Sandy Koufax Read online

  After that season, he quit. He could still pitch but he could no longer straighten his left arm. He could not envision a whole life without being whole. Quitting was an act of imagination and emancipation. It required the ability to conceive of an existence as full and as important as the one he had so publicly led.

  No other baseball immortal in memory retired so young, so well, or so completely. He may be the last athlete who declined to cash in on his fame. He has refused to cannibalize himself, to live off his past. He remains unavailable, unassailable, and, as Pete Bonfils points out, unsullied.

  This won’t be so much a biography, I told Koufax, as a social history of baseball, using his career as a way to measure how much has changed. My aim, I said, is to limn the trajectory of his career and in so doing re-create that time in baseball and America when change was imminent, when a well-placed tie tack held it all at bay.

  “And, by the way,” I told him, “you should call Phil.” A mutual friend, Phil Collier, was feeling poorly and I thought he ought to know. I also thought I was the biggest schmuck on the planet. Four months it takes to reach the man and now I’m lecturing him about how to be a friend. The next day, there was a message on the answering machine. “Jane, this is Sandy. I called Phil. Thank you.”

  So began this improbable journey. The search for Koufax has taken me from Bensonhurst to Beverly Hills, from the cathedrals of baseball to my rabbi’s study. I have interviewed over four hundred people: players and coaches; teammates and opponents (high school, college, and major league); friends, fans, and others—Koufax has a lot of distant cousins he’s never met, roommates he never roomed with, and high school friends he doesn’t remember. Such is the price of fame.

  I have spoken with humpties and Hall of Famers, baseball scouts and baseball executives, gentiles and Jews. Opinion was ecumenical. I gave up counting the number of times I was told, “You won’t find anyone to say a bad word about him,” and started wondering what it meant that so many people assumed that’s what I was after. “Gentle” is the word used most often to describe him.

  Those who know him well were invariably wary, often seeking his permission before agreeing to talk to me. Sitting in the visitors’ dugout at Camden Yards in Baltimore, pitcher Orel Hershiser said, “I cherish my friendship with Sandy. You’d probably have an easier time doing this after he was dead.” Undoubtedly, Koufax’s preference. Running into my friend Dave Kindred, the sportswriter, at the Final Four a while back, he asked, “You haven’t been able to talk her out of it yet either, huh?”

  As word of this project spread, I was besieged by requests for his time and attention. It was my first intimation of what it must be like to be Sandy Koufax. Some messages were passed along, others deflected. I became a de facto and awkward conduit to him. Don Newcombe, his former teammate, asked me to ask Sandy for an autograph for his nephew. Such is the respect for Koufax among his peers that even those who know him are reluctant to intrude. Koufax chafes at this perception but not at such requests. An autographed picture was immediately dispatched.

  Sometimes, it felt as if he were stalking me. I had surgery and just before the anesthesiologist told me to start counting backward from one hundred, he said, “Sandy’s my cousin. My mother used to walk him in his carriage on Bay Parkway.” A New Year’s Eve guest volunteered she was his girlfriend’s best friend in high school. A beatific stay at a Tuscan inn was interrupted by a knock at the door. Ouismane, the polylinguistic Somali concierge, delivered a fax from home on a silver tray: the first page of Sports Illustrated ’s millennium tribute to its favorite athlete, Sandy Koufax. “‘The Left Arm of God,’” Ouismane exclaimed, reading over my shoulder. Imagine elevating an athlete to the Holy Trinity. “You Americans! I will never understand you!”

  We live in an era where privacy is suspect and the distinction between what is private and what is secret has been lost. Privacy as an act of integrity is a conceptual has-been. Koufax is a private man in the old-fashioned sense of the word. He says he would like to leave this world without a trace, which given his accomplishments is an impossibility. He told his friend Tom Villante at a funeral a couple of years ago: “It’ll be thirty days before they know I’m gone.”

  He has no need to be noticed. Joe DiMaggio, to whom Koufax is so often compared, marketed his privacy; Koufax cherishes his. On the field, athletes are coached to “stay within themselves.” Yet, an individual who chooses to do so, to keep an inner life inner, is deemed reclusive, enigmatic, aloof. “That whole reclusive, ghostly Howard Hughes thing is bullshit,” his friend Joe Hazan says emphatically.

  An enigma defies understanding. Koufax defies nothing, except perhaps the expectations of a debased, media-driven age. Nor does he defy understanding; he just doesn’t particularly need to be understood, an anachronistic impulse in our “tell all” culture. In an age of promiscuous self-promotion, a woman dressed as the “Cat in the Hat” who stands outside the Today Show studio with a poster announcing “I am having breast cancer surgery tomorrow” is thought normal. A man who opts out of his celebrity, declining to prolong or exploit his allotted fifteen minutes, is thought odd. There must be something wrong. Something hidden.

  Out of such reserve, apocrypha grow. He’s lived in New Zealand, Nova Scotia, and Australia. (False.) He raised horses in North Carolina. (False; there were two horses in the barn, and he never tried to ride either of them.) Comedian Buddy Hackett was his childhood baby-sitter. (False; it was Buddy’s sister.) He was the first athlete to use ice as an analgesic. (False; it was Drysdale.) He tried out for the Maccabiah Games in basketball. (False.) He struck out the heart of the Dodgers order in batting practice prior to a 1981 World Series game. (False; he says Pedro Guerrero took him deep.) He did not love to play the game. (False.)

  With his reticence, Sandy Koufax asks a pertinent fin de siècle question: How, ethically, do you write about someone who would prefer not to be written about, a public person who has chosen to lead a private life but whose public deeds demand consideration? A person who grants you access to his friends and maybe even a little bit of his soul and then says, “This book has to be yours, not mine.”

  From the beginning, Koufax made it clear he did not want this book to be written. But, if it was going to be done, he wanted it to be done right. To that end, he agreed to verify matters of personal biography and gave friends the go-ahead to be interviewed as long as it was clear that the book is “based on what others said, not on what I’m saying.” I agreed, at his request, not to interview his closest living relatives: the son and daughter of his late sister, Edie. I chose not call his ex-wives, ex-girlfriends, or the woman with whom he currently shares his life. You don’t need to know everything to write the truth. You just need to know enough. He refers to this project whimsically and ruefully as “an unauthorized biography by a neat lady.” He also calls me a CPA—“a certified pain in the ass.”

  Over time, I developed a verbal shorthand to describe his cooperation: circumscribed but invaluable. Then, one day, I was a guest on a public radio show in Philadelphia. The sound engineer was already giving the host the signal to wrap it up when she remembered to ask about Koufax’s cooperation.

  “Well,” I said, “it was circumcised but invaluable.”

  The next day the phone rang at my home in Washington. “Hey, Leavy, I heard that ‘circumcised’ line.”

  Koufax hung up. I left a message on his answering machine: “Hey, big boy, it’s the one biographical fact I didn’t check.”

  In July 2002, shortly before the book went to print I asked him one last time if he wanted to have any further input. “No,” he said. “It would be wrong for me to influence what you write.”

  Maybe you have to be a writer to understand why that took my breath away. “You know,” I said, “I spoke to four hundred sixty-nine people, and if four hundred sixty-nine people said you were a shit, I would have written that you were a shit.”

  “Four hundred and sixty-nine people can’t be wrong,” he r
eplied, with the characteristic wit he employs to deflect public affection.

  I can’t pretend not to know him; nor do I pretend to know him better than I do. I have seen him in public venues, such as baseball’s celebration of the Team of the Century, where, he noted wryly, the placard in front of him misspelled his name. And on the golf course at Bob Gibson’s annual charity tournament where the press of humanity wanting a piece of him momentarily trapped him in a Port-O-Johnny. With one exception (see page 265), I have quoted him only when the words were spoken at public events or in previously recorded interviews and conversations.

  I’ve seen him in private settings where I experienced the kindness of which so many people spoke and his sense of humor. When he inquired about the health of my mother-in-law after surgery that required implanting a pig valve in her heart, I told him: “Well, now she’s trayf.” The Yiddish word for unclean food. “All mother-in-laws are trayf,” he replied.

  Early one inhospitable February morning, soon after I began working on the book, I found myself at the Budget Rent-A-Car counter in the airport at Melbourne, Florida, at 1:00 A.M. A viciously pert attendant refused to rent me a car because my D.C. driver’s license had expired in flight. There wasn’t a living soul I knew within three hours of Melbourne (not to mention a cab or a limo) except Sandy Koufax. Slumped by the Budget counter, I asked myself the existential question: Could I call him? Would he come?

  I decided I could and he would. Then I remembered he was out of town. So I heedlessly hitchhiked down I-95, heading south toward Dodgertown, thinking, Is this sonofabitch really worth it? To which he later, cheerfully, replied, “You get a resounding no from me.”

  Among those who respectfully disagree is Herb Cohen, the Sage of Bensonhurst, author of You Can Negotiate Anything. Herbie is Larry King’s close friend, not Sandy’s. Their lives were peripheral to each other’s: Lafayette High School, Bay Parkway, the “J.” But Herbie knows things. “I watch fish,” Herbie told me one day, puckering his lips. “The thing about fish is they don’t know they’re in the water. Their vision is always blurry. Don’t let Sandy dissuade you from his significance.”

  In Robert Pinsky’s poem, Koufax stands in opposition to my childhood hero, Whitey Ford, whom he beat twice in the 1963 World Series. Whitey and the Yankees were anathema to Pinsky. They were the establishment, people who got all A’s. One early fifties night in Monmouth, New Jersey, when Whitey was pitching for the U.S. Army and Pinsky was still very young, he waited for an autograph. When the moment came, the boy ventured forward with his request. “Not now, kid,” the pitcher replied.

  Big mistake: you never know who’s going to grow up to be poet laureate. Whitey’s fate was sealed; in the poet’s mind he would always be Sandy’s foil. So, although I didn’t go to the Library of Congress in search of Sandy Koufax, that’s where I found him or, at least, the defining differences Fred Wilpon urged me to consider. As Pinsky put it, “His triumph surpassed mere success.”

  I called Sandy the next morning to tell him what the poet had said. There was quiet on the other end of the line. After a moment or two, he asked with a delivery every bit as smooth as his windup, “Do you think he’d like a ball?”

  The package arrived a couple of weeks later, accompanied by a note: “Whitey’s really a good guy.”

  Ford subsequently redeemed himself in Pinsky’s estimation with a plaintive, if belated, explanation for his youthful rudeness: “Soldiers don’t give autographs.” (And in mine by asking for a copy of Pinsky’s poem. “He wrote nice about Sandy?” Whitey said. “I’d like to see that.”)

  Now, every night before he goes to bed, Pinsky thinks about Sandy Koufax. He sets the alarm on the security system of his home and considers his valuables: a signed first edition of Robert Frost’s first book of poetry, A Boy’s Will, and a signed Sandy Koufax baseball. On the sweet spot it says, “There was never a better night game.”

  Except, perhaps, one.

  Chapter 1

  WARMING UP

  THREE DECADES AFTER he threw his last pitch, Sandy Koufax was back in uniform at Dodgertown, a rare occurrence given his belief that baseball uniforms do not flatter those of a certain age. This is where he made his debut in the spring of 1955 and Vero Beach is where he has chosen to make his after-baseball home—an odd choice for a man said not to like the game and the attention it brings him. Mornings when he’s in town, he works out in the training room. The clubhouse guys gave him a key. He brings the bagels.

  On this particular day in February 1997, he was at Dodgertown for a seminar on sports medicine. He had been recruited by Frank Jobe, the Dodgers’ team physician, to teach an audience of biomechanical experts how to throw a ball. He couldn’t very well say no: he was on Jobe’s operating table at the time. He had torn his rotator cuff falling down the stairs. The Boys of Summers Past are not immune to senior moments.

  Thinking of Koufax as clumsy is as disconcerting as the sight of the familiar “32” confined to this minimalist stage: sitting behind a bunting-draped table in a multipurpose room at what is now known as the Conference Center at Dodgertown. He looked thinner than in memory, thirty pounds less than his playing weight, the legacy of an afterlife as a marathoner. The old baggy uniforms always made him look less imposing than he was. His hair was thinner too, but silver, not gray. He had the appearance of a man aging as well as one possibly can, somehow managing to look graceful in uniform while perched beside a droopy fern.

  In 1955, Dodgertown was a baseball plantation with diamonds that disappeared into the orange groves on the horizon. No one could have envisioned then the industry that baseball would become; the science that throwing would become; or the pitcher Koufax would become. A pitcher so sublime, people remember always the first time they saw him—among them fellow lecturers Duke Snider and Dave Wallace. What Wallace, a baseball man, recalls most is leaving the stadium convinced: “The ball comes out of his hand different from anybody else’s.”

  His virtuosity was a synthesis of physiognomy and physical imagination. He didn’t just dominate hitters or games. He dominated the ball. He could make it do things: rise, break, sing. Gene Mauch, the old Phillies skipper, was once asked if Koufax was the best lefty he ever saw. Mauch replied: “The best righty, too.” As Billy Williams, the Hall of Famer, put it: “There was a different tone when people talked about Sandy Koufax.”

  Hank Aaron was his toughest out: “You talk about the Gibsons and the Drysdales and the Spahns. And as good as those guys were, Koufax was a step ahead of them. No matter who he pitched against, he could always be a little bit better. If somebody pitched a one-hitter, he could pitch a no-hitter.”

  John Roseboro, who died in August 2002, was his favorite receiver: “I think God came down and tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Boy, I’m gonna make you a pitcher.’ God only made one of him.”

  He was an artist who inspired ballplayers to reach beyond their usual idiom for metaphor and simile. They called him the game’s Cary Grant and Fred Astaire and compared him to the Mona Lisa and the David. “He looked like Michelangelo,” Ernie Banks said. “Pitching, walking, whatever he did was kind of in rhythm with life, stylish.” Sometimes one analogy did not suffice. As Koufax’s teammate, the noted art historian Lou Johnson, said, “He was Michelangelo and Picasso rolled into one.”

  Absent the radar guns and computer-generated technology of the late twentieth century, which turned acts of grace into biomechanical models, he was admired rather than analyzed. His fastball remains elegantly understated, unmeasurable, unknowable. His curveball lives on in grainy television footage and in the memory of the unfortunates who tried to hit it. There are those, romantics and catchers, content to leave it at that—Roseboro was among them: “That SOB was unusual. There’s never been another like him and I don’t think there ever will be. Trying to explain how he throws, how he got his control, how he thinks—he was just un fucking-usual. Who gives a shit how he threw it?”

  Koufax cared. Long after he retired, he
became a roving pitching coach in the Dodgers’ minor league system and a stealth advisor to an ardent cadre of pitchers, coaches, and managers who quote him like a shaman—Sandy says!—and then get in line for his autograph just like everyone else. He didn’t want them to do what he said because Sandy Koufax said, “Do it.” He wanted them to understand why it worked.

  He had come to see his body as a system for the delivery of stored energy, intuiting the principles of physics inherent in the pitching motion. This realization not only put him ahead of batters, it put him ahead of science. It would take decades for the gurus of biotech medicine to catch up. Later, when he had the time, he visited their labs and delved into their textbooks seeking proofs for what he knew empirically to be true. He learned to break down the pitching motion into its component parts and to put the science of motion into accessible language. He improvised drills using a bag of balls and a chain-link fence, giving impromptu clinics in the parking lot of Bobby’s Restaurant in Vero Beach. He held whole pitching staffs in thrall with his knowledge—sitting, as John Franco of the Mets put it, “bright-eyed at his feet in the middle of the locker room like little boy scouts.”

  His face changes when he talks about pitching. His eyes light up, his grammar comes alive, the past tense yielding to the present. The tightness in his voice often noticed in the presence of reporters disappears. As he spoke to the doctors and physical therapists arrayed before him in Dodger jerseys in a conference room at Dodgertown, his voice was as light as his fastball. Before long his hands began to move, first tentatively, then more broadly, arms spread wide, as if to envelop his subject and his audience.

  A pitcher from the beginning of his motion through his delivery, using his body as a catapult.

  “Everybody who performs an athletic event of any kind is a system of levers,” he began. “You can’t alter what the bones do. If you can make the bones work, the injuries to the soft tissue will be a lot less. It’s when guys are in a bad position and now they try to make the muscles do something to compensate for the bad position that they injure themselves.”