by Jane Leavy
Everyone played: stickball, punchball, square ball, Gi-Gi ball. The streets and playgrounds were multicultural before there was a word for it. Diversity was a fact, not a goal. Political correctness was preached only by Mao Tse-tung. Italians were guineas. Jews were born with silver spoons in their mouths. Nobody took offense. “My baseball coach wanted me to come out,” Glatman said, explaining how he became a player. “He said, ‘I need another Jew to persecute.’”
Baseball, specifically the Dodgers, was a religion. Many of the players lived in the borough’s neighborhoods. The sounds of the game suffused the streets, the crack of the bat ricocheting from one apartment radio to the next. “My wife would go shopping and go across the street and someone would holler, ‘Hey, the Dodgers got runners on first and second,’” Duke Snider said. “Everybody would have their radio on. She’d go into Bernard Altman in downtown Brooklyn on Flatbush Avenue. There would be a radio on the speaker system. They loved us and we loved them. It was very special.”
Catholic kids like Joe Torre and his older brother, Frank, went to early Sunday mass wearing their spikes so they could go straight to the ball field. Orthodox Jewish boys in the many neighborhood yeshivas worshiped Jackie Robinson. Among Koufax and his friends, Judaism was often more cultural than practiced. Many of them, including Koufax, were not bar mitzvahed. “It’s not that he was religious, none of us were,” said Gloria Marshak Weissberg, a classmate at Lafayette. “It was the way we grew up. You’re Jewish but you don’t hold it up. Everyone would go to Temple on the High Holidays and hang out. Friday-night services? Nobody went. You were Jewish because you were born Jewish. Because you were from Brooklyn. The schools closed on the holidays because the teachers were all Jewish. You were Jewish by osmosis. You grew up in a shtetl.”
The Lafayette crowd hung out at the Famous Cafeteria, lingering over a bottomless cup of coffee, at Marine Park, the Parade Grounds, and on the boardwalk at Coney Island just a couple of miles away. For kicks, they memorized the Hit Parade and Dodger batting averages and debated which was better ice cream, Carvel or Sealtest. There was no television. When there was nothing else to do, Herbie Cohen says, “We watched the wall.” They formed clubs with important-sounding names—the Warriors, the Legends, the Seraphs—and paid off building superintendents so they could use unoccupied basement apartments for clubhouses, “borrowing” furniture from whomever and wherever they could. Joe McCarthy was less a presence in their lives than Holden Caulfield. J. D. Salinger’s seminal teenage novel, decrying the phonies of the adult world, was published in 1951. Two years later, Hugh Hefner unveiled the first issue of a new magazine named Playboy. “Whatever the 1950s became under Ike, it hadn’t gotten there yet,” said Richard Kaufman (Class of ’52). “The chaste fifties hadn’t begun. We were still in the postwar boom period. We were having a helluva good time.”
This was Brooklyn before urban blight, before baseball flight. It was a time of unbridled American optimism. We could win a war, stop Hitler, integrate the major leagues. Anybody could grow up to be president or a starting pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers, even Sandy Koufax. “Bensonhurst was a place of hope, where accidents could become adventures,” Cohen said. “It was pregnant with possibility. What was conceivable was achievable. There was a feeling that in America you could transform yourself. We were the children of the high projections of our parents.”
It was a can-do culture and there were plenty of people ready to help, teaching boys how to pitch, catch, wrestle, debate, behave. At Ebbets Field, Happy Felton presided over the Knothole Gang, bringing neighborhood kids onto the field to meet real baseball players. And he wouldn’t hesitate to lecture them, as he did one young man caught on newsreel footage saying hi to his dad. “Take your hat off when you talk to your father, son,” Hap said sternly, yanking the cap from the boy’s cowlicked head.
Boys were boys and girls (in Peter Pan collars) did what was expected of them. When they didn’t, it was news. “A girl appeared in the press box at the Polo Grounds,” a Brooklyn Eagle columnist huffed. Thank God, she was only a messenger.
It was to this world, this corner, this optimism, that Koufax returned at the beginning of ninth grade. Wilpon quickly became his closest friend. They slept at each other’s apartments, ate dinner with each other’s parents, confided teenage despairs and dreams. It was a carefree time filled with salami sandwiches and whole milk and sandlot baseball. They didn’t worry about body fat percentages or what they’d be when they grew up.
They were the children and grandchildren of immigrants who came to America believing the streets were paved with gold. They were lower-middle-class Jews, sons of the working class, renters, humble enough in their economic standing to be awed by the first brick facade on the block. A mobster’s home, Wilpon recalled, it blew up one afternoon while they were out playing ball. One thing they knew: Nine to five held no appeal at all. “Brooklyn had an enormous effect on Sandy’s background and thinking,” Wilpon said. “And in many cases, what he did not want. Sandy and I didn’t want to be straphangers and go on the subway every day. I think the Brooklyn experience permeated his life.”
It’s in his Brooklyn shrug, that characteristic bit of body language which says everything about who you are while saying nothing at all. “The difference between Brooklyn then and maybe places like Brooklyn now is that when someone does something well, scholar or athlete or actress, people tend to pull them down,” Wilpon said. “Just the opposite in Brooklyn in those years. People were there for each other. People tried to build you up: We’re proud of you. That’s what I mean by the Brooklyn thing. Sandy wasn’t a typical Brooklyn guy, but the Brooklyn thing was inside him.”
As Koufax says, “It holds my youth.”
Before it became a subject for coffee-table books, a locus for nostalgia, Brooklyn was just a place—a place to hang out and a place to want out of. Eventually the Bums left and so did most of the guys from the corner. Some changed their names, moved to California, and made money. Herb Cohen moved to Washington and became a best-selling author. John Sprizzo became a federal judge. Vito Farinola became Vic Damone. Wilpon became the owner of the New York Mets. And Sandy Koufax became the most unlikely pitcher in the history of major league baseball. But wherever they went, whatever they became, they took Brooklyn with them. As Sid Young says, “Being from Brooklyn is a full-time job.”
Koufax was known as a quiet kid, always with the basketball. “A close-mouthed kid” is how he described himself in his autobiography, noting that his mother requested an early copy “so she could find out something about me.” He preferred dribbling a ball to talking about himself. He preferred basketball to everything. He liked to fix things (spaghetti and radios). He put ketchup on everything he ate, the sort of inane biographical detail that follows the famous to the obituary file. He was “a happy, healthy, dirty-faced kid,” his sister Edie told The Sporting News.
Angelo Plaia, his general science teacher, who still calls him Sanford (a 90 student with excellent manners), said, “I had a lot of students. Nobody knew Sandy Koufax was going to be Sandy Koufax, not even Sandy Koufax. Isn’t it funny I remember him?”
Gloria Marshak was a member of a girls club called the Seraphs—angels in Hebrew—who hung out with the boys from the Lafayette basketball team. Her best friend, known as Bootsie, was Koufax’s girlfriend for a while. She vividly recalls them sitting apart in a corner of the clubhouse. “I ask myself why I remember him,” she said. “The other guys were so noisy. They tummeled, they danced. He radiated a presence. Even as a child he had that. His shyness filled the room.”
Quietness distinguished him, a stillness and self-sufficiency at odds with the motion he was otherwise constantly in. “He was outside the chaos,” Cohen said. “Even if he never pitched, he’d be mentioned. It’s like he knew things. In the Jewish tradition, there is a luftmensch—a person with the capability to see things that more accustomed eyes miss. When you’re different you think. Unbelonging makes you free.”
For Koufax and his crew, sports was not so much an act of conforming as defying. It was not just a vehicle for assimilation, it was a way of saying no to the immigrant mentality their forebears had brought with them to Ellis Island—what Irving Howe, in World of Our Fathers, called “the suspicion of the physical, fear of hurt,” and “anxiety over the sheer pointlessness of play.”
Herb Cohen’s sister, Renee, remembers her brother’s gang as a bunch of bums. “We were children of immigrants. The goal was a girl should be a teacher, a boy should be a doctor. You had to get an education. These guys were rebels. I was the goody-two-shoes. I ratted on Herbie. His notebooks all had batting averages on them. They were American kids and they were not going to follow the line. They were not going to sit down and be the perfect students. It was a form of rebellion.”
Gloria Marshak agrees: “None of these boys worked hard at class. Their ambitions were to become famous, all of them.” They lived for sports and gave each other exalted names. Richie Kaufman, the 164-pound Lafayette linebacker and future economist, was known as “Rug”—for rugged. Burt Abramowitz, the starting forward on the basketball team, was “Big Job.” Koufax was “the Animal.” “He was a fierce competitor, contrary to his demeanor, which is very soft and easygoing,” Wilpon said.
His hardworking parents were not invested in their son’s physical prowess except when it came to football. His mother, a sensible woman with a good set of shoulders (Dodger scouts would note these later in assessing his physique), rebuffed the entreaties of Lafayette’s gridiron coach. Jerry Goldstein, Koufax’s occasional teammate in two-on-two Association Football games played on the streets of Brooklyn, ran into a parked car and chipped a tooth trying to catch one of his passes. He remembers Koufax as the kid who could throw a football two and a half sewers. Wilpon remembers him as the kid who could catch any throw.
In 1951, a coaches’ strike shut down scholastic sports at public schools across the city. Koufax and his buddies spent their time that year at the Jewish Community House of Bensonhurst. They led the “J” house basketball team to the Jewish Welfare Board championship. The team picture still hangs by the door to the gym, where water pipes clank and radiators hiss and the perpetually optimistic score (Home O—Visitor O) is posted on the old scoreboard. The J’s mission is still to “ennoble Jewish youth.” But today the language heard in the halls is more likely Russian than English, thanks to the influx of Soviet émigrés in the neighborhood.
Milt Gold was director of athletics when Koufax competed there. One day, he told Wilpon: “If I had one year with Sandy I could train him to be an Olympic athlete in anything other than speed sports.” Wilpon didn’t need to be convinced. Koufax had him pinned to a wrestling mat. “This guy was a world-class athlete at age seventeen,” Wilpon said.
This Richie Kaufman does not dispute. Back from college, he made the mistake of bragging that he had made the varsity wrestling team. Next thing he knew Koufax was all over him. “That kid was so wiry, all skin and bone, no fat anywhere,” Kaufman said. “We wrestled and wrestled. I wrestled him to a draw but to me it was a defeat. Little did I know it was a moral victory. I had a roaring headache for the rest of the day.”
Koufax was six feet two and built. He had dark hair, dark eyes, and God-given muscle definition. “Everything Sandy Koufax ate turned to muscle,” said Eliot Greenfeld, Trip’s brother. “When we were in high school a bunch of guys came up to visit us from Washington. So these guys are walking out on the boardwalk. They pointed to a guy running down the beach. ‘Look at that guy, he’s built like a Greek god.’ We looked. It was Koufax. He was sixteeen years old then.”
“Nobody knew how strong Sandy was,” Buzzie Bavasi said. “Great upper body. Got it from his mother. Lovely woman.”
Great lower body too. In a pickup basketball game at the YMCA, Cohen said, “he split his gym shorts, his thighs were so big. Cheap shorts.”
Raymond Conrad lived in the apartment next door. It was tough being a newcomer to Benshonhurst—not to mention being a short Scandinavian thirteen-year-old in a neighborhood of rough-and-tumble Italians and Jews. “To me he was massive in size. The young boys always gathered around this gentle giant and he encouraged them to joust with him and try to punch him in the stomach. Sandy was virtually made of steel. I threw a very hard jab at him and was almost reduced to tears as my fist simply bounced off his body.”
Mike Napoli was Big Man in the neighborhood—a catcher signed by the Dodgers out of Lafayette in 1951 for a bonus of $10,000. Not bad considering his parents earned maybe $3,200 a year. The Torre brothers, Frank and Joe, both of whom would become major-leaguers, played sandlot ball, and the Aspromonte boys too—Kenny and Bobby also made it to the bigs. They lived across the street from the high school—it was their home not so far away from home. Tommy Davis played basketball for Boys High. Joe Pignatano, aka “Piggy,” trained as a TV repairman at Westinghouse Vocational before he signed on as a catcher with the Dodgers. “You grew up in the streets,” Frank Torre said. “If you didn’t adjust you wouldn’t survive. People who grew up in other neighborhoods, even though they were maybe more talented, didn’t have the luxury, the pleasure of having the fun we did as kids. Hell, we gathered whoever was around in the morning. We’d go to the park and play some kind of a ballgame. If we only had three people, you had a pitcher, a backstop, and a right fielder. You figured out a game to play. If you didn’t have a ball, you’d wrap up paper with a rubber band. There was always some improvisation.”
Later, when, improbably, so many of them from the neighborhood became major-leaguers, it was like they never left home. They roomed together, fished together, got drunk together, and eventually grew old together. One evening in Milwaukee after a particularly egregious day at the plate against Koufax, Joe Torre, then a young catcher for the Braves, was consoling himself at a hotel bar. A waitress came over with an invitation to join Koufax at his table. “I told her to tell him, ‘He’s got to come to me ’cause I went to him all day,’” Torre said. “We sat and had a couple of drinks and got a little blistered.”
When, in 1999, Torre was diagnosed with prostate cancer, Koufax showed up at Yankee spring training camp asking to see the manager. Don Zimmer, the old Dodger working as Torre’s bench coach, was sitting in the clubhouse when he arrived. “He comes to the clubhouse door,” Zim said. “There’s a cop out there. The cop comes to me and says, ‘A guy says he’s a friend of yours and wants to see you.’ I said, ‘Who is that?’ He said, ‘Sandy Koufax.’ I said, ‘You’re kidding.’ Koufax would have been satisfied to talk to me in the driveway. He spent forty-five minutes talking pitching with the Yankee coaches. Talked more than all the years I played with him total.”
Then he went to see Torre, demanding to know, “What is it with these Brooklyn catchers?” Piggy had received the same unwelcome diagnosis that spring. “He called me, he found me, knowing how much it meant to…” Torre paused, seeking refuge in an impersonal grammatical construction endemic to Brooklyn, “…the person.”
When he was growing up, baseball was neither Koufax’s dream nor his passion. His dream was to play for the New York Knicks. Wilpon was the sandlot star for whom a major league career was confidently predicted, the boy with all the tools, a polished pitcher at age sixteen who piqued every scout’s interest. Koufax was a tagalong. Sometimes he kept Wilpon company when he was summoned to Ebbets Field to throw batting practice. The Dodgers made Wilpon an offer; he does not remember how much. “Everybody got an offer,” he says.
Koufax wasn’t good enough to play on Wilpon’s sandlot team. Wilpon pitched for the exalted Falcons and Blue Jays, who competed in state and national tournaments. Koufax caught for the Tomahawks in “Pop” Secol’s Ice Cream League; they already had a pitcher—the guy became a surgeon. “Sandy volunteered to be our catcher,” Goldstein said. “We owned a righty catcher’s mitt—and we couldn’t afford to buy a lefty catcher’s mitt—so Sandy put the mitt on the ‘wrong’ hand and did a helluva job catching with
it.” Koufax would remember turning the mitt inside out in order to catch with it, one of Pop’s old tricks. He was a lefty, too.
Anyone on the receiving end of a Koufax snowball knew he had an arm but no one thought to ask him to pitch, certainly not Charlie Sheerin, Lafayette’s baseball coach, briefly a major-leaguer. Plenty of guys will tell you now they faced Koufax when, but his old buddies know better: “Yeah, well, he musta done it from first base.” He was so impotent at the plate one coach had a guy with a broken leg pinch-hit for him. They sawed off Walt Laurie’s cast and told him to get a bat. “Sandy couldn’t hit a cow in the ass with a bag of rice at five feet,” said Dom Fristachi, who played with Wilpon. “In his senior year I think he got, like, one hit.” Walter O’Malley and Jackie Robinson were present at the annual Ice Cream League banquet when Koufax received the award for Best Overall Basketball Player.
Later, when Koufax became Brooklyn’s biggest star, he gave “Pop” Secol a ball autographed, “From all of us who you gave a chance to play.” “Pop” had a gold dog tag made up with those words engraved on it—and four small diamonds to signify Koufax’s no-hitters—and wore it until his son, Steve, removed it before his funeral.
Koufax didn’t play much basketball either until his family returned to Brooklyn, where every open space was a court, or a half court, and every fire escape ladder was a potential basket. Others practiced shooting; Koufax practiced the anonymous, contentious skill of rebounding. The first time Arthur Greenfeld encountered him on the court Koufax didn’t get a single rebound. “I had him completely boxed out,” Greenfeld said. “He said to me afterward, ‘Why can’t I get a rebound?’ I said, ‘You’re not getting position.’ A month later, I couldn’t get a rebound from him.”