Sandy Koufax

by Jane Leavy

  His upper body turned as a unit like a matador pirouetting away from a charging bull, the ball and his left hand tucked inside his glove. Then his hands parted and his left shoulder dipped, his arm dangling below his knee, the ball obscured from view. From the batter’s perspective, he looked almost simian. From the photographer’s well, it seemed he reached so far back his hand actually touched the mound.

  Anyone who has ever handed something to a whining child in the backseat understands the peril of reaching back with only your arm. Koufax kept his arm in line with his shoulder blade, reducing the pressure on his rotator cuff. In medical jargon: “On the scapular plane,” thirty degrees forward of lateral. “Just the way we teach it now,” Jobe said.

  One leg reached toward home, the other extended behind him, forming an inverted V with his hips at its apex. They were his infrastructure, flying buttresses supporting his upper body.

  Some athletes describe an out-of-body experience at peak performance, a freedom from the bonds of physical activity. Koufax never lost consciousness of where his body was, particularly the lower half. He knew that if his hips went where they were supposed to go the rest of him would surely follow. “You gotta lead with your hips,” he always tells young pitchers.

  As he planted his foot on the downward slope of the mound, his back knee grazed the ground. His torso arched, his legs splayed. From certain angles, it almost looked as if he were straddling the hill.

  His stride was long and exact (it should be about 70 to 80 percent of a pitcher’s height), which made him fussy about his pants. If they were too tight, they impeded his stride and Nobe Kawano, the Dodgers’ accommodating clubhouse man, would scurry for new ones, waiting as Koufax tried on pair after pair, going through his pitching motion in each of them.

  “You have to be low,” he said, simulating with his hand the motion of a plane taking flight. “If you look at pictures of Tom Seaver, Nolan Ryan, myself, the back leg is on the ground. If you ever had a Whiffle ball and tried to make it do that, you know you’ve got to get down as low as you can and make the ball spin backward. You have to get your center of gravity low so that when you’re throwing the ball, you’re throwing it straight out, rather than down. You can’t defy gravity.”

  His eyes never left the target. Oh, he’d look over at first base if by chance anyone got that far. Otherwise, his gaze stayed level, blazing a path for the flight of the ball.

  He never threw downhill. Gravity would take care of that. He told himself, “Throw through the target, not to it.” And that target was always on the other end of a level plane. What made him different from other pitchers, biomechanical experts would later conclude, was his ability to conceive of and stay on that plane longer than anyone else.

  No matter where the target was, three or four inches off the outside of the plate or brushing the inside corner, his release point was always the same. Only the direction varied.

  “You see a lot of pitchers trying to change direction with just the hand or arm,” Koufax said. “It doesn’t work. You have to do what the bones do. You want to shoot it over there, you point over there. Like a bow and arrow.”

  Inside his glove, his hand stayed on top of the ball until the last possible instant before rotating it into position to deliver the desired pitch. His fingers were his compass, the seams a topographical map, pointing the way home.

  The ball nestled in a V between his fingers. That V was his sight—a sharpshooter’s guide. “All the time I’m pitching I see this,” he said, splaying his fingers. “When I pick the ball out of the glove and here, and here, and here, all the time I look at this. The only time I stop seeing it is as I release the ball.”

  Now the arm came forward like a whip, hurtling the ball in its assault on home plate. The power generated by his lower body traveled upward and exploded through his fingertips. The catapult had done its job. The transfer of energy was complete.

  “It’s KISS,” he told the doctors with that familiar Brooklyn shrug. “Keep It Simple, Stupid.”

  Of course, it isn’t simple. The experts had lots of questions, some of which couldn’t be answered with a Magic Marker. They were having trouble visualizing that thing he did with his foot on the pitching rubber. He got up from behind the table and placed himself on an imaginary pitching mound, asking them to envision a hundred-pound weight at his foot and the best way to go about moving it. He swung his left leg out to the side, as if to push the object with a scissor kick. “There’s no way I’m going to do it this way,” he said.

  Then he tipped his left foot inward and pushed the imaginary weight again. “I’m going to turn my foot and push as hard as I can this way,” he said. “If my foot is in this position, the minute I pick my right foot up, I’m gone. I can’t not do it.”

  His hands were cupped at his waist as if in prayer, his feet splayed in that familiar bowed angle. His weight shifted from back to front, the momentum of his body carrying him toward home. The years faded and all that remained was the blank, white movie screen behind him. It was easy to project onto it a different scene—say the corrugated pavilion in deep center field at Dodger Stadium. It didn’t take much imagination at all to see him on the mound, warming up again.

  Chapter 2

  THE PREGAME SHOW

  SUNSET ON SEPTEMBER 9, 1965, was at 7:08 P.M. The lights were on at Dodger Stadium, obliterating the last vestiges of smog and smoke lingering over Watts some ten miles away. It was that last moment before darkness compromises the light. But the absent sun still asserted its control over the ebbing day.

  Sandy Koufax, the Dodgers’ starting pitcher, knew he was in the gloaming of his baseball career. He had not won a game in three weeks. Not since black Los Angeles had exploded in rage. Not since he watched in horror as San Francisco Giants pitcher Juan Marichal bludgeoned John Roseboro with a baseball bat. Not since he had confided in his friend Phil Collier, the beat reporter for the San Diego Union, that the next season would be his last.

  Traumatic arthritis in his left elbow required him to douse his body with Capsolin, a hot sauce derived from red hot chili peppers, before every game. Trainers used tongue depressors to apply it, smearing him with the stuff the way you’d spread mustard on a Dodger Dog. Bill Buhler, the head trainer, wore surgical gloves for this procedure; otherwise his wife wouldn’t let him put his hands beneath the sheets when he got into bed.

  All season, Koufax had been taking Butazolidine pills and cortisone shots. Empirin with codeine was a staple of his pregame diet. Afterward, he bathed his arm in a tub of ice water cold enough to chill three postgame beers left behind by the trainers. When the bottles were empty, the treatment was done. But the inevitable erosion of time, bone, and cartilage had not yet compromised his ability. He could still throw the tantalizing curve that broke like a waterfall. And he could still blow.

  There were times, many times, when he would come into the dugout before the game mindful of the Dodgers’ paltry offense and tell his teammates: “Just get me one. All I need is one.” No one thought he was bragging. Other times, he would emerge from the tunnel kvetching, “I can’t get loose. I ain’t got shit.” They’d watch him dangle from the dugout roof trying to stretch, the only time he ever looked ungainly, and laugh: “It’s in the bag. Big Boy’s got it tonight.”

  This was not one of those times. It was just another Thursday night in September: an improbable confluence of lives, careers, dreams, and fates. There were no bullpen portents or predictions, only the usual great expectations. The Dodgers had lost their last two games to the hated, league leading Giants to fall a half game behind in second place. A scheduling quirk had brought the dismal, last place Chicago Cubs to Los Angeles for a one-game visit. The U.S. Weather Service had predicted light to moderate smog and a game-time temperature in the seventies. The ball wouldn’t carry; it never did at night. By the late innings, batting helmets and bullpen chairs would acquire a fine residue of condensation, as dampness settled into the basin of Chavez Ravine. It was a foreca
st almost as providential as the scheduled pitching matchup.

  Koufax (21-7) vs. Hendley (2-2)

  Elsewhere in the continental United States, the outlook was not so fair. A killer hurricane named Betsy had forced 250,000 people from their coastal homes, postponing a chess match between Soviet Vasily Smyslov and American wunderkind Bobby Fischer. On the comics page, Lucy, from the Peanuts crew, was already cursing the darkness. The morning paper also brought news of the 650th American casualty in Vietnam, where 108,000 U.S. troops were now engaged in combat. In Dallas, Jack Ruby told a press conference that people in high places were suppressing facts about the Kennedy assassination. In Boston, a headline proclaimed: “Negro Children Invade White Schools.” In San Francisco, Marichal was making his first start at Candlestick Park since his suspension for the attack on Roseboro. In New York, Major League Baseball announced that the first game of the world series would be played on October 6, Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.

  Help!, the Beatles’ new color movie, had been held over at Los Angeles theaters for a second smash week. Schoolboys preparing to return to Orange County classrooms were warned that Beatle-bobs would not be tolerated in public schools. Dorothy Dandridge was found dead in her West Hollywood apartment. Three weeks after the worst racial rioting in U.S. history, the Los Angeles Times reported “Two Fires Flare in Burned Riot Area Buildings.” A one-paragraph item buried deep inside the news hole explained:

  Firemen quickly extinguished two blazes which began seven minutes apart Wednesday in burned-out buildings in the south Los Angeles riot area. Officials said both may have been set by Molotov cocktails. The first fire was reported at 3:07 P.M. in the ruins of a commercial building at Vernon and Central Aves. The other started at 3:14 P.M. in the abandoned theater at Vernon and Broadway.

  Ten miles away, at Dodger Stadium, Koufax was preparing to try to win his twenty-second game. Emotionally and geographically, Dodger Stadium is as far as you can get from Brooklyn and still be in the continental United States. It is gaudy in its expanse, luxurious in its spaciousness. Nestled in the Elysian Hills, with the purple San Gabriel Mountains standing sentinel to the north, it feels at once intimate and expansive. The nooks and crannies of urban constraint do not pertain. The trolley car dodgers of the forgotten borough, who gave the franchise its name, are a distant and severed memory. Mass transportation? Forget it. Parking we got: twenty-one terraced lots, vast, undulating swaths of concrete circling the ravine which the Los Angeles city fathers had ceded to Walter O’Malley in order to lure him out of Brooklyn.

  He created a cheerful place, often called the most beautiful stadium in baseball, dotted with eucalyptus and acacia, palm trees and rose bushes, its fixtures and appointments painted the color of swimming pools as seen from the sky. It was not just state of the art, it was a state of mind, a $22 million steel-and-concrete symbol of the continental shift in American culture. The sun still rose in the east. But that’s about all. Dodger Stadium spoke to the ascendancy of the West. It was the place to be, and to be seen, especially if Koufax was pitching.

  A half hour before the first pitch, Milton Berle spotted home plate umpire Ed Vargo by the backstop. Vargo was schmoozing with some tonsured Brothers from the Christian Brothers Winery. “Hey, Eddie, quit worrying about the Catholics,” Berle bellowed. “The Big Jew’s pitching tonight.” Uncle Miltie, always with his finger on the pulse of America, claimed authorship of the line: “Koufax is the greatest Jewish athlete since Samson.” Or maybe it was Georgie Jessel. His teammates called him “Super Jew.” “That, or God,” Stan Williams said.

  A decade earlier, when Koufax became a Dodger, there was no deification. Nor was there major league baseball in California. No red-eyes. No West Coast swings. So much had changed in America, in baseball, in Sandy Koufax’s life. Even staid, WASPy Time magazine had taken notice. A cover story was in the works. Koufax was baseball’s biggest name and biggest draw, filling ten thousand additional seats every time he pitched. He was buzz before there was a word for it. Dodger attendance had already surpassed two million after only sixty-five home games, prompting one old-time Brooklyn fan to crow, “You know what they counted when he pitched? How many were turned away.”

  On September 9, there were only 29,139 paying customers in the stands, a small crowd by his standards. The city was still smoldering from the violence of August. Among the spectators were season ticket holders who had been permitted to exchange their August 14 seats for a later date because of the riots. Barry Pinsky and six of his best friends were celebrating his fourteenth birthday in upper-deck reserved seats along the first base line. They had better tickets for the August 14 game. But Barry’s father didn’t want to take a bunch of kids to the stadium in the middle of the riots. So they were consigned to the upper reaches of Blue Heaven. Dinner before at Little Joe’s had assuaged some of the disappointment.

  Jess Whitehill Sr. and his son, Jess Jr., were sitting in a field box down the third base line. They had given away their season tickets—behind the visiting dugout—to Jess’s best friend and his father. Jess Jr. wasn’t that big on baseball anyway. It wasn’t hip. Surveying the crowd, he decided he was the only longhair in the stadium. But his mother said it was important to his father, so he went, dutifully filling out his official twenty-five-cent September scorecard—“Headin’ for Home!”—with the caricature Dodger being chased across the cover by ghouls in Pittsburgh and San Francisco caps.

  Jack Epstein and his brother, Jerry, were there with their father, Joe. He had surprised them with seats behind the home dugout courtesy of his childhood friend, Mickey Rudin, Frank Sinatra’s lawyer, who had no interest in seeing the Cubs. Thursday was the only night Joe could get off work. He managed the Brooklyn Theater on Brooklyn Avenue in East L.A. Koufax was the only baseball player this Russian immigrant, a former boxer who fought with the Star of David on his trunks, deigned to see.

  Greg Figge, a senior at Glendale High School, was on assignment for his photography class. The teacher had given him a choice: shoot a junior varsity football game or take photos of the Dodgers. He borrowed a Pentax camera and a telephoto lens from the school, bought a $1.50 ticket and took a seat in the left-field pavilion. There was no one sitting within twenty-five feet of him.

  Steve Soboroff, a Taft High School senior, was sitting in the first row of the upper-deck grandstand seats (orange level) directly behind home plate, resting his chin on the railing. Zev Yaroslavsky and his buddy Norm Schultz were sitting nearby. They saw their first professional game together when Los Angeles was still a minor-league town and their first Dodger game together at the Coliseum in 1958. Finding their seats among the half-filled rows, Zev thought, What a shame this place isn’t full.

  One of the empty seats belonged to Maxine Goldsmith’s father, Bob Smith. She had given birth to his first grandchild that morning. He had gone to the hospital instead of the game.

  Walter O’Malley was in the owner’s box; general manager Buzzie Bavasi was not with him. He was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, scouting a minor league pitching prospect named Don Sutton who was making his first trip west of the Mississippi. Richard Hume, a young attorney working in the office of J. William Hayes, Koufax’s lawyer and business advisor, was sitting in seats Koufax had left for him, a blank scorecard on his lap. Gary Adams, best friend of the Cubs’ rookie catcher Chris Krug, was sitting twenty rows up behind first base. Tommy Davis, the disabled Dodger outfielder, was roaming the stands. Bill DeLury, a Brooklyn guy who worked his way up in the organization and came west with the team, took a club-level seat along the third base line. Bill Buhler was in his customary spot in the dugout, a 16-mm Bell and Howell camera in his lap. Vin Scully settled himself before the microphone in the broadcast booth, preparing to call the game for KFI radio.

  There was no local television coverage of home games for the same reason there were no water fountains at the fan-friendly stadium when it first opened in 1962. O’Malley wanted people to come to the ballpark and spend. The folk
s at home had a choice. They could watch Buddy Hackett, the comedian who grew up next door to Koufax, starring in a one-hour TV special: “Once Upon a Tractor.” Or they could listen to Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett on KFI.

  Kevin Kennedy chose KFI. He was eleven years old and living in the west San Fernando Valley. He was supposed to be asleep in bed, but he was a Dodger fan. So he hid his transistor radio under his pillow and put the ear plug in his ear and hoped his parents wouldn’t come in to check on him.

  Also tuning in, and also in bed, was Garry Jones, a catering truck driver, who had to get up at 1:00 A.M. to make deliveries. He was in bed every night at 8:00 P.M. and expected to fall asleep listening to the game.

  In Lakewood, Russell Gilbert’s mother, Joy, turned on her transistor. They always listened to the Dodgers together but especially when Sandala was pitching. Four hundred miles north, Bliss Carnochan, a Stanford University humanities professor and heretic—a Dodger fan in Giant territory!—found KFI on his radio and prayed that he’d be able to hear the entire game before the night air carried the distant signal away.

  Dave Smith, a seventeen-year-old living in Escondido, thirty miles north of San Diego, made a different choice. And it wasn’t an easy one. His high school sweetheart was leaving for college in the morning. Dave chose the girl but left the radio on in his bedroom and a special four-hour reel of tape in the brand-new $200 Panasonic tape recorder he had purchased for such emergencies.

  Radio broadcasts were not routinely taped for posterity. Scully’s words, carried by the night air and fifty thousand watts clear channel, floated across the ballpark into the greater Los Angeles Basin. In some neighborhoods, you could walk down the block without missing a ball or a strike. People brought radios to the ballpark too. A cacophony of transistors filled the empty seats, making the crowd seem larger than it was. Sometimes, a pitcher would hear laughter echoing from the stands and know that Scully had said something funny. “You didn’t need a PA announcer,” Adams said. “You didn’t even need to see. You could hear Vin Scully’s voice all over the ballpark.”