Sandy Koufax

by Jane Leavy

  At the dinner, held annually to raise money for indigent ballplayers who came of age before free agency, organizers always station him in the farthest corner of the massive ballroom at a table set off by velvet ropes and stanchions. The lines that form before him are always the longest. One year, they stationed him next to an exit sign that burned crimson: Occupancy of More Than 60 Is Considered Dangerous and Unlawful.

  A security guard stood to his right, an impassive sentinel in a bad tan suit. People thrust balls at him, pennants, ticket stubs, magazine covers. No one said please or thank you. The monotony was relieved by occasional levity, as when one fan inquired, “How come no women, Sandy?”

  “Too old, didn’t make enough money.”

  Everyone laughed. The total Dodger payroll for the fifteen years Buzzie Bavasi was general manager equals Kevin Brown’s $15 million annual salary. Someone asked the inevitable question. If, in the brave new world of baseball, Brown is worth $105 million to the Dodgers, what would they have had to offer Koufax? The answer, to paraphrase Garagiola: “Howdy, partner.”

  Joe Pignatano, another old catcher, a buddy from Brooklyn, eased himself onto an adjacent stool. “Hey, how come he gets to sit there?” a voice demanded.

  “Roomie seat,” Koufax said, smiling.

  On the surface, Piggy is everything Koufax is not—paunchy and balding, indifferently dressed in the manner of baseball men who never had to decide what to wear when they got up in the morning, his accent Brooklyn thick. In fact, they are not so different. Piggy is who Koufax aspires to be—just another guy happy to be on this side of the grass.

  Piggy’s pals don’t stand on line for his autograph. Koufax looked up to see a familiar face, Solly Hemus, the third base coach of the Mets who gave him such hell during his first no-hitter. “Solly!” he said, brightening, then blanched at the commemorative baseball in Hemus’s hand. Another peer had become an acolyte.

  After an hour and fifteen minutes, the ballroom lights flickered, signaling an end to the affair. The conga line dissolved into a voracious mob. Kids who already had one autograph ducked beneath the velvet ropes, unrestrained by parents or manners. Ten, twelve, maybe twenty baseballs were thrust at Koufax from every angle: low and away, high and tight, right down the middle. There was nowhere to go, no personal space, no exit. The security guard placed a meaty hand protectively on his shoulder and whispered urgently into a lapel microphone, “Table five is a madhouse.”

  What is this impulse, this need for a shred of greatness, a name scrawled on a sweet spot? Koufax doesn’t get it. The need mystifies him; he is dubious about his ability to fill it. But he does the best he can, within the bounds of taste and decorum, bringing dignity to this most undignified pursuit—the sycophantic elevation of one human being over another and the exploitation of that difference for material gain.

  A few years ago, he was a featured guest at Bob Gibson’s golf tournament in Omaha. Bob Costas was the emcee. As he was making the introductions, he inadvertently skipped over Koufax. At first, the lapse seemed intentional—the biggest star in the room should be introduced last. But it wasn’t. Costas smoothly ad-libbed his way out of his embarrassment. “And, of course, who could forget the great Sandy Koufax?”

  Costas was mortified, having done just that. Koufax was delighted. For once, he was an afterthought. “Bob! Bob!” he said, getting up from his seat. “K comes after R in the Jewish alphabet!”

  As he stood, the white helium-infused balloon inscribed with his name jerked free of its mooring in the center of the table and drifted to the ballroom ceiling, floating above the fray. This is where he’d like to be. In American life, that makes him odd, enigmatic. An enigma defies understanding. Koufax does not. “He doesn’t defy anything,” Costas said later, “except the norm.”

  That, finally, is what makes him different. Not his religion or his taste in music or literature or even his gentleness. Players recognize and respect that which distinguishes him, and they are protective of it. At the 1985 All-Star Game in Minneapolis, he and Harmon Killebrew were named honorary captains of their respective teams. Twenty years had passed since they faced each other in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the 1965 World Series. Metropolitan Stadium was gone, replaced by an egregious indoor ballpark shaped like a pillow. Some hot-shot public relations guy decided it would be fun to put them in uniform and take them out to the river, where Koufax would throw a pitch and Killebrew would try to hit the sucker across the Mighty Mississippi.

  The two Hall of Famers got in a limo and drove to the narrowest bend in the river, where a crowd of 5,000 fans—and one ten-year-old boy in full catcher’s gear—were waiting for them. Killebrew took one look at the whole carny setup, the 800-foot width of the river, and told Koufax, “No fucking way.” He wasn’t about to help embarrass the greatest lefty in history. “Kid,” he said, wrapping his arm around the disappointed boy. “You ain’t catching Koufax today.”

  The first time I met Sandy Koufax, I assumed it would be the last. The bar in the players’ lounge at Dodgertown was empty, the taps dry, the lunch crowd gone. The lounge belonged to ghosts and legends: Jackie and Pee Wee, Podres and The Duke, Branca, Hodges, and Koufax too. Their unlined faces peered down from larger-than-life photo murals, each one given over to a different era, another world series team. I placed myself beneath a montage from October 1963, when Koufax struck out fifteen Yankees at the Stadium. Above my head, he was leaping into Roseboro’s arms, their fates and shadows intertwined; their teammates engulfing them in an embrace of conjoined elation.

  Koufax let himself in through a side door, emerging out of the sunshine into the shadows of the dimly lit bar. Over his shoulder were fields of green and empty pitching mounds. Backlit against Field One, where he threw his first pitch as a Dodger, he appeared in silhouette and much as the Los Angeles Times had recently described him, “a cross between a Greek god and Gregory Peck.” He introduced himself politely and unnecessarily. He did not look up.

  Twice a year, the old naval base is turned over to Fantasy Campers, grown men who pay $5,000 to cram themselves into double-knits adorned with the numbers 14, 4, 42, and 32 and walk the fields where Gil and Duke and Jackie and Sandy once roamed. They say they come for the competition and the instruction. The truth is, they come because spikes make the same sound on gravel no matter who’s wearing them. The highlight of their stay is the annual game between campers and old-timers played at Holman Stadium. Koufax wanted to go over and see some friends, some of those guys in the photographs above our heads.

  His arrival at Holman Stadium was heralded by the crackle of walkie talkies—“We got Sandy in the press box”—the static generating unwelcome attention. Not that he needed to be introduced. Hatless and dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, Koufax was immediately apparent. A uniform would have offered better cover. He would have been just another middle-aged guy wearing number 32.

  Back in the early nineties when he was living in North Carolina, and running a lot, he met two joggers on a back road one day. “This is why I left New York,” he told the guy running in the opposite direction. “It’s too crowded.”

  He was joking but, as Abe Singer says, in Koufax’s universe “there is no personal space.” When he walks across an empty stadium parking lot an hour after a night game nobody knew he was planning to attend, people materialize out of the macadam like moths drawn to a flame. At Dodgertown, it’s an infestation. “You want security?” a Holman Stadium official asked.

  “Nah,” he said, accepting a beer and a pretzel on the house instead.

  “For your aggravation,” the concession man said.

  “It’s not enough,” Koufax said with a grin.

  As he bit into the pretzel, a billowing woman swathed in a lime sun dress bulldozed her way toward him. “I’ve been trying to get you since 1955,” she said. There was hardness in her voice and in her phrase, an edgy voraciousness at odds with the soft breeze that whispered through the orange groves. Nobody knew who Koufax was in 1
955.

  The Fantasy Campers in their gray road uniforms were lined up spryly along the first base line waiting to be announced—to hear the echo of their names roll across the field where Koufax pitched. As word of his arrival spread, the line began to curl back across foul territory toward the press box until it formed a question mark. Grown men broke ranks and ran galloping up the concrete steps toward him. First among them was a camper wearing number 32, who squatted at Koufax’s feet unable to speak, to move, or to leave. “Excuse me,” Koufax said, finally, “I’ve got to go see my friends.”

  He made his way quickly through the sparse, disbelieving crowd, descending the rows toward the home dugout. He climbed over the chain link fence and disappeared into a profusion of crisp white uniforms. True, the bodies occupying them were not quite as crisp as they once had been. But there they were: Duke and Branca, Erskine and Labine, Reggie Smith, Rick Monday, Steve Yeager, Jerry Reuss, and Jeff Torborg, Dodgers all, teammates, converging upon him. Koufax was mobbed in the dugout again.

  In the weeks before our rendezvous, I had lots of time to prepare my arguments, advance my cause for making this an exception to his self-imposed rule against personal retrospective. I hadn’t expected to get this far. And I didn’t expect ever to speak to him again. I thought about the one thing I needed to know, the one question I had to ask, in order to proceed.

  As we walked back toward the clubhouse from the stadium, he talked about the way Vero Beach looked in 1955, how he preferred the rustic, raw simplicity of the past. Back inside the bar, we were surrounded by it. This time, he looked up, taking in the whole tableau—the fond pummeling by the dugout steps as his teammates engulfed him, yanking on his arm, knocking his cap askew like some dead-end kid. Like they couldn’t get enough of him. “I absolutely loved it,” he said. “How could you do the things I did and not love it?”

  Afterword

  THE PROBLEM WITH PAGE 111

  THERE ARE NO BOOKS. We’re all sold out.”

  The manager of the bookstore in Skokie, Illinois, the first stop on a twenty-city publicity tour, shook her head. It was not good news. There were 150 people waiting downstairs to hear about Sandy Koufax and, if so moved, buy a book about him. “They may walk out,” she cautioned. “Don’t take it personally.”

  I braced myself for the diaspora. Instead, a miracle: nobody left. A half hour later, they were still there, waiting in line for autographed bookplate stickers and to tell me their stories about Sandy Koufax. The most patient man in Skokie waited forty-five minutes to tell me about his boyhood friend in Los Angeles (let’s call him Ted). One year, Ted decided to invite Koufax to break-fast, the meal shared by family and friends at the end of the Yom Kippur fast. The kid had a little moxie and called Dodger Stadium, asking to be put through to the locker room. In those days, actual people answered the telephone and the accommodating operator connected him. An obliging clubhouse man got Koufax to come to the phone.

  “Hi, I’m Sandy Koufax,” he said.

  “Hi, I’m Ted,” the kid replied. “I was worried you didn’t have a place to go for break-fast. Maybe you’d like to come to my house?”

  Rather than humiliate the kid—“Hey, dufus, I’m Sandy Koufax, you think I don’t have invitations?”—Koufax replied, “That’s a really nice offer, Ted, but I’ve made plans with friends. Maybe next year.”

  Four years ago, when I began work on this book, I knew it came with a built-in demographic base—the same marketing upside anticipated by Walter O’Malley when he signed the young Jewish “Boro Star” to pitch for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1955. The greatest lefty in baseball history, a secular, non-practicing Jew, will go to his grave known as the pitcher who refused to pitch on Yom Kippur. He remains a moral exemplar for bar mitzvah boys (and bat mitzvah girls) everywhere.

  But I had no idea how ecumenical his appeal was until I landed in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Rabbi Rob Dubersin informed me my next guest appearance would be that afternoon on the Ave Maria Radio Syndicate—call letters WDEO. Until a grown man in Florida asked me to autograph his book: “To Mark, who once sat on Sandy Koufax’s lap.” Until the director of a book fair in Walnut Creek, California, exulted: “We haven’t had such a crowd since Dr. Ruth!” (The diminutive sex therapist had one detractor, who complained that she made sex sound like fun.) Until I returned to the Chicago area six months later and a kind man named Ronald Emanuel said, “I met you in Skokie. There were no books. I came back to get my book signed.”

  He handed me his copy with the bookplate slapped on the title page and asked if I remembered receiving a letter from his friend, Kenny Granat, concerning page 111 of the hardcover edition. It was a pivotal moment in the game—and apparently in Kenny’s life—with Lou Johnson, the first base runner, on second base in the bottom of the fifth inning. I wrote: “Hendley went into the windup.” Turned out Kenny and his mother were major Cub fans and quite distressed about the page on which this statement appeared. Because if Hendley had gone into his full windup instead of pitching from the stretch position, Johnson would have stolen third easily. Thus rookie catcher Chris Krug wouldn’t have hurried his throw, the one that sailed over Ron Santo’s head and allowed the game’s only run to score. Was that really the way it happened? If so, it was no small matter. If Hendley was responsible, there was blame to be assigned. But if it was my mistake, it was just one more reason to nurture a Cub fan’s broken heart. “I just came from sitting shiva with Kenny,” Emanuel said. “His mother died. She went to her grave not knowing.”

  “Give me your cell phone,” I replied, chagrined.

  It was Friday evening, Shabbat. Kenny wouldn’t be sitting shiva. Ron dialed Kenny’s telephone number.

  “This is Jane Leavy. I am sorry for your loss. The mistake was mine, not Hendley’s. I promise it will be corrected in the paperback edition.”

  “Who is it really?” Kenny replied.

  “Really, it’s me.”

  Kenny paused, deciding whether to believe me. Then he said, “Page 111 killed my mother.”

  It was like that almost everywhere. Only in Vero Beach, Koufax’s hometown, where he is known as Mr. K, perhaps to protect his anonymity, was the crowd smaller than expected and more deferential. Men and women, baseball fans and non-baseball fans, Jews and non-Jews, boys born long after Koufax retired, and elderly men attached to oxygen tanks inundated me with their stories. “I was his bunk mate at Camp Chi Wan Da!” “I was his counselor at Camp Chi Wan Da!” “I was his roommate!” “His neighbor!” “His most devoted fan!”

  In fact, I didn’t meet a single detractor until Halloween, when I returned to my hometown to speak at the library where I joined my first book group. “You said you couldn’t find anybody to say anything bad,” a man crowed. “Here I am.”

  The librarian stepped between us but I didn’t want to be insulated from him or whatever version of the truth he wanted to convey. Early one morning in the 1980s, when Koufax was still working for the Dodgers, the man told me, he staked out the door to his room in Dodgertown. And: “He came out with a blonde on his arm!”

  Apparently, it had not occurred to him that said blonde might have been Koufax’s wife and in any case it was none of his business who was sharing a room with a fifty-seven-year-old man.

  “Guess, you didn’t speak to any of my ex-girlfriends, huh?” Koufax said one day when I reported the consensus of opinion about him.

  I hadn’t called his ex-girlfriends, or his current longtime girlfriend, or his two ex-wives. It wasn’t at his request. It was a decision I myself had made, though one apparently so out of keeping with the norms of New Millennium journalism that many people assumed it was his stipulation. My hope was to create an intimate portrait without violating his essential privacy, to write incisively but not invasively, not because there was something to hide (there wasn’t) but because there was no compelling reason to do otherwise. Still, it felt like a risk to be kind in print.

  In response to the book, I’ve heard from nearly one thousa
nd caring careful readers. (I am grateful for the errors they found and the opportunity to correct them.) None, stunningly, contradicted the portrait of the man within these pages. Each of these messages arrived with the unstated hope I would pass it on to him and thus validate the connection between teller and subject. I am their medium, channeling an icon, a retired pitcher, with umbilical pull.

  In Austin, Texas, Ted Siff, a onetime batboy for the Houston Colt 45s, said Koufax inspired him to sue the Democratic Party of Texas when the state convention was scheduled for Yom Kippur in 1972. He won.

  In Walnut Creek, Zoe Rosensweig Kahn told me about the decades-ago surgery that her late husband, Bill, performed on Koufax’s mother. When word got around whose mother was in the operating room, all elective surgery was canceled for the afternoon while doctors fanned out all over town searching for baseballs to have autographed. “Bill told Sandy, ‘You’re my hero,’” Kahn said. “And Sandy replied, ‘No, you’re my hero because you have my mother’s life in your hands.’”

  At a reading in Davie, Florida, Eileen Rogow announced: “I was crazy about Sandy Koufax, crazy.” I’d heard that one before. “No,” she said, “I was really crazy.” Crazy enough to ambush Koufax in the backseat of his limousine one snowy night after a sports banquet in Island Trees, Long Island, when she was nineteen years old. Before she left home that night in a cranberry chemise dress with a bow at the neck and a ruffle at the hem (and matching snakeskin pumps and a purse), she told her mother to buy lox and bagels because she was bringing Sandy Koufax home for breakfast.

  She bribed the waiters to get a seat by the dais. All evening she made eyes at him. The only woman in the audience, she was hard to miss. But when the banquet ended, Koufax was engulfed in a tide of testosterone. Panicked, Rogow fled through the back door, reasoning that’s how the unassuming object of her desire would make his getaway. His limo was waiting. The driver invited her in. Her intentions were clear: “I was a nineteen-year-old Jewish virgin offering.” When the Hall of Famer found her waiting in the backseat, she said, “You weren’t going to leave without saying good-bye to me, were you?”