in this interview how relaxed Martin is. We just hope he isn’t too relaxed, there’s still a lot of work to be done.
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