Sandy Koufax

by Jane Leavy

  Among the viewers was Bob Costas, a sixth-grader in Burlington, Connecticut. “Mr. Tomasi and Mr. Landy, who were our teachers, they had a black-and-white television set,” Costas recalled. “And they brought the TV set in and suspended class and let us watch the world series on a black-and-white TV set with rabbit ears. Whitey Ford against Sandy Koufax—I mean, how great is that?”

  Mel Allen and Vin Scully, voices of the Yankees and Dodgers, respectively, called the series for NBC. Scully, who was hired by the Dodgers as a radio announcer in 1950, watched as television usurped the prerogatives of reporters. “In those days, it was strictly between the lines,” he said. “I mean that’s about all we did. You know the classic change in the media. In the old days, even in the early fifties, you had two kinds of newspapermen following a club: a morning man and an afternoon man. The morning man answered all the great questions of journalism: who, what, where, when, and how. And then television came along. Television gave you the who, what, where, when, why, and how. So the morning man’s job had to change. So the morning man started looking for an angle. So now you had a morning man looking for an angle and an afternoon man looking for an angle.”

  As television appropriated the old questions, reporters began to ask new ones. The sports pages had come a long way since Red Smith filed his first dispatch for the St. Louis Star in 1927, writing an account of an evening event from the point of view of a glowworm outshone by newly installed floodlights. The old bald guys with inky fingers were being nudged aside by a new species of sportswriter. Chipmunks, Jimmy Cannon called them, after noticing Phil Pepe, a toothy Daily News reporter, and a horde of other sportswriters surrounding Jim Bouton’s locker in Yankee Stadium.

  The chipmunk revolution is often traced back to the 1962 World Series when a reporter named Stan Isaacs, interviewing a pitcher named Ralph Terry, inquired about the eating habits of said pitcher’s new baby. “Breast or bottle?” Isaacs asked.

  He saw the lighthearted inquiry as an example of a new, less reverential view of athletes. To Isaac’s dismay it became interpreted as an example of how sportswriters intruded on private lives. The protective bubble around them was imploding. “It was the ultimate chipmunk question,” said Larry Merchant, a former assistant Lafayette football coach, who became a sports columnist for the New York Post. “It would be the chipmunk letterhead or T-shirt. Now we can be reporters, not just fans, which was revolutionary in those days—sportswriters as reporters. No one was getting into social issues or the heads of athletes. I felt the personal was the professional. We wanted to know who these people were.”

  Chipmunks found their voices in irreverence. Distance and irony were the tools of their trade. Old-school reporters like Collier perceived themselves as being in the same business as the players. They knew more and wrote less about the people they covered than their journalistic heirs, whose mandate to understand their subjects has grown while their access has diminished. “None of them ever feared me,” Collier said before his death in February 2001. “I wasn’t going to squeal. I rode in the back of the plane and the bus with the guys. I went out and drank with them every night. I always said I was going to write a book and call it, The Bases Are Loaded and So Was I.”

  In time, the excess of one era was replaced by another. Purple prose, underwritten by free food and free booze, gave way to sports page psychoanalysis. Sportswriters became interested as much in how players felt as in what they did. “Measuring the ego and id of ballplayers,” Red Smith called it with distaste.

  For athletes of Koufax’s generation, the rules changed mid-game. Everything became fair game: adoption, divorce, marriage; remarriage, wife-swapping, wife-beating. Suddenly, ballgames were not just events but media events; and, thanks to the Game of the Week and postseason play, ballplayers were TV stars, especially telegenic ones like Koufax.

  The return of the Bensonhurst kid, coming home to fulfill the thwarted dreams of all those cuckolded Brooklyn fans, was an obvious and compelling angle. The tabloids made him their own. Even his head cold made headlines. Speculation about his health was fueled when he failed to show up at Dodger Stadium for the last weekend of the regular season. It was Yom Kippur, he explained later.

  New York reclaimed him. And so did his biological family. Maury Allen was a young reporter for the New York Post. Shortly before the series began, Allen said, the Post received a tip saying that Koufax was adopted. People didn’t talk about divorce in 1963, much less adoption. “All of a sudden we get a call: ‘I’m related to so-and-so Braun, that’s Koufax’s natural father. He’s adopted.’ The big scoop is that he’s not a Koufax—not born a Koufax. Ike Gellis is the sports editor. Gellis says, ‘What kind of bullshit is this?’”

  Gellis gave the information to Milton Gross, a Post columnist, who was close to Koufax. “Gross talks to the guy,” Allen said. “He spells out the background.”

  The background was this: Koufax’s biological father, Jack Braun, had left the family when his son was three years old. They had not spoken since before he signed with the Dodgers. The paper made arrangements to bring Braun to Yankee Stadium in the hope of meeting his estranged, biological son. “I wrote a story about him,” Allen said. “Sandy was very hurt. He never said, ‘I’m never going to talk to you.’ You could read in his face such anger, such disappointment. We were Jewish. We were also the Jewish paper. It was a very, very strained thing through that series.”

  Ed Linn, the writer who later collaborated on Koufax’s autobiography, also recalled the story. “I said, ‘Maury, how could you?’ He said, ‘You think I didn’t fight this?’”

  Merchant recalled it, too: “It was considered by a lot of people at that time a sort of breach of some kind of journalistic etiquette. It made a lot of people uncomfortable. It didn’t have anything to do with his being a player.

  “Part of the deal here is Sandy Koufax, a Jewish kid from New York, coming to New York to pitch in the world series, a superstar, somebody who seemed almost perfect—handsome, beautiful to watch, except when he hit, and brilliant at what he was doing. Here was this perfect guy, and this was seen as some bump in the road, some slight imperfection. We’re talking about the time just before the sexual revolution, before divorce became a norm. I guess it was something of a shock. It was public. It was during a world series.”

  Koufax did not see Braun. Nor was he aware that Post reporters were responsible for bringing him to the Stadium. His concern was for his father, Irving Koufax, who was still recuperating in a Los Angeles hospital.

  The Koufax clip file in the Post morgue no longer exists. What was actually published in 1963, if anything, is lost to history. Three years later, the Post did publish an exclusive interview with Braun the day after Koufax’s last major league start in the 1966 World Series. Braun appeared on the front page of the paper in a photograph showing him at home on Long Island watching his biological son on television.

  The headline blared: “Sandy’s Dad: The Ordeal.” The caption read, “Where Sandy’s Loss Hurt.” Arthur Greenspan, the rewrite man who got the byline, quoted Braun as saying: “Please say in your story that you came looking for me, not that I sought you out. Tell people that I didn’t really want to talk because I don’t want to do anything which could even remotely harm Sandy. Say that I don’t want to seem to be trying to profit from my son’s fame. And say I am very proud of my son.”

  The Post printed snapshots Braun had taken of his eight-year-old son, a boy in short pants and high socks trying to hit a baseball, and revealed that he attended every game at Shea Stadium that Koufax pitched, sitting as close to the visiting dugout as possible.

  The wire services reprinted the story, and the pictures, noting the coincidence that both world series starting pitchers had been adopted. Jim Palmer, of the Orioles, was born Jim Wiesen, the Associated Press reported. As the story gained circulation, the zone of privacy—a new concept for a new media age—began to shrink. Dodger general manager Buzzie Bavasi remembers Koufax showing him “a tel
egram he got one day from somebody saying his grandmother was dying and ‘Goddamn you, you sonofabitch, why don’t you take care of her?’ And I said, ‘Well, Sandy, you had nothing to do with that. Whoever sent you the letter should take care of your grandmother.’”

  Nobe Kawano, the protective clubhouse man, began to screen his mail. “I remember one letter from Brooklyn. It said, ‘I went to the Hall of Records. There is no Sandy Koufax.’ I didn’t want to tell him about it. I just threw that letter out.”

  The adoption story became not only public record, but also a de facto part of his public persona—a perception perpetuated even today. Writing in the Los Angeles Times in 1999, Roger Kahn, the celebrated author, suggested that the Post piece drove Koufax into a shell, a refrain that drives Koufax nuts. “What shell?” Koufax asks friends, plaintively.

  “The shell,” Kahn responds, “that Pee Wee Reese encountered when he asked Koufax to work with his son, Mark, on a 1997 television series about the Dodgers in the Hall of Fame. Despite his warm feelings for Reese, Koufax declined, whereas Snider and Rachel Robinson and even Roy Campanella, who was very ill, cooperated wholeheartedly.”

  It was during a cross-country flight that Reese broached the subject. “We’re up there in first class, going to North Carolina. Sandy had just bought a place in North Carolina. He started talking about how lucky he was to play baseball in Brooklyn. He’d see all those people riding the train, doing nine to five. He said, ‘Man, I am the luckiest man on the earth.’ I said, ‘Sandy, that’s great stuff. I’d like to use that in the documentary.’ He reamed me. He said, ‘No, that’s just for me, that’s not for everybody to know.’ Later, he said, ‘Okay, call me.’ But I never pursued it. I respected that. He was a lot like my dad about things like that. Whenever he was approached about scripts and things, he always said no. I can’t say anthing bad about Sandy Koufax. Every single week when my father couldn’t distinguish a clock from a coffee cup, when the cancer was going to his brain, he was still talking to Sandy. Sandy called regularly, every week.”

  Sometimes, near the end, when Pee Wee wasn’t entirely lucid, Mark got to wondering what they could possibly be talking about. “One time, he was on the phone talking to Sandy, I picked up the phone to listen. There was no one on the other end of the line.” Deep in the twilight of terminal illness, Pee Wee took solace in an imaginary conversation with Koufax.

  “I wouldn’t say Sandy denied me,” Mark Reese said. “A lot of people think Sandy is an uptight, reluctant, elusive guy, which he is, but not around teammates. When he got around my dad, they were like two little kids.”

  After Pee Wee’s funeral in 1999, Koufax told reporters, “He was a teammate for four years, a friend for forty. What else is there to say?” Privately, he told friends, so many former teammates were dying, he needed to pack a dark suit on all his travels.

  It is one thing to be publicity shy. It is another to be just plain shy. Koufax doesn’t view himself that way. “People have been writing it for forty years,” he told a press conference in 1999, “because someone said it forty years ago.” Friends consider it a “reserve” (evident only among those he doesn’t know) and trace it not to the publication of the Post story but, as Charley Steiner suggests, to the fact of Jack Braun’s absence from his son’s life, a formative event in any childhood.

  Allen, who did the legwork for the story, believes it served as a cautionary tale. “It allowed him to accept that he was a public figure and that everything in his life was going to come out,” he said. “It was a hurtful thing. In journalism, you have one, two, three stories in your life—that’s the line that’s drawn. Sometimes you cross it. We crossed it. I regret it from the standpoint of hurting a beautiful human being.”

  Koufax did not see Braun until decades after the Post published its account, shortly before his death. Braun gave him some old snapshots, the same sort he had supplied to the tabloid.

  Yankee Stadium was strictly S.R.O. for the first game of the 1963 World Series. For once the announced attendance—69,000—wasn’t inflated. It was the eighth time the Yankees faced the Dodgers, but the first time New York faced L.A. Teachers suspended class. New York dailies printed page one pleas to readers not to call for information. A special citywide telephone number had been set up. Five hundred and forty radio stations carried the radio broadcast with Joe Garagiola and Ernie Harwell. Everyone else watched on TV.

  The Vegas boys made the Yankees 8-to-5 favorites to win the series—6 to 5 to win the opener—and posted 10-to-1 odds against the Dodgers’ being swept. The odds against the Yankees’ being swept: 25 to 1. No wonder. The Dodgers had finished seventh in the National League in home runs, and sixth in runs scored. Bill Skowron, “The Moose,” who had come over from the Yankees in an off-season trade for Stan Williams, entered the Dodger clubhouse one day and found a baseball dangling from the ceiling—the handiwork of Koufax and Drysdale. “This is a baseball,” they said. “You’re supposed to hit it.”

  The Yankees were the Bombers. They had won the American League pennant by ten and a half games. “It was the last great Yankee team,” said Dodger infielder Dick Tracewski. “We had our meeting and we said, ‘Holy Christ, how are we ever going to compete against them? I hope we don’t get embarrassed.’ They were so potent.”

  Whitey Ford, “The Chairman of the Board,” was the winningest pitcher in world series history. Koufax had never pitched in Yankee Stadium except in the bullpen in 1955. On the way to the ballpark, he entertained his teammates with impersonations of Bill Dana, a comic of the era who made the entire country laugh by pretending to be Hispanic. (“Hello, my name—Jose Jimenez.”) Koufax wasn’t nervous until he stepped onto the mound. Being on the mound in Yankee Stadium, he decided, was like being at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

  “I was scared crapless,” Roseboro said. He was at his locker worrying about the winds that swirl around home plate when his father showed up with a flask of peach brandy. “I was going to take my little sip to cool myself down,” Roseboro said. “Somebody tapped me on the shoulder. I had my head up in the locker. It was Alston. He said, ‘Have a good day, boy.’”

  It was seventy-six degrees at game time. Ladies wore lampshade-size hats. Men wore white shirts. Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Stan Musial threw out the first pitch.

  “The world series had a tremendous mystique then because the leagues didn’t meet,” Costas recalled. “And teams had more of an identity then. The Dodgers had a certain continuity in their roster. In fact, one of the things that was almost jarring was Moose Skowron playing for the Dodgers.

  “And I knew all about the lore of Yankee Stadium and the world series with the hitting background coming down behind the monuments. And everyone then wore white shirts. And so, I fully understood, even watching on this black-and-white TV, that here’s Koufax coming out of the white shirts, out of the sunlight, into the shadows. And I could tell that not only was he throwing incredibly hard but this curveball…I don’t know that his curveball was ever more effective than it was on this day.

  “And I was a Yankee fan, too. As a Yankee fan, you had a certain belief, a certain haughty belief in your team. And you know he didn’t just beat the Yankees. I think the first five guys struck out, didn’t they?”

  The first three Yankee batters—Tony Kubek, Bobby Richardson, and Tom Tresh—struck out on twelve pitches. NBC’s cameras panned the crowd: Stogie-shaped men with fat cigars jammed between their teeth were speechless. Umpire Shag Crawford was grateful. Taking a drag on a last cigarette before the game, he ruptured a blood vessel in his throat and began spitting up blood. He wasn’t about to bail on Koufax and Ford. He waited to go to the hospital until after the game and never smoked again.

  Koufax’s confrontation with Richardson, the Yankees’ diminutive second baseman, was the touchstone of the game and perhaps the series. Born the same year, retired the same season, they had little in common other than manners and civility. Richardson, a bo
rn-again Christian, who returned home to Sumter, South Carolina, when his playing days were over, answers the phone with courtliness: “I will be happy to receive your call.”

  They weren’t happy memories but he was glad to share them. “There was an air of expectancy. We had won in ’61 and ’62. We were confident, overconfident. That was set straight right away. I was just overpowered.”

  Richardson had struck out only twenty-two times in more than 600 at-bats. Koufax didn’t just strike him out, he did it three times, and he did it the way everyone said you couldn’t—throwing to his power. Koufax and Roseboro were in complete agreement about what they wanted to do with the fastball-hitting Yankees. “After a while you’re on the same wavelength,” Roseboro said. “It becomes so easy that if Sandy didn’t want what I put down he wouldn’t do anything but look at me for a couple of seconds and I said, ‘Oh, shit, he’s going to the next one.’”

  Like most of his teammates, Richardson ignored the scouting reports. “The report comes in and says, ‘His fastball really takes off.’ You think, ‘I’ve seen lots of fastballs.’ When you see it for the first time, I couldn’t believe it. I had not seen stuff like that before. By the third time up, I was honestly just trying to hit the first pitch because I didn’t want to strike out again. Mantle was in the on-deck circle and when I walked past him, he said, ‘No use even going up there.’”

  After Koufax struck out the side in the first inning, writers and other observers reported that he looked into the Yankee dugout as if to say: There, take that. Others, who know him better, swear it never happened. “That’s not him,” Ford said. “He might have been thinking it but he sure as heck didn’t say that or give that impression.”

  Frank Howard, the slugger whom Jimmy Cannon once described as a “one-faced totem pole,” came to bat in the second inning. John Gregory Dunne, the novelist, then a Time magazine reporter and aspiring TV writer, watched from the left-field grandstand as Howard hit the ball to center field, a drive as clear and straight as a narrative line. Kubek, the shortstop, had the fleeting impression he might catch it. Ford ducked instinctively and needlessly. “Mantle took one step and the ball was over his head,” Dunne said. “It was like a projectile. Of course, it was a projectile.”