Sandy Koufax

by Jane Leavy

  In his spare time, Milt took Koufax over to Lafayette to work on his control. The Aspromonte family lived across the street. One chill fall afternoon Sonny, the oldest, was watching the New York football Giants on television. At halftime, he went outside to get a breath of fresh air. “I heard the mitt cracking,” he said. “I said, ‘This kid is throwing too hard.’ I went inside and got a jacket. I said, ‘I gotta see this kid throw.’ In November. In the cold.

  “I say to the catcher, ‘What the hell is going on?’ The guy says, ‘My father’s working on his delivery.’ It was Wally and Milt Laurie. I stand up there. I give him a target. I made believe I had a bat. Wow, he looks good. I figured I’d look for the kid the next year on a sandlot team. What happens? He goes to the Univeristy of Cincinnati. He tries out for baseball and the rest is history. I said, ‘What’s his name?’ ‘Koufax.’ Oh, Koufax.”

  Koufax arrived at the University of Cincinnati in the fall of 1953 without an athletic scholarship. He was a walk-on for the freshman basketball team, a complete unknown to coach Ed Jucker. “He just showed up,” Jucker said. “I didn’t know him from anything. I told the head coach, ‘We might have something here.’ I always wondered why he came. Maybe he liked the way we played, how we cut our hair. I still don’t know.”

  Koufax was awarded a work-study scholarship after Jucker saw him practice. Walter Alston, who was about to be named manager of the Dodgers, was in the stands the night Koufax had his best game, against Miami of Ohio. He had enrolled in the school of liberal arts with the idea he might transfer to the school of architecture. He liked Cincinnati because it had a work-study program—eight weeks of school, then eight weeks of work. A scholar he wasn’t. He lived off-campus in a fraternity popular with Jews and other Easterners. His roommate was Norman “Left-ky” Lefkowitz, a guard on the basketball team, another New York kid. “When I think back it’s hard to say I knew him. He was sort of quiet, into himself. We should have had a lot in common. He was very bright. I remember before a test, instead of studying, he was reading Battle Cry. You’re too young to remember that. I said, ‘Sandy, why aren’t you studying?’ He said, ‘Oh, I gotta finish this.’ He was smart enough to be able to pass without studying.”

  Having a good time was more important. For that the college boys went across the river to the Kentucky towns of Covington and Newport where the ladies were a little faster and the bars a lot looser about who got served. Ed Rothenberg, another teammate, was with Koufax one day when “a pretty waitress, maybe thirty years old, started massaging his arm while taking the order. She said, ‘My God, Sandy, are you this hard all over?’ He smiled sheepishly. He was not the type who bragged or talked about women. He’d just go off by himself, across the river.”

  During spring break, the baseball team, also under Jucker’s supervision, made a road trip to New Orleans and Florida, which sounded a whole lot better than April in Bensonhurst. Tony Trabert, the tennis player, another Cincinnati kid, was playing an exhibition match against Ham Richardson of Tulane. In order to justify the cost of the trip, the athletic department arranged a schedule for the baseball team. “It was near the end of the season and Jucker was finding it hard to find players,” Lefkowitz said. “Sandy said, ‘I think I’ll go out for it. I played a little in high school.’”

  Koufax went to his coach and said: “I can pitch.”

  “Don’t bother me now, kid,” Jucker replied. “When the season’s over, I’ll come over and watch you throw.”

  Baseball try-outs at the University of Cincinnati were held indoors in the old gym, the Schmidlaff. It was a dank place that earned its nickname, “The Band Box.” The air was heavy, the space was tight, and the light even worse thanks to dark wood paneling above the tiled walls. The gym was just large enough to accommodate the distance between the mound and home plate—with perhaps two and a half feet behind the pitcher and the catcher. Jucker couldn’t find anyone willing to catch Koufax. “Anybody who tried, the ball would go right by them,” he said. “I can still hear that noise, I can hear it right now, as the ball hit the wood. Bang! Bang!”

  Don Nesbitt, another pitcher who tried out that day, witnessed the result in the shower: “Anyone who tried to catch him, they were just a series of bruises all over their backs, their behinds, the backs of their legs from the ball hitting the floor and tile wall and bouncing back.”

  Nesbitt refused even to play catch with him, hiding in the locker room until Koufax found somebody else to throw with. Two catchers, Bill Hall and Joe Miller, quit the team rather than deal with him. “Then,” Jucker said, “this big country kid stepped forward and said, ‘I think I can do it.’”

  Danny Gilbert settled optimistically into a crouch. Gilbert was a farm boy from Minford, Ohio, onetime home of Roy Rogers. He had met Koufax at the try-outs for the freshman basketball team. They spent a little time together, riding the roller coaster at Coney Island—Cincinnati’s version of the original.

  The first pitch he saw from Koufax was the real thing. “Oh, my gosh,” Gilbert said. “You ever take a sledgehammer and hit a knot in a piece of wood? You know how it bounces back? That’s how it felt.”

  They made the 1954 varsity squad and Gilbert started padding his glove, which he kept for the next fifty years. After graduating, Gilbert returned to Minford and became what he was supposed to be—a high school teacher and a guidance counselor. Koufax became what no one expected him to be. When Koufax returned to campus for the first time in February 2000 to attend a dinner honoring Jucker, it was his old battery mate, Danny Gilbert, who picked him up at the airport. He had tossed the old mitt in the trunk, just in case Sandy wanted to throw.

  The spring of 1954 was Koufax’s only season of intercollegiate baseball. Koufax was 3 and 1 with a 2.81 ERA. He had fifty-one strikeouts in thirty-two innings—and thirty walks. “With other pitchers, I’d work inside, outside, up and down,” Gilbert said. “With Sandy, we were working just to get it over the plate. When he got it over the plate, it was Katie bar the door.”

  The first scout to approach him was Bill Zinser, a bird dog for the Dodgers, who was also the only person ever to accuse Koufax of being a good hitter. The glowing report he sent to the front office promptly got lost in the paperwork at 215 Montague Street in downtown Brooklyn.

  Bill Zinser Scouting Report May 15, 1954

  * * *

  Arm

  A+

  Fielding

  A–

  Hitting

  A–

  Running Speed

  O+

  Accuracy

  A–

  Power

  A–

  Very good prospect, also a very good hitter

  Has averaged 16 strikeouts per game this season

  Aptitude—very good

  Aggressiveness—Outstanding

  Definite Prospect?—Yes

  Physical description, Tall—muscular—quick reflexes, well coordinated

  Other remarks: Going to U. of Cincinnati on Scholarship—not interested in pro ball until he graduates.

  Also plays 1st because of hitting ability.

  * * *

  The big game that spring was against Xavier, Cincinnati’s cross-town rival. Xavier was Catholic. Cincinnati was “diversified,” said Jim Bunning, the future Hall of Famer who was then coaching Xavier’s freshman basketball team. Rothenberg would recall that more than the usual elbows and insults were traded during the annual basketball matchup that winter. Koufax was looking forward to pitching against Xavier in the spring.

  The night before the game he sprained his ankle, falling down the stairs at his fraternity. He didn’t tell his coach. Buzz Boyle, a scout for the Cincinnati Reds, was at the game, as were Koufax’s basketball buddies, “Left-ky” and Rothenberg, both of whom remember the catcalls directed at him from the Xavier bench. “I couldn’t believe the nerve of those guys, making these Jewish cracks—big nose, sheeny, kike,” Rothenberg said. “He totally ignored it. I was getting angry. He acted like he didn�
��t even hear it. Afterward I said, ‘Sandy, how do you take this shit?’ He said, ‘Ed, the only way I can deal with this is to beat ’em.’”

  He didn’t. The winning pitcher that day was Irvin “Hank” Schmidt, the number-three man in Xavier’s pitching rotation. He was a former Marine with a menacing, sidearm delivery. Late in the game, he made the mistake of backing Koufax off the plate. “He kind of glared at me like, ‘You didn’t have to do that, I’m not going to hit the ball,’” Schmidt said. “I thought it was funny. I didn’t realize I was leadoff man the next inning. When he wound up, I started thinking about it. And I just started backing out of the batter’s box. Right where my knees were was where the fastball came. Otherwise, I might not be walking today.”

  Koufax lasted eight innings, giving up nine hits, including a 400-foot home run to a left-handed batter that landed on a hillside beyond the playing field. He lost the game and his temper, calling the umpire a sonofabitch over several disputed calls. “He’ll never make it” was Boyle’s glum assessment.

  Boys at Camp Chi Wan Da who competed against him every summer in everything from softball to tennis might well have agreed. “He was a great natural athlete and a big sore loser,” his friend Ken Bodenstein said. “That’s what boys would have called him anyway. He hated to lose. We knew that even as kids. We’d pick on him. We knew if we got to him, he’d just get wilder.”

  At the end of freshman year, Koufax went home to Brooklyn and a job at the Hudson River valley camp where his mother was the bookkeeper. He’d been a camper or counselor there since he was three. As a counselor, he made a lasting impression on one young boy, David Saks, who has been having recurring dreams about Koufax ever since. The campers loved the dirty jokes Koufax told and the softball games he organized. Saks will never forget the first words he heard Koufax utter: “I don’t give a shit what you guys do.”

  Some weekends, Wally Laurie came up to the Catskills to work out with him. Other times, Koufax went home to pitch for the Parkviews. “Milt sent Wally up to camp in his Journal-American delivery truck,” Dick Auletta remembers. “He’d bring him down, pitch, shower, sleep over, and take him back. And his folks knew nothing about it. The way we heard it, they weren’t too keen on baseball.”

  Scouts began coming around. That summer, he and Bodenstein were waiting tables in the guest dining room the camp maintained for visiting parents. “Sunday lunch was the big meal, and he’s running to the telephone because Branch Rickey is calling,” Bodenstein said. “I’d have to serve the whole meal to five tables.”

  The momentum of his improbable baseball career was gathering force. The Yankees, with their customary ethnic sensitivity, sent a Jewish scout to court him, offending his family and precluding any possibility of a future in pinstripes. When he went to the Polo Grounds to try out for the Giants, he forgot his baseball glove. Frank Shellenback, the pitching coach, took him to the locker room to borrow one. Johnny Antonelli, a lefty pitcher, was summoned to the clubhouse door. “He said, ‘Can I please borrow your glove?’ I remember he called me ‘Mr. Antonelli.’ First time I’d been called that in a clubhouse, and ever since too.”

  Using Antonelli’s glove, Koufax went out and threw several pitches over the catcher’s head. So much for the Giants. Ed McCarrick, a scout for the Pittsburgh Pirates, was his most ardent suitor. At his urging, Branch Rickey, then general manager of the Pirates, sent his son Branch Jr. and his most trusted aide, Clyde Sukeforth, to have a look. When Rickey was still running the Dodgers and searching for the right man to break the color bar, he sent Sukey to see Jackie Robinson. When Robinson played his first game in 1947, Sukey was his manager (filling in for the suspended Leo Durocher). When the bullpen phone rang on that fateful October day in 1951, Sukey was the coach who recommended bringing in Ralph Branca to face Bobby Thomson. Three years later, Sukey was back in Brooklyn eyeballing Koufax through the wisps of fog hovering over Dyker Field.

  Sukey would remember that Sunday morning with a clarity he brought to little else in the fall of 2000. In his last days, his vision was gone and his hearing was going. It was the dawn of a new millennium and Sukey was almost a century old. Callers were discouraged. Those who persevered were admonished to speak loudly and to use simple sentences. His granddaughter said, by way of introduction, “He may think you’re Sandy’s wife.”

  Sukeforth was just back from the hospital for cataract surgery. But, oh, he remembered scouting Koufax, remembered it in the present tense. “This boy is unbelievable,” he said, his voice as strong as the memory. “I’m as high on him as anybody. Everybody regards him as the best prospect.”

  He spoke highly of “the boy’s habits and disposition,” dismissing as inconsequential the wildness “you expect from a boy like that” and the fact that Koufax got clobbered in a sandlot game later that day. “How hard did he throw?” Sukey said. “Harder than anybody else we had. He has what you look for in qualities. I mean the good Lord was good to him.”

  Sukeforth quickly arranged for an audition before Mr. Rickey Sr. Grover “Deacon” Jones, another prospect, and Koufax took a midnight sleeper to Pittsburgh out of Penn Station. They lay in the dark talking about their prospects and trying to be cool about them. Not that Koufax had to work at it. “Cool,” Jones said. “That’s just how he is.”

  Dick Groat was at Forbes Field when Koufax arrived the next morning. Like Koufax, Groat had begun his athletic career as a basketball player, a star at Duke University. “We always parked in left field and came in through the gate, past the visiting bullpen,” Groat said. “As I walked through the gate I saw all the Pittsburgh brass—Branch Rickey Sr., Clyde Sukeforth, Rex Bowen, George Sisler, Fred Haney, the manager—and there’s a young boy throwing, great body, a marvelous delivery.”

  Mr. Rickey was excited. Groat could tell by the vigorous way he chewed on his unlit cigar and grabbed at his hat. Sam Narron, the bullpen coach, was catching. “They finally brought our third-string catcher in to catch him,” Groat said. “They sent one of the kids to the locker room to say, ‘You better get out here or he’s gonna kill Sam.’”

  In fact, he broke Narron’s thumb. When the workout was over, Sukey quoted Rickey as saying, “‘This is the greatest arm I’ve ever seen.’ Mr. Rickey was in love with him. You don’t see talent like that.”

  Koufax made a second trip to Pittsburgh with his parents expecting to sign a contract, but they left town without the anticipated offer or an explanation. Apparently, Branch Rickey Jr. remembered seeing Koufax get shellacked at Dyker Field and discouraged his father from signing him. John Galbraith, the Pirates owner, refused to budge from his initial offer of $15,000. Later, after selling off their New Orleans farm team, the Pirates came back to Koufax with a promise to better any offer by $5,000. But by then Al Campanis had seen God.

  Many claimed credit for alerting the Dodger scout to this “Kovacs” kid. Jimmy Murphy, the high school columnist for the Brooklyn Eagle, was often mentioned. Pat Auletta wasn’t. Pat was a mover and shaker in the sandlot world and owner of a sporting goods store across the street from Nathan’s Famous in Coney Island. His sons, Dick and Ken, the author, remember their father urging Campanis, “You gotta come see this kid.”

  Bob Marino, who played third base and outfield, savors the memory of Campanis showing up at Lafayette High School in a black Caddy convertible with the top down, wearing a great black cape. Biggest car he’d ever seen. Koufax made as much of an impression on Campanis as Campanis did on Marino. He drove Koufax and his father home in the Caddy and scheduled a try-out. “First time he saw him throw, he invited him to Ebbets Field,” Al’s son, Jimmy, said.

  After Koufax was signed, the Dodgers donated the satin uniforms once worn for night games to the Parkviews as a gesture of thanks. Auletta wore Duke Snider’s uniform proudly though with some difficulty. The sleeves dangled below his knuckles. But the symbolism outweighed the inconvenience. “One of us made it,” he said. “And with dignity and class.”

  For several years ther
eafter, until the team moved out of Brooklyn (and until the clubhouse guys explained major league etiquette to him), Koufax continued to buy his spikes and gloves at Pat Auletta’s store.

  In September, just before returning to school, Koufax pitched off the mound in Ebbets Field for the first time. Nobody in the organization made the connection with the University of Cincinnati fireballer who’d been invited to visit Brooklyn by their bird dog, Bill Zinser, earlier in the spring. Vin Scully, the young Dodger broadcaster who had taken over the catbird seat from Red Barber, was in the locker room when Koufax arrived. “There was this fellow getting dressed into a baseball uniform,” Scully said. “And the thing that I noticed right away—he was stripped to the waist at the time—he was fully tanned, which made me think he didn’t play much baseball. Because certainly in those days, ballplayers had what you’d call a truck driver’s tan. The arms would be burned but the chest would be white. Sandy was completely tan.

  “The second thing I found unusual as I looked at him was his back. It was extremely broad. And if I remember again, he had this large muscle on the right side of the back which I believe he inherited from his mother.” “Wide back strong” is how Dodger trainers described him.

  Dave Anderson, later a Pulitzer Prize–winning sports columnist for the New York Times, was a cub reporter for the Eagle, looking for an angle on a rainy day. “They told Sandy, ‘Stick around and when the field dries we’ll have you throw,’” Anderson recalled.

  As manager Walter Alston and scouting director Fresco Thompson watched from the owner’s box, Campanis assumed a hitter’s stance at the plate. “He actually liked to stand in to get the feeling of the batter,” Anderson said. “Koufax started to steam the fastball in on him. Al Campanis said—and I’ll never forget this—‘The hair on my arms rose, and the only other time that happened was the first time I saw the Sistine Chapel.’” (“On my neck, too,” he told his son, Jimmy.)