Sandy Koufax

by Jane Leavy

  Mordecai Richler reviewed the book in the November 1966 issue of Commentary magazine. The fact of the review by the distinguished Jewish author in the distinguished journal of Jewish thought was testimony to Koufax’s standing among his people, especially the literary intelligentsia. The review was scathing, damning the effort as a “very bush-league performance, thin, cliché-ridden.” In short, a typical ghost-written sports autobiography. (Had Richler read more closely he might have heard an authentic voice in the opening cri de coeur.)

  Getting to the heart of the matter, Richler wrote: “Anti-Semitism takes many subtle shapes and the deprecating story one reads again and again, most memorably recorded in Time, is that Sandy Koufax is actually something of an intellectual. He doesn’t mix. Though he is the highest paid player in the history of the game, improving enormously on Lipman E. Pike’s $20 a week, he considers himself above it.”

  Then he goes further: “In fact, looked at one way, Koufax’s autobiography can be seen as a sad effort at self-vindication, a forced attempt to prove once and for all that he is the same as anybody else. Possibly, Koufax protests too much.” In denying his putative intellectualism, Richler seemed to be saying, Koufax was denying an essential part of his Jewishness. Which no doubt accounted for the deluge of letters to Commentary’s editors accusing Richler of being anti-Semitic.

  Having held himself to a higher standard, Koufax was then impaled upon it. To wit: The Minnesota rabbi, who still insists that Koufax was in his synagogue, said nothing at the time because he wasn’t too thrilled with Koufax’s lack of piety. “That’s why I couldn’t build him up,” Raskas said. “He’s not such a good Jew because he didn’t marry a Jewish girl. So I don’t get too excited about it.”

  The significance of Koufax’s decision has been debated ever since in synagogues and at dinner tables, by Talmudic scholars and baseball players. How much did he change the way Jews are perceived? How much did he change the way Jews perceive themselves? “He gave little Jewish boys some hope,” said pitcher Steve Stone, who was one of them. “The series went seven games instead of four,” said general manager Buzzie Bavasi. “I always told him, ‘You made Walter O’Malley a million dollars.’”

  Four decades after the fact, two best-selling Jewish authors, Scott Turow and Mitch Albom, engaged in a heated polemic about the significance of a ham sandwich Koufax allegedly was seen eating in the hotel elevator in Minnesota that week. Albom’s friend, a rabbi’s son still a young man in 1965, was apparently still devastated at having seen pork touch Koufax’s pitching hand. Turow responded indignantly: “Who’s to say what is Jewish enough? Who’s to say what a Jew is?” Except that Jew himself.

  Peter Levine, author of Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sports and the American Jewish Experience, argues that Koufax’s symbolic potency was attenuated by world events. Who needs Koufax when you have Henry Kissinger playing realpolitik? “However tough and strong a pitcher Koufax was,” Levine wrote, “he clearly was no match for Moishe Dayan and his legions of commandos when it came time to search for heroes and deeds symbolic of the contemporary Jewish experience—far more relevant than anything Koufax offered.”

  Rabbi Lustig, who as a boy wired a transistor radio to his seven-year-old person and took the world series into the synagogue, understands why Koufax is hardwired into the psyche of the American Jewish community and his congregation—why grown men are transformed by putting on Koufax’s jersey. The decision not to pitch was a transforming event, providing the catalyst for an unknown number of lawyers and Little Leaguers to acknowledge and honor their religion in like kind. Koufax made them brave. By refusing to pitch, he both reinforced Jewish pride and enhanced the sense of belonging—a feat as prodigious as any he accomplished on the field.

  “The Six-Day War was important to Zionism,” Lustig said. “It changed the image of the Jew in the world. He could be a true soldier. The world series was important to the whole community. What could be so American? We had finally made it. We had earned the right to be as interested in baseball as in our Jewish identity.”

  The discussion and debate proceeds without any comment from him. Some have attributed his silence to modesty; others to the realization that nothing he could say would improve upon what he did. But this too is true. It’s embarrassing being a religious icon, especially an inadvertent one. Later, friends say, he would become a reader of Holocaust literature and quit driving German cars. He came to appreciate the significance his decision had for others. After the old lady at Herbie Scharfman’s funeral finally let go of Koufax’s right arm, Tom Villante said to him, “You know, Sandy, in my lifetime there’s three guys I’ve known who have transcended their sports and become a symbol for their race or nationality: Jackie with the blacks, Joe D. with the Italians, and you with the Jews.”

  “He said, ‘I know it.’ And he said it as if he knew it and accepted it. This is something he carries around with him. And he is very proud of it.”

  Koufax refused to be a Jew’s Jew or a gentile’s Jew. He may have been different but he refused to be anything other than himself. In the Talmud, it is written that some attain eternal life with a single act. On Yom Kippur, 5726, a baseball immortal became a Jewish icon.

  Chapter 18

  THE EIGHTH INNING

  ALONE AMONG THE PRINCIPALS ON THE FIELD, Ed Vargo was oblivious. The year before in Philadelphia, he knew Koufax had a no-hitter. Philly fans always let you know what’s going on. This time he was too invested in calling a perfect game to notice that it was one. Koufax knew; and he knew something else too. Never before had he thrown a baseball with equal measures of control and velocity. It was a confluence of experience and opportunity, muscle memory and kinetic understanding, reflex and thought. Quite unexpectedly, in the eighth inning of his 349th major league game, everything he had learned about the physics of pitching and everything his own physiology enabled him to do was at his disposal. He thought, It’s as total as it has ever been.

  Everyone in the stands knew. Spines stiffened in club seats and up the middle of the diamond. Last call came and went. No one went for another Blatz Beer or another Dodger Dog. No one went anywhere at all. Except to get up for every pitch. “One step to the left, one step to the right,” Bill DeLury noticed from his seat high above third base. “And on every pitch, a roar.”

  Jack Epstein couldn’t hear himself talk, much less anything his father or brother said in reply. Jerry heard only the staccato syncopation of his heart. In the dugouts, stasis and silence reigned. In the seventh, they move a little, DeLury thought. In the eighth, they don’t move, they don’t talk at all.

  Everyone was accountable. Just being there carried a measure of responsibility. Nate Oliver, the utility man known as “Pee Wee” to everyone but Koufax, who called him “Brute,” felt as if he were carrying the Empire State Building on his back. “Nobody wants to be the one to mess up by getting a beer or soda. You’re responsible. You don’t want your neighbor or relative or spouse to say later, ‘You should have kept your butt where you were.’”

  If the Dodgers were muted by superstition, the Cubs were silenced by embarrassment. Our guy is pitching a one-hitter and losing! Ken Holtzman thought. On an error, an overthrow! He glanced down the bench. Everyone was feeling the same thing: Terrible for Hendley and helpless against Sandy.

  Scully introduced the late-inning defensive changes and speculated about the butterflies in John Kennedy’s stomach. “The big boys are coming up,” he added. “Santo, Banks, and Byron Browne.”

  Koufax wanted the no-hitter but he wanted the win even more. With the Dodgers leading 1–0, he needed to keep the ball in the ballpark and away from their power. The first pitch to Santo was a fastball away; the next two he swung at and missed. There was no chance his bat was going to get in the way of them. The guy threw ninety-five mph without thinking about it; a hundred mph when he put his mind to it. Santo had never seen him throw this hard before. I was waiting for the fastball and he threw it right past me, Santo thoug
ht.

  By the time he quit thinking about it, he’d been caught looking at a vindictive curve.

  “All right,” Scully said. “Sandy Koufax needs five more outs as Ernie Banks steps in at the plate.”

  Two previous strikeouts had done nothing to compromise his determined optimism, nor would a third. After which he headed back to the dugout, considering what he would say to his twin sons when he got home. What happened last night, Dad? Was that a no-hitter, Dad? What did you do?

  He would tell them: “I failed to make contact.”

  Koufax felt looser than he had all season, more in control than he had been all year. The fastball and the curve were on their best behavior. “One going up, one going down, both hard,” Hendley murmured to himself, a solitary sentinel standing watch at the corner of the dugout, spitting seeds. (He never chewed.)

  It’s not fair, Torborg thought.

  Byron Browne agreed. Walking to the plate felt like walking the plank. Browne hoped it would be quick. He swung through a curve for strike one, then watched a fastball sail high. It was the only lapse in Koufax’s form or composure. “The first time I saw him force himself tonight,” Scully noted. “He wanted oh and two.”

  The next pitch produced a futile swing. “Oh, doctor,” Scully said.

  One ball and two strikes. What Browne would remember was how the number 32 appeared after the pitch, like a child peeking around the corner. That’s how complete Koufax’s delivery was. Al Campanis, the old scout, kept a photograph in his office demonstrating how Koufax finished a pitch—a reminder to others seeking a raise. “I can’t see the number on your back,” Campanis would say, dismissing them.

  Koufax tried to shake off the weight of the moment. “Koufax standing in back of the rubber, tugging at the bill of his cap, pulls at his belt, pushes up his sleeves, goes to the rosin bag,” Scully reported. “Normally, he’s not a fidgeter. Now he toes the rubber. Byron Browne waiting. Curveball got him swinging!”

  As he trudged back to the dugout, Browne thought, At least he didn’t get me three times—like Ernie.

  Hendley was torn. One instinct was to marvel, the other was to hope. He was looking at something he had never seen before and would never see again. But to savor it was to accept its inevitability and he wasn’t ready to do that. He tugged on the brim of his cap and headed back to the mound, reminding himself, You’re only down a run.

  Due up for the Dodgers: Lefebvre, Parker, and Torborg. Scully urged his listeners to pick up the phone and call their friends and neighbors. “If you’re listening and you have a neighbor who is a red-hot baseball fan, it would be a good idea to give him a ring just to make sure he’s at the other end of this thing tonight.”

  Immediately, the phone rang in the home of one such fan who was curled up in a fetal position on the living room floor beside his father trying to stave off anxiety. He hung up on his best friend, fearful that the call violated the taboo against talking about a no-hitter. Father and son resumed the fetal position, communicating by hand signals in order to preserve the karma.

  The Dodgers went quickly in the bottom of the eighth, three up and three down. Torborg was the last hitter to face Hendley. Scully encouraged his listeners to give “the kid at the other end of eight perfect innings a hand.” The stadium responded with pitch and volume. Torborg responded by driving a ball to the left-field wall. God, I hit a home run on the night Sandy’s gonna pitch a perfect game! Torborg thought. But the wind caught it and then so did Browne, his back against the bullpen gate. Behind him relievers were jockeying for position to witness the top of the ninth.

  “Sandy Koufax is slowly walking out to the mound for a meeting with destiny,” Scully said, as Hendley took his leave.

  He received a standing ovation: the first and last of his major league career.

  Chapter 19

  WARNING SHOT

  FRED WILPON’S OFFICE HOVERS FORTY FLOORS ABOVE New York’s Fifth Avenue. It is well appointed and well located, filled with objets d’art deserving of museum-quality lighting and a desk large enough to measure in wingspan. It is a trophy office, calculated to impress. Most impressive is the panorama: South and west in New York Harbor is the Statue of Liberty. And, two blocks north, the art deco terraces of Rockefeller Center, that most elegant monument to capitalist zeal. This is the one place Wilpon never expected to be: eye-level with the captains of industry.

  On a clear day (and with a little imagination), he can see all the way back to Brooklyn and the boyhood he shared with Koufax. As a pitching prospect, Wilpon peaked too soon. There was no hidden speed behind the curve. As Koufax would later observe, “Fred hasn’t lost anything off the fastball he had then.” Word in the neighborhood was he turned down a $4,000 offer from the Dodgers to stay in college.

  After graduating from the University of Michigan, Wilpon returned to New York, looking for a future. It was the fifties. The anti-Semitism he encountered was latent but patent. Looking up at the skyscrapers of Manhattan he saw names painted on the walls, Jewish names: Rudin and Tishman. He went to the New York City Public Library and studied their careers. Real estate is where he would make his name, where he would earn the money to acquire the New York Mets and a view worthy of the Rockefellers.

  It is from this unique vantage point, as boyhood friend and owner of the New York Mets, that Wilpon views what may have been the most underestimated event in Koufax’s career: the Great Koufax-Drysdale Holdout of 1966. By bargaining collectively, they not only challenged the owners’ omnipotent domain, they forcibly dragged the industry into the twentieth century. “It was radical because it was the two of them,” Wilpon said. “They were unionists.”

  “It was a small union,” Koufax likes to say, “a union of two. But it was a union.”

  In the spring of 1966, baseball was as insular as the round, cookie-cutter ballparks that would soon dominate the landscape. All over America authority was under siege. Dr. Timothy Leary was exhorting Americans to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” Everyone was mobilizing, sitting in and walking out, even Frankie’s kid, Nancy Sinatra, who topped the charts with “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” (Stiletto-heeled white “go-go” boots became an immediate fashion imperative, though not at political demonstrations.) Black was beautiful. Women were abandoning their stays. But baseball was still run as a plantation. “Everybody was speaking out then from all places and all walks of life, protesting, outside, inside,” Lou Johnson said. “Sports had always been in a different category.”

  Players were owned in perpetuity, tethered for life to the clubs that signed them by the Reserve Clause in the Uniform Players Contract, a legal oddity which allowed owners to interpret each year’s contract as infinitely renewable. Players had no bargaining power, and no one to argue on their behalf. Absent the right to sell themselves to the highest bidder, they resorted to empty threats. On the morning of September 9, 1965, the Los Angeles Times reported Drysdale’s sudden interest in Japanese baseball: “$500,000 Offer Tempts Drysdale!”

  The Players Association had no leverage at all. The director was appointed by—and paid by—management. As was legal counsel. The owners put forth that noted labor activist former vice president Richard M. Nixon as their new candidate for the job. Agents were for actresses. When Roger Maris tried to take his brother, the businessman, with him to talk money after hitting 61 home runs, the Yankee brass kicked him out. Contract negotiations were, in fact, not negotiations at all. “Negotiation by ultimatum,” Koufax called it.

  Salary talks were often comic monologues. Like the time Phil Regan went to see general manager Buzzie Bavasi after winning fourteen games and saving twenty-one in 1966. Before Regan could even state his case for a $40,000 salary, Bavasi had trumped him, writing figures on five pieces of paper, wadding them up into balls, and throwing them across the table. “Pick one,” he said. By chance, Regan picked the highest, $37,000. “My bad day,” Bavasi said.

  Another time, Tommy Davis went to see Bavasi and found Maury Wills’s
contract for the coming season lying on his desk. When Davis saw how low the numbers were he figured he better take whatever he was offered. The contract was a fraud. Bavasi had left it out intentionally.

  Ploys like these left a bitter aftertaste. Players would mutter under their collective breath, but that was the limit of collectivism. There had been attempts to organize, to create rival leagues in hopes of forging a competitive market for their services. All had failed or been rebuffed.

  In the mid-1940s, four Mexican brothers tried to lure players south of the border with promises of big money. In 1946, Robert F. Murphy, a lawyer for the National Labor Relations Board, quit his job to form the American Baseball Guild, an attempt at an effective players’ union. He demanded and got a minimum salary ($5,000), a pension plan, and a spring training allowance—still known as Murphy money. When Pittsburgh management refused to discuss player grievances, the Pirates authorized a strike vote. Baseball Commissioner Happy Chandler got the word via pitcher Rip Sewell and quickly organized a team of scabs—including seventy-two-year-old Honus Wagner. The uprising was put down. Sewell happily accepted a gold watch from the commissioner.

  In the early fifties, Yankee minor leaguer George Toolson challenged the reserve clause in a case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court before the justices reaffirmed Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1922 decision exempting baseball from antitrust laws. Robin Roberts, an early union activist among players, remembers a proposal made to the owners at winter meetings in the mid-1950s which would have allowed limited free agency after six years. Then the player would be tied to his new club for six years. “For the owners, it would have been a chance to loosen up on control,” Roberts said. “They didn’t give us any satisfaction. It was shortsighted on their part. It would have really made sense because they do spend a lot of money developing guys in the minors. But they were so used to having complete control, they were out of control.”