Sandy Koufax Read online

  SANDY KOUFAX

  A Lefty’s Legacy

  JANE LEAVY

  For Nick and Emma

  Another time,

  I devised a left-hander

  Even more gifted

  Than Whitey Ford: a Dodger.

  People were amazed by him.

  Once, when he was young,

  He refused to pitch on Yom Kippur.

  —from “The Night Game,” by Robert Pinsky

  Contents

  EPIGRAPH

  PREFACE THE POET AND THE PITCHER

  1 WARMING UP

  2 THE PREGAME SHOW

  3 WHEN SANDY TOUCHED THE SKY

  4 THE FIRST INNING

  5 THE ACCIDENTAL PITCHER

  6 THE SECOND INNING

  7 THE GREENHORN

  8 THE THIRD INNING

  9 TO BE YOUNG AND WILD

  10 THE FOURTH INNING

  11 1961

  12 THE FIFTH INNING

  13 WHEN WE WERE YOUNG

  14 THE SIXTH INNING

  15 PULLING TEETH

  16 THE SEVENTH INNING

  17 KING OF THE JEWS

  18 THE EIGHTH INNING

  19 WARNING SHOT

  20 THE NINTH INNING

  21 SWEET SORROW

  EPILOGUE THE AFTERLIFE

  AFTERWORD THE PROBLEM WITH PAGE 111

  APPENDIX

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SEARCHABLE TERMS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE

  OTHER BOOKS BY JANE LEAVY

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  Preface

  THE POET AND THE PITCHER

  I DIDN’T GO TO THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS searching for Sandy Koufax.

  I went for a poetry reading, in support of a friend. Also, there was the promise of free food. Sportswriters will go anywhere for free food.

  I was just back from Fantasy Camp in Vero Beach, Florida, winter home of the Los Angeles Dodgers, where I first met Koufax and several of his former teammates. Clem Labine, an estimable pitcher in his own right, had tutored me in the physics of the Koufax curveball, explaining how he held the ball without his thumb, rolling it off his uncommonly long fingers with such velocity and spin that when the ball met the wind, the air cried.

  I was attempting to demonstrate the proper grip to my friend Jane Shore, a poet who had not yet recovered from seeing Mike Mussina beaned on the mound at Camden Yards. An unexpected enthusiast exclaimed, “Sandy Koufax? I devised Sandy Koufax.”

  Jane introduced me to Robert Pinsky, poet laureate of the United States. I was too unlettered to get his allusion and Pinsky was too polite to make a point of it. He turned to a student clutching a copy of his collected works and, borrowing the volume, opened it to page 86. “The Night Game” is a poem about sex and imagination, green grass and stadium lights that turn night into day. It is about the act of creation and new love, possibility. Koufax is not so much its subject as its solution. “The solution to an emotion,” Pinsky said.

  Once, when he was young, Pinsky saw Sandy Koufax pitch at Ebbets Field. He doesn’t remember much about the game. Just that it was night, that he sat along the third base line, that he knew who Koufax was. It was probably 1955, Sandy’s rookie year. Pinsky remembers the green of the grass and blue satin shimmering against the white flannel of Koufax’s shirt, and how the fabric wrinkled with exertion. He does not remember who won; whether Koufax started or relieved.

  Years later when Pinsky was teaching writing at the University of California at Berkeley, someone sent him a poster of Koufax pitching: a study in kinetic sculpture, midway through his delivery, coiled and balanced on his back leg, his foot the only point of contact with the earth.

  Pinsky hung the poster on his office door. In the arc and force of the pitcher’s motion, Pinsky saw everything he wanted his students to know about writing: balance and concentration; a supremely synchronized effort; the transfer of energy toward a single, elusive goal.

  Pinsky is a sturdy man with a square jaw, a poet whose father was a catcher for the Jewish Aces, a New Jersey barnstorming team. Surrounded by his fans, people who don’t confuse the poetry of baseball with iambic pentameter, he raised his arm above a tray of canapés, attempting to replicate the impossible angle of bone and ball just prior to release. “You can’t really do it,” he sighed, lowering his arm. “It was like a catapult. Elegance followed by violence.”

  I never saw Sandy Koufax pitch. My father, who grew up on Coogan’s Bluff rooting for the New York Giants, made me what I am today, a Yankee fan, by refusing to take me to Ebbets Field before the Dodgers left Brooklyn. I was probably the only Jewish kid in New York who didn’t root for Koufax. I rooted for the gentiles in the Bronx instead—a fate sealed by the proximity of my grandmother’s apartment to the House That Ruth Built. I watched the world series from the second floor ballroom of the Concourse Plaza Hotel during High Holiday services. I went to synagogue to pray the Yankees wouldn’t have to face Sandy Koufax.

  Though I was a devoted subscriber to Life magazine, I don’t remember seeing the August 1963 issue with him on the cover. It is an iconic, Norman Rockwell treatment. At age ten, I somehow failed to notice his importance. I was a Yankee fan first, a Jew second. I was assimilated. I did not feel compelled by Judaism to place him above baseball.

  Twenty years later, I was covering the U.S. Open tennis matches for the Washington Post on the High Holidays. Deadlines were tight. I remember feeling pressured and something else, a discomfort in my own skin. I remember thinking, “Sandy Koufax didn’t pitch on Yom Kippur.” I have not worked on the High Holidays since. Sandy Koufax had made himself at home in my soul.

  In this I am not alone.

  In Vero Beach, Florida, I met John Gentillon, a regular at Dodger Fantasy camp, who lived next door to him for a while in California. At a family reunion one day, forty of his tipsiest relatives, most of them female, spotted Koufax watering his trees and barreled down the hillside “like a herd of elephants, screeching, Sandee!” Gentillon was mortified. Koufax signed an autograph for each of them.

  In the suburbs of New York, I found David Saks, a camper at Camp Chi Wan Da in 1953, who has been having recurring dreams about his bunk counselor, Sandy Koufax, ever since. In his dreams he gets to ask Koufax what so many others have wondered: “How did you become that great? How did that happen?”

  In Manhattan, I met a woman named Shirley at the seventy-second anniversary gala of the Jewish Community House of Bensonhurst, where Koufax played on the 1951 National Jewish Welfare Board championship basketball team. A fleshy arm attached to a big voice and a firm grip took me by the wrist. “You would like, maybe, to create a Jewish memory?” I assured her I had plenty. “So why are you here?” Shirley said, disappointed. I explained my purpose, finding people who had known Koufax in Brooklyn. In an instant, she was dragging me across the ballroom, dodging vats of kosher dill pickles and mounds of chopped liver, bellowing at the top of her considerable lungs: “Anybody here know Sandee?”

  Everything stopped. Mel Goldfeder, the event chairman, stepped forward. While he couldn’t claim to know Koufax, they had spoken when Koufax telephoned his regrets. Goldfeder still hadn’t gotten over it. “He called me sir!”

  I have met Koufax collectors and Koufax “completionists.” In Washington, I was introduced to Michael Levett, whose youthful devotion to Koufax led to an adult passion for collecting the baseball card of every Jewish major-leaguer. (He has 128 of the 148 he covets.) In Philadelphia, I discovered Phil Paul, whose ambition is to acquire a ticket stub from each of Koufax’s 165 victories. So far, he’s got 107, including all four no-hitters, the world series games, the record strikeout performances, and two one-hitters. Stubs cost him anywhere from twenty to forty do
llars. A full ticket is double the price. “My Holy Grail, the one game I really need is his first win, August twenty-seventh, nineteen fifty-five,” Paul said. “There were only ten thousand people at Ebbets Field.” Paying customers that night: 7,204.

  On a mountaintop in Southern California, I met Buzzie Bavasi, former general manager of the Dodgers, in his study overlooking the Pacific. He’s retired from baseball, but not from storytelling. “In all my years in baseball, I never saved a thing,” he said. “About two years ago, I decided to get autographed balls from friends of mine, people I knew in the Hall of Fame. So I got twenty-two of them.” Among them: Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, Stan Musial, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron. “Somebody broke in here. What do you think they took? One ball. Sandy’s. I never laughed so much in my life.”

  A few hundred miles north, in a subdivision of Cape Cod townhouses in the outwash sprawl east of Los Angeles, I met Pete Bonfils, a former Dodger batboy, longtime batting practice pitcher, and present-day Koufax aficionado. In his study, he has a custom-made, glass-encased coffee table, eight feet square, built to house 132 batting practice balls. In his hard drive, he has a three-page catalogue of Koufax memorabilia he has assembled over the last thirty years: magazine covers and newspaper headlines, baseball scorecards and autographed glossies, a brick from Ebbets Field, a porcelain Koufax beer stein, a 1965 issue Volpe tumbler (“That’s a hundred-dollar glass right there—it’s never been used”), a Koufax photo tattoo, a 33 1/3 RPM recording of the “Last Inning, Sandy Koufax Perfect Game” (“Actual reproduction, as narrated by Vince Scully”), a Koufax money clip/nail file/pen knife, an autographed ticket stub from game one of the 1963 World Series, a 1981 “Official Minor League Photo Fact Card” of the Albuquerque Dukes with pitching coach Sandy Koufax in red and yellow team colors, every extant Koufax biography, juvenile and adult, forty-two Topps Koufax baseball cards, and a picture of Pete and his hero on the field at Dodger Stadium the day he was named batboy in 1969.

  Pete also has a mean, pink scar on his left shoulder, acquired in the process of trying to become Sandy Koufax. Growing up in Pasadena, Pete, a lefty, imagined himself as Koufax every time he took the mound. Eventually, the game surpassed his talent. He never got further than Class A ball. But he never outgrew his devotion to Koufax. “There seems to be a story on every guy. Ted Williams can be rude. Willie Mays too. These guys sell their souls. Koufax could sell his soul. He could make millions of dollars. He could do anything he wants. I don’t want to say he’s Jesus Christ walking on water but he has such an aura. He, like, glows.”

  Sandy Koufax pitched twelve seasons in the major leagues: six of them indifferent, six of belated brilliance. Five consecutive years, from 1962 through 1966, he led the National League in earned run average. (He is the only pitcher ever to do that.) Four times he led the National League in strikeouts. Three times, he won at least twenty-five games. Ninety-seven times, he struck out ten or more batters. He is one of five pitchers in major league history who pitched at least one thousand innings with more career strikeouts than innings pitched. His last year, pitching with a crippled, arthritic arm, he won twenty-seven games and completed as many. And he never missed a start. Then, abruptly, he was gone. “He was a meteor streaking across the heavens,” his friend and former roommate, Dick Tracewski, said.

  Thirty-six years have passed since he last threw a pitch in competition, yet you see him on the menu at Gallagher’s Steak House in New York, on the wall mural celebrating the history of the Jews outside Cantor’s Deli in Los Angeles, on a six-dollar stamp issued by St. Vincent and the Grenadines, on the canvases of the renowned Jewish painter R. J. Kitaj, and on the library shelves at the Washington Hebrew Congregation in Washington, D.C. The paperback biography, a quickie clip job published in 1968, was so well thumbed librarians had to put it between hard covers. It remains the most asked for book in the synagogue’s children’s collection.

  It was his childhood friend Fred Wilpon, owner of the New York Mets, who helped me understand why. Growing up with Sandy in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst, Wilpon was the star Koufax became. Sitting in his office high above New York’s Fifth Avenue nearly fifty years later, Wilpon challenged me to find “the defining differences” that mark Koufax’s career. And, he confided, in what sounded like an afterthought but felt like a benediction, “I think Sandy would never want to be remembered only by what he accomplished on the field. He may not admit it but he also stood for values that he thought were important.”

  What began as a search for a telephone number, an address, a way to apprise Koufax of my interest, soon became a search for those defining differences, and for the man within the myth. Of course, I also wanted to find him, which I did, finally, through Wilpon and Donald Fehr, executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association. I wasn’t home when Sandy called. The message he left aspired to tartness. “Hi, Ms. Leavy, this is Sandy, uh, Koufax.” The pause told me something I would come to know about the man: formality does not become him.

  “I don’t really have any interest in this project,” he continued. “But I’ll call you back.”

  Yeah, sure, right, I thought.

  The next day the phone rang. His voice is as smooth as his archetypal delivery. No hint of Brooklyn in the inflection. He had a well-taken—though erroneous—objection. He didn’t see how a person, me, could agree to write a book about another person, him, without informing the subject of her plan. In fact, I told him, I had yet to sign a contract because I hadn’t been able to contact him. Reaching him had taken four months.

  “Everybody has my telephone number,” he protested. “I haven’t changed it in twelve years.”

  “Yeah, well, not me.”

  “You want it?” he said.

  I reached for a pen. And started talking. I talked for close to an hour, afraid that if I shut up, he’d hang up. Or worse, say no, as he had to so many other aspiring authors. So I kept talking, explaining the premise for this book.

  Sports in the modern incarnation is a jungle—the name Jim Rome has given to his call-in radio show out of “SoCal” where “clones” wait on hold for hours in order to trade “takes” and “smack” in a guttural and debased competition for air time. It is impossible to imagine Koufax in the jungle. In virtually every way that matters, ethically and economically, medically and journalistically, he offers a way to measure where we’ve been, what we’ve come to, what we’ve lost. Just as he provided me, the grandchild of Jewish immigrants, with an unlikely barometer of my own assimilation into mainstream American culture, so he affords much-needed perspective on an industry in which a shortstop is paid $252 million, more than the gross national product of ten nations.

  A case in point. The first call I made, when I began reporting, was to the Major League Baseball Players Alumni Association, looking for old ballplayers who had a key at-bat, a good swing, a good story to tell. I was connected to Dan Foster, who considered my request, and then said: “Here’s what I want you to do. Write a letter to each of these individuals. Place his name in the center of a white envelope. Place your return address in the upper left-hand corner and a stamp in the upper right-hand corner. We will fill in the address. That way, if they choose to respond they can.”

  Koufax laughed when I told him the story. He got it. He remembers when you didn’t need FBI clearance to talk to a ballplayer and baseball was what you did until you grew up. The guys he played with pumped gas in the off-season. Duke Snider didn’t carry an attaché case. He delivered the mail.

  Koufax spans two distinct eras in baseball and in America. He epitomizes a time as distant as my childhood when presidents were believed and pitchers went nine innings; when $4,000 was a bonus; when the words “team” and “mates” could be used separately or in conjunction but always without irony; when a member of the 1955 World Champion Brooklyn Dodgers would go straight from Yankee Stadium to Columbia University after the seventh game of the world series. Admittedly, Koufax hadn’t played much that yea
r. He was a bonus baby kept on the roster only because the rules demanded it. Still, it is unimaginable to think of any of today’s multimillionaire benchwarmers showing up for class. I’m not sure which is more remarkable: that he was enrolled in school or that he asked the professor’s permission to leave early so he could attend the team party.

  Koufax is the sixties before the sixties became the sixties. He is celebrity before celebrity became an entitlement. He is hound’s-tooth, a crisp white shirt, and a skinny black tie held in place by a discreet gold tie tack. This is how he appears in that August 2, 1963, issue of Life, vastly handsome and inaccessible. It is a cover story that promises much and delivers nothing by today’s intrusive standards. No details, no revelations, except this: He built his own hi-fi! How easily satisfied we were.

  Koufax defined and distinguished himself by what he did on the baseball field and by what he refused to do. He challenged batters and stereotypes. On the evening of September 9, 1965, he pitched a perfect game against the Chicago Cubs. Less than a month later, he achieved another kind of perfection by refusing to pitch the opening game of the world series because it fell on the holiest day of the Jewish year.

  As a modern athlete, he stands resolutely with one spike in the “bonus-baby” fifties and the other on the cusp of the “free-agent” seventies. His joint holdout with Don Drysdale in 1966 was an unprecedented act of solidarity, a revolutionary act, received as heresy in a time of national rebellion. The insular world of baseball has never been the same.