by Jane Leavy
“This is what I do. I go around with the shirt and people write me checks. Sometimes I get a hundred thousand dollars, sometimes a hundred. What I do is I go around and ask these people, ‘What is the importance of Sandy Koufax?’ Then I take out this rumpled shirt from an Air Express box and say, ‘Here, put it on.’ And they give me money. I’ve sold it twenty to thirty times over. I told Mel Brooks, ‘I’ve sold this thing five thousand percent.’”
He’s got the snapshots to prove it: a stack of glossy three-by-fives featuring captains of industry with Koufax’s rookie jersey draped over their shoulders like a prayer shawl. “This guy—a hundred thousand dollars,” Blumenthal said, flipping through a stack of pictures. “This guy, a hundred thousand.” He’s raised over $2 million this way.
It isn’t the money that’s impressive. It’s the faces: aging, wealthy, accomplished men—industrialists and bankers, investors and mergers-and-acquisitions specialists, capitalists all. These balding, concave-chested bar-mitzvah boys put on Sandy Koufax’s uniform and kvell. They are transformed.
Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, the Day of Atonement. Those who repent their sins are inscribed in the Book of Life. On October 6, 1965, Koufax was inscribed forever in the Book of Life as the Jew who refused to pitch on Yom Kippur. Bruce Lustig, who would grow up to be the senior rabbi at the Washington Hebrew Congregation in Washington, D.C., was seven years old and attending services in Tennessee with his parents that day. He took a transistor radio with him, the wire running up the inside of his starched white shirt. When the rabbi called upon the congregants to stand and pray, the earpiece came loose and the voice of Vin Scully crackled through the sanctuary. His mother walloped him with her purse and banished him to the synagogue library, where the television was tuned to NBC’s coverage of the game. Live and in color when live and in color was something to brag about.
The Dodgers lost but Koufax won. In that moment, he became known as much for what he refused to do as for what he did on the mound. By refusing to pitch, Koufax defined himself as a man of principle who placed faith above craft. He became inextricably linked with the American Jewish experience. As John Goodman put it in the movie The Big Lebowski: “Three thousand years of beautiful tradition: from Moses to Sandy Koufax.”
In Jewish households, he was the New Patriarch: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Sandee. A moral exemplar, and single too! (Such a catch!) He was every Jewish mother’s dream, and some with eligible daughters didn’t hesitate to say so. During the 1966 World Series in Baltimore, one very determined matron got his roommate, Norm Sherry, on the phone. “I vant to talk to Sandy. I got a lovely daughter I vant him to meet.”
Jewish mothers with sons were equally enthralled. Kenny Holtzman faced Koufax at Wrigley Field in September 1966, the day after Yom Kippur. They had moved their scheduled starts back a day so they could attend services. There had even been some discussion, Holtzman recalls, about going to synagogue together. A TV producer at WGN took Holtzman’s family to his temple, where Kenny prayed he would beat the sonofabitch the next day. His mother prayed for guidance about whom to root for. “He was every Jewish mother’s idol and now he’s pitching against her son,” Holtzman said. “Clearly, she didn’t want anyone to lose. I said, ‘But, Mother, one of us has to lose.’ She said, ‘Maybe you can get a no-decision.’”
Dr. Jonas Salk volunteered to procure tickets for Koufax, making the offer through coach Danny Ozark. Salk—whom Ozark refers to as “the polio guy”—presented the Catholic coach with a religious medal in honor of the occasion. It had Saint Christopher on one side and the Star of David on the other. “When you go to see the Jews, turn it over,” Salk told him.
The next day, Holtzman’s mother and his girlfriend, and her best friend, president of the Sandy Koufax Fan Club at the University of Illinois-Champaign, were in the stands watching as Kenny held the Dodgers hitless for eight innings. Mrs. Holtzman’s son won; her hero lost. She told Kenny she had decided to root for him to be just like Koufax.
A bumper sticker from the era proclaimed: “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Sandy.” His predominantly Christian colleagues admired his chutzpah. For them, the decision not to pitch was a political act, one that would not have been tolerated from a .500 pitcher, one that sent a message to baseball’s hierarchy. As Jim Bunning put it, “We have our rights and my choice is not to play on Yom Kippur.” The political subtext did not go unnoticed among the generation of Baby Boomers who would grow old still thinking of themselves as sixties kids. To Charley Steiner, a sixteen-year-old growing up on Long Island, it was “a quintessential sixties move. And it predated Ali and the draft. For Jewish teenagers, it was like, ‘Wow.’”
Zev Yaroslavsky, who was sixteen when he counted the outs of the perfect game, still wonders, “Does he know what he means to people? Growing up, it was a big deal. You’d take off for the Jewish holidays and the Gentile teachers would look at you and say, ‘How do I know you’re not taking off to go to the beach?’ All of a sudden, you didn’t have to explain yourself.”
He was an object lesson to bar mitzvah boys (reform, conservative, and orthodox), a standard to which Jewish parents held their children, as well as a measuring stick of their assimilation into American culture. In the Brooklyn yeshiva where Alan Dershowitz studied as a boy, they discussed his parentage with Talmudic fervor. They heard he was adopted but (thank God!) Jewish by birth. “That’s all we ever cared about. We wanted to make sure we can claim our rights.”
The Jewish community laid claim to him, ascribing to him a religiosity he never acknowledged or displayed. “Did you know the day he blossomed was the evening of the day Adolf Eichmann was captured?” Buddy Silverman, editor of The Jewish Athletes Hall of Fame, asks breathlessly. He is referring to May 23, 1960, when Koufax threw his first one-hitter. “Before that, his record was twenty-eight and thirty-one. From that point on, one thirty-seven and fifty-six! Whether it was a swelling of pride, I don’t know. Is that crazy? What do you think?”
Koufax remains a touchstone for measuring the progress of the Chosen People in the New World. When Senator Joseph Lieberman became the first Jewish American to be named to a national political ticket in 2000, a columnist in the New York Times dubbed him “the Sandy Koufax of politics.” As filmmaker Aviva Kempner traveled the country promoting her loving tribute, The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, the question she was asked most often was “What about Sandy?”
He still receives more bar mitzvah invitations than any rabbi in America. In July 1965, one enterprising thirteen-year-old sent an invitation to the Dodgers’ team hotel in St. Louis: “I knew that the Mets would be in L.A. on Labor Day weekend for my bar mitzvah, but I could still hope, couldn’t I? I got back a response card postmarked ‘St. Louis, July 30,1965.’” His hero sent his regrets. “It was signed in very clear handwriting with his name and the word ‘not’ written on the appropriate line.”
He could not have calculated the effect his reflexive decision would have on his private life or what it would mean to others. Strangers in steak houses, delicatessens, public rest rooms, and funeral homes wanted to thank him, touch him. A couple of years ago, Koufax and his friend Tom Villante attended the funeral of Herbie Scharfman, the old Dodger photographer, in Fort Lauderdale. “This lady grabs his right hand,” Villante recalled. “She’s saying, ‘I can’t believe I’m with Sandy Koufax. All the things you’ve done.’ I said, ‘Lady, you ought to take his other hand. He’s done more with that.’”
Until October 6, 1965, he was “a ballplayer, a terrific ballplayer,” Villante said. “When that happened, he transcended being a player and became a symbol.” A symbol who understands better than anyone else Portnoy’s anguished complaint in Philip Roth’s novel: “Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder—and nothing more! But I am something more, or so they tell me. A Jew.”
Among the cognoscenti, and there are many of them, there is general agreement that there are 140 to 150 Jews to be found in the fine
print of the Baseball Encyclopedia. It depends whether you count converts and when they converted. Standards vary. There were four Cohens (Alta, Andy, Hy, and Sid) who kept their last name and at least three others who changed it. Jesse Eugene Baker was born Michael Myron Silverman. There was a Rabbi of Swat and even a Chosen catcher—Harry Chozen, who caught one game for the Cincinnati Reds in 1937.
Koufax set no precedents as did Lipman Pike, the first Jewish major leaguer, who was also among the first ballplayers to be paid for his craft, accepting twenty dollars a week from the Philadelphia Athletics in 1876. Or Barney Dreyfuss, owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and father of the modern world series. Or the tunesmith who coauthored “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”—who had never been to one. Nor was Koufax the first prominent Jewish player to confront the dilemma posed by the High Holidays, which annually conflict with baseball’s most important games.
In the World War II era, every home run Hank Greenberg hit for the Detroit Tigers was a potent retort to the image of Jews passively accepting Hitler’s chosen fate for them. When, in the midst of the 1934 pennant race, Greenberg played on Rosh Hashanah and hit two home runs, he was saluted by the Detroit Free Press in a front-page encomium: “And, so to you, Mr. Greenberg, the Tiger fans say, ‘Leshono tovo tikosayvu!’ which means ‘Happy New Year.’” No one objected when he chose not to play a week later on Yom Kippur, the more solemn day of observance.
Harry Eisenstat, a Brooklyn boy who pitched for the Dodgers the year Koufax was born, roomed with Greenberg in Detroit. “I was very proud we didn’t play on Yom Kippur,” he said. “For Rosh Hashanah we got a special dispensation from the rabbi. It was a case of letting the team down and not putting one individual player’s interest above the other twenty-four. Because it involved twenty-four other players, the rabbi felt it was okay.”
On Rosh Hashanah in 1936, when Eisenstat was still with the Dodgers, he was in uniform but not expecting to pitch. Turned out his teammates needed him more than God. Summoned to the mound, he gave up a grand slam on his first pitch. Harry inferred no displeasure from above. “Nah,” he said, “I should have made a better pitch.”
Eisenstat was Detroit’s winning pitcher on the last day of the 1938 season, when Greenberg famously did not match Babe Ruth’s record sixty home runs. Eisenstat beat Bob Feller, 4–1, and had a no-hitter until the eighth inning—a fact obscured by the record eighteen batters Feller struck out that day. He and Koufax never met. “The closest I ever got to him was Bensonhurst,” Eisenstat said before his death in March 2003.
Koufax and Greenberg, two New York City boys born a generation apart, met only once or twice; Greenberg drove in 170 runs the year Koufax was born. They are linked symbolically and by the fact that neither was an observant Jew. Al Rosen, who played for Greenberg during his tenure as general manager of the Cleveland Indians, wryly refers to himself as “the next notable Jew” after Hammerin’ Hank.
In ten seasons with the Indians, Rosen was four times an All-Star, twice the American League home run and batting champion, as well as 1953’s Most Valuable Player. “In the early fifties, we were playing in New York,” he said. “I was invited to a party on a Saturday night. Imogene Coca was there and Sid Caesar. I brought a few ballplayer friends along—Jim Hegan and Bob Lemon. It was a buffet. I sat down to have a bite next to a woman who asked if I was a ballplayer. I said, ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘My son is a baseball player, too. He’s with the Dodgers. His name is Sandy Koufax.’”
Having heard many such “my-son-the-ballplayer” stories over the years, Rosen excused himself politely saying, “I certainly hope your son has a great career.”
Three decades or so later, he met Koufax for the first time at Dodgertown. “I see Sandy coming toward me,” Rosen said. “I said, ‘Sandy how are you? I have to tell you the funniest thing.’ He said, ‘My mother already told me.’”
Like Koufax, he never played on Yom Kippur. The one time it posed a true dilemma, he said, “I got lucky—it rained.” Like Greenberg and Eisenstat, he consulted a rabbi about Rosh Hashanah—he played on the Jewish New Year. He describes himself as “fervently Jewish” but not “a revolving-door Jew—in at Rosh Hashanah and out at Yom Kippur.”
“For some reason, many people didn’t know I was Jewish,” he said. “I don’t know why my face and my name wouldn’t give them an indication. One time, I’m on a road trip, probably 1951, and Ed Sullivan writes a column saying, ‘Al Rosen, though of Jewish heritage, has converted to Catholicism and you can see him make the sign of the cross every time he comes to bat.’ It was a terrible blow to me.”
When he got back to Cleveland, huge gray bags from the U.S. Postal Service were waiting for him—letters from irate rabbis, congratulatory missives from Roman Catholics, and a trove of St. Christopher medals. “I got Sullivan on the phone. He was recovering from surgery and apparently his gal Friday had made a mistake. They printed a retraction but you know what that’s worth. I never made the sign of the cross. With my bat, I made little chicken scratches in the dirt, just a nervous thing at the plate. I said, ‘I wish my name was Rosenstein or Rosenberg so there would be no doubt.’”
He wanted his Jewishness to be more apparent. Long after his playing career ended, Rosen returned to baseball as president of the 1978 New York Yankees. It was the summer of Billy Martin, and the straw that stirred the drink, and the one-game playoff against the Red Sox in Boston. “And it fell on Yom Kippur. I had to make the choice. I was very torn. I went. I sat in the box alongside the dugout with George Steinbrenner. So my face was on TV. Would you believe it? I got only one letter, from a rabbi, castigating me. I told him ‘If you knew I was on TV, then you’ve got a bigger problem than I do.’”
Shawn Green, the young outfielder who invoked Koufax’s example when he signed with the Dodgers in 1998, also grew up in an assimilated family (they dropped the “berg” from their last name two generations before). Shawn was an adult, a multimillionaire, a Dodger, before he learned that his father, like so many others, had a collection of Koufax memorabilia upstairs in the attic waiting for him, an unspoken inheritance.
Nearly forty years after he retired, Koufax still resonates with the American Jewish community, inspiring artists like Deborah Kass to render his likeness in the pop art style of Andy Warhol—an iconic treatment reserved for the likes of Marilyn Monroe. (Kass also claims she is a distant cousin.) He endures in image and imagination far longer than he did as an athlete.
Because, Rabbi Lustig argues, in his quiet, assiduous, and thoroughly unintentional way, Koufax broke all the rules. “Think of the stereotype of the Jew in literature, the ugly avariciousness of Shylock,” Lustig said. “He broke so many of them. Here was a good-looking Jew, a lefty, very powerful on the mound; a perfect player, an enigma, a man who didn’t reach for fame or money. He broadened the concept of what a Jew is.”
It had been a long season. With Tommy Davis hurt and Drysdale and Wills hurting, Koufax carried the 1965 Dodgers toward an improbable pennant on his fragile left arm. It did not go unnoticed, even by the squash-playing editors of Time magazine, who assigned Bill McWhirter, a young staffer in the L.A. bureau, to report a cover story on Koufax. McWhirter was an odd choice, given his rawness as a reporter and his disinclination for baseball. Baseball was part of the old East Coast establishment culture he had come west to forget. California was happening. Baseball was not. Still, it was a cover story, his first.
McWhirter remembers:
“Things were simple then. There was no go-between, no agents, no such thing as p.r. I went to the Dodgers and asked them about it. They said, ‘There’s Koufax, go ask him.’ I was so new, so young, I didn’t know enough to be awed by Koufax. It wasn’t like my knees were shaking. I was more impressed that Time wanted to do a cover on Koufax than I was by Koufax himself. I went up to him and he said, ‘No, I don’t think that’s a very good idea. I really don’t think I want to do it.’
“There was no negotiation, no second appeal. I was stopped in my tracks
. Then he said, ‘Of course, if you want to do it, go ahead.’ He gave me a few names, including the Berles, who were friends, and some women he had dated. I couldn’t imagine anyone turning down a cover.”
McWhirter interviewed the women (he remembers them as “bit-part babes”) and the friends and came away with the distinct impression that none of them had a clue who Koufax was. Wills, a clubhouse confidant, says even now: “There was so much depth there, and complexity too. He’s still a mystery to a lot of us.”
The conventions of news weekly journalism, as practiced in the mid-1960s, made no allowance for a subject this elusive, this multidimensional. “I knew I had an incredible story about an incredible guy who wasn’t going to talk to me,” McWhirter said. “It was almost like he vaporized after games. When he put on the uniform he was Sandy Koufax. When he took it off, he was a shadow man.”
In the received wisdom of the time, Koufax was sublime but unhappy, the tortured artist of the pitching mound. “A captive of baseball, trapped by his talent and his instincts,” Jim Murray wrote in the Los Angeles Times. Of course, he was tortured, but not in ways he ever acknowledged. Even his teammates had no idea the pain he was in. But, that wasn’t the writerly implication. Koufax was tortured with a gift of a miraculous left arm that compelled him to do something he really didn’t like. He wouldv have been happier as a doctor, a lawyer. He was a nice Jewish boy. In a word, different.
The novelist E. L. Doctorow has written: “Of all the varieties of anti-Semitism, this is perhaps the most discreetly structural in form—the lingering widespread assumption of the irreducible otherness of someone of the Jewish faith.”
The pigeonholing of Koufax began early. In a column written the day Koufax signed with the Dodgers, Jimmy Cannon lamented his lack of exuberance, describing him as “courteous and aloof.” A spring training story written by Bill Roeder of the New York World-Telegram on March 4, 1955, bore the headline “Koufax, Unorthodox, Reads Books,” and mentioned that he might go back to school and study architecture if baseball didn’t work out. Two weeks later, the New York Post reiterated the refrain, describing him as having “both feet on the ground, except he reads books and stuff like that.” That theme and expectation followed him throughout his career. Thus: “Sandy Koufax belongs in baseball about the way Albert Schweitzer belongs in a twist joint,” Murray wrote in 1963.