Throwback (short story)
"Throwback" is a classic science fiction short story featuring atavism by L. Sprague de Camp. It was first published in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction for March 1949. It first appeared in book form in the collection A Gun for Dinosaur and Other Imaginative Tales ; it later appeared in the anthology Apeman, Spaceman. The story has been translated into Italian and German.
Plot summary
Football scout Oliver Grogan is looking for recruits for the Chicago Wolves, but his efforts are unsuccessful. Accepting an invitation from Professor Frybus to visit a reservation for Gigantanths, he sees possibilities. The Gigantanths are the result of a multi-generational back-breeding experiment to recover prehistoric genetic traits. The result has been a race of giants of limited intelligence, who have had to be segregated for their own protection.Encountering an exceptionally bright giant named George Ethelbert, Grogan pitches him to consider a football career. The massive, nine-foot tall George would prefer to be an artist, so Grogan dangles the lure of paying for his art lessons. The giant agrees, and is spirited off to Chicago for training. George takes naturally to the game, and in his first game is easily taking out the rival Dallas Wildcats until they call foul and refuse to play. In response, the football league bans Gigantanths from the game.
Grogan, broke and ruined, tries to renege on his agreement with George, only to find the giant cannier than he seems, and with a lawyer to back him. Stymied, Grogan attempts to skip town with team funds, forcing his former protégé to enforce their deal in a more physical fashion.
Scientific basis
De Camp based his Gigantanths on the fossil species Gigantopithecus, then called Gigantanthropus and theorized to be a human ancestor. This interpretation is now outdated. As de Camp himself noted in 1973, "ccording to an article in the Scientific American for January 1970, the huge fossil primate... is not now considered, as it was at first, a carnivore, is now thought to have been a gramnivore is no longer deemed partly ancestral to man but much closer to the gorilla, probably resembling a gorilla 9 feet tall when standing erect, and weighing circa 600 pounds. And Pop! goes the assumption of my story 'Throwback'!"Reception
P. Schuyler Miller, commenting on the story, notes that it "plays with the possibilities of back-breeding people to recreate our pre-Sapiens forebears—in this case a well-meaning Gigantanthropus who gets a short-lived job in pro-football."Avram Davidson found the story among most others in A Gun for Dinosaur and Other Imaginative Tales "a great disappointment," feeling the author "ime after time... gets hold of a great idea—and throws it away in playing for laughs of the feeblest conceivable sort."