by Jane Leavy
“Except for getting hit by a foul ball,” Koufax said, just as he had in 1964.
“Thanks for a second great game, Eddie,” Koufax wrote on the sweet spot of a game ball.
“The game called itself,” Vargo replied.
Then Koufax retreated to the trainer’s room to ice his arm in thirty-five-degree water. That’s where Claude Osteen found him, sitting alone, sipping a beer, one of three Buhler had left behind in the tub. Half an hour earlier, Osteen had been lying right there on the training table when Drysdale ordered him to get up for history. He wanted to pay his respects as Drysdale had done. But the only words that came to mind were banalities. So he offered his congratulations and headed home.
Osteen wasn’t alone in his loss for words. At the Los Angeles Times, a headline writer on the sports desk was busy setting type for the morning paper: “Koufax Pleased.”
Chapter 21
SWEET SORROW
THE MASTERMINDS BEHIND “Major League Baseball’s Team of the Century” broadcast had thought of every contingency. Roadies in black T-shirts had established a temporary beachhead in the infield at Atlanta’s Turner Field. Arrangements had been made to hoist Ted Williams’s wheelchair to the stage. The honorees had been instructed what to wear. Koufax, ever the team player, came in the suggested uniform: blue blazer, gray slacks, and shoes so highly shined they glowed in the TV lights. Mark McGwire showed up in jeans and sneakers.
The script called for each of the greats to mount the dugout steps when his name was called and then climb a second set of stairs to the stage. Koufax was announced just ahead of the other lefty on the exalted, imaginary squad, Warren Spahn. When Koufax was selected as the left-hander of the last one hundred years, he told reporters that any Team of the Century without Spahn was a joke. A special panel was convened and Spahn was added to the roster. Koufax had a special affinity for Spahn—they shared a skewed left-handed view of the game—and respect for his twenty-one years in the majors. Spahn did the one thing Koufax couldn’t do—endure. But with Spahn, the old adage “the legs go first” applied. He needed help getting up the dugout steps at an event he needed help getting invited to. Not wanting to see Spahn left behind, Koufax waited at the lip of the dugout and offered him an arm, guiding the old lefty to the stage where he belonged.
Age marks everyone differently. Spahn had a rubber arm and pitched until he was forty-three. Koufax had a golden arm much older than its years. One April morning in 1966, soon after he and Drysdale ended their spring job action, Koufax was examined by Dr. Robert Kerlan, the team physician. Kerlan was Buzzie Bavasi’s racetrack pal, a gambler. But he knew when to cut his losses and he had promised to tell Koufax when the odds of permanent disability became prohibitive. “I just told your pitcher to retire,” he informed Bavasi.
Koufax had already put his future at risk by pitching the 1965 season without missing a turn. The damage was no longer parenthetical, like his arm, or hypothetical—he was beginning to drop things, everyday things like screwdrivers. The fingers on his left hand tingled and occasionally went numb. Buttons and hair combs presented a challenge.
Koufax kept the pain—and Kerlan’s advice—to himself. He began the ’66 season as he had ended the last, taking the ball every four days. By season’s end he had accumulated 323 innings of work, again without missing a start. His astonishing record, 27 and 9 with a 1.73 ERA, and astonishing consistency camouflaged the extent of his injury. Even other Dodger pitchers, privy to training room secrets, were unaware of how bad it had become. Later, Phil Regan could recall only one instance when it was even intimated that Koufax might not be able to pitch—trainer Bill Buhler whispering sotto voce, Koufax says he might not be able to go. “He minimized how bad it was,” said pitcher Joe Moeller. “So people said, ‘He can’t be hurting that bad.’”
Fame wore on him equally. In Hollywood, he was “Sandy baby.” “Bigger even than Sinatra,” his roommate Dick Tracewski said. So big you could walk down the street on Balboa Island, not exactly a Jewish enclave, and never miss a pitch. When Koufax was starting, every house had the radio on. California wasn’t so different from Brooklyn after all.
When the Dodgers made their first visit to Atlanta to play the newly relocated Braves, fans stood in line all night to get tickets. “They sold standing room only behind the fence on the field for a dollar a ticket,” Regan remembered. “I’ve never seen it before or since.”
People didn’t come to see whether he won or lost but to be able to say they saw him. Every game was an event accompanied by hoopla and subtext. An arm has only so many pitches to give, and with any one of those not yet delivered, Koufax’s could come unhinged. That was the irony. The more unassailable he appeared, the more vulnerable he became. As the pitch counts and the innings and the strikeouts and the victories and the accolades mounted, so did his awareness of how tenuous it all was. His elbow reminded him with every pitch. Chapter 1 of his autobiography, published that spring, ended with an intimation: “An athletic existence is a self-liquidating life.”
Sports autobiography is a peculiar genre: ghostwritten fiction masquerading as fact. In the literature of sports, the truth has always been easier to tell in fiction—Pete Gent’s North Dallas Forty and Dan Jenkins’s Semi-Tough are among the best examples. It wasn’t until Jim Brosnan’s The Long Season and Jim Bouton’s Ball Four that a semirealistic view of the baseball locker room emerged between hard covers. The authorized life stories of America’s greatest athletes form an oeuvre of mythology. What are myths if not as-told-to stories? Occasionally, and inadvertently, the putative author actually makes an appearance in his own book. Such is the case on page 160 of Koufax:
“Late success is quieter.”
It’s a quiet sentence, audibly Koufax. You can hear his voice in the syntax and the sentiment. It’s also true. Late success is quieter, and perhaps a bit untrustworthy. Its vagaries were as palpable to him as its demands. For the first six years of his career, he toiled—when he toiled at all—for respect amid muted expectations. Then he became suddenly and reluctantly famous. He viewed his success through the scrim of early failure, which tempered his view of center stage. He knew how chimerical it all could be.
After all those years at the margins, the swift appropriation of self did not come easily or naturally. Some personalities—Tommy Lasorda and Larry King come to mind—embrace celebrity and crave proximity to it, make careers of it, basking in belated recognition. For others, it’s like wearing a dress shirt whose collar is too tight. Koufax is one of those. “It’s almost like he ran away from popularity,” his teammate Tommy Davis said.
Celebrity is as old as Homer, but he lacked the technology to exploit it fully. Koufax had the cathode appeal and the Hollywood connections to become a star, but lacked the instinct and the desire for it. He was the product of a more sedate and modest time, an unconscious era in baseball (see Billy Martin and Mickey Mantle circa 1957 at the Copacabana) when there was no mass media. There was only “the press”—and the press of attention that came with daily baseball reportage was gentle compared to a dimly perceived future of 24/7 coverage, microphoned managers, catcher-cams, satellite dishes, and perpetual news cycles. When, in the small hours of a 1964 summer night, his roommate, Doug Camilli, arrived at the team’s New York hotel after catching Koufax’s third no-hitter, he was astonished to find the corridor staked out by reporters. TV lights blazed a hot path to their door. It was Camilli’s first encounter with a new American phenomenon: the media event.
This technology-fueled notoriety mandated a new sensibility on the part of the famous. Larry Sherry, a holdover from the Naughty Fifties, thought Koufax was “image-conscious before it was popular.” While Bo Belinsky and Dean Chance, the playboy pitchers, were lighting up Los Angeles, Koufax was developing the internal radar required of modern celebrity. One night, he asked John Kennedy and Ron Perranoski if he could tag along with them to a local bar. By the time they placed their order, the first floozy had made her approach. “S
andy said, ‘Let’s get outta here,’” Kennedy said. “We didn’t even have the drink. He didn’t want to be in the wrong place if there was trouble.”
When he was expected, management invariably stationed a valet outside with a camera. Little wonder his roommates came to know him as a room service guy. “We’d be on a long road trip,” Tracewski said. “I’d say, ‘C’mon, Sandy, let’s go to the movies or out to dinner.’ He’d say, ‘No, you go.’ He’d be sitting on the bed in that white shirt he always wore and his underwear. And when I came back he’d still be sitting on the bed in his underwear, smoking cigarettes.”
He gave up golf and basketball. He didn’t go out the night before he pitched. “I think he was very hard on himself,” said Wes Parker. “He kind of reminds me of Heifetz, the violinist. There was a story in Life magazine about him and the caption said, ‘He sacrificed his humanity in the attainment of perfection.’ Sandy didn’t sacrifice all his humanity but he definitely sacrificed some of his humanity in his ability to be comfortable with people. I purchased a stereo. I told Sandy. He said, ‘Let me tell you about my stereo.’ He had to be better. He didn’t say, ‘I’m glad for you.’ He had to be number one. His stereo had to be better than mine. I was happy with what I had.”
Gene Mauch remembers watching from the Philadelphia dugout as Koufax warmed up before his 1964 no-hitter. “The man threw a hundred and fourteen pitches!” Mauch said. “Warming up! One hundred and fourteen pitches! For about eighty-five or ninety or maybe close to a hundred of those pitches, he was scowling and grimacing and shaking his head, just really down. He couldn’t find anything. He couldn’t find his release point or his rhythm. Something was bothering the hell out of him. But he was gonna stay out there until he got things the way he wanted it.
“So after about ninety-five or so pitches, he started nodding his head and smiling. Sandy Koufax didn’t smile. But now he’s smiling at his catcher, who had his back to me. He started nodding his head, and I said, ‘Oh my God, I’m in for it.’”
It was a given that he would pitch every four days and that every four days he would win, regardless of how many errors the Dodgers made or runs they didn’t score. His career record in 1–0 games was 11 and 3. His record in his last two Septembers was 14 and 3 (16 and 3 if you count October). In those last two seasons, he struck out 699 men in 658 2?3 innings, an average of 9.6 per game. Once after Koufax struck out Rico Carty of the Braves three times, Carty went to him, demanding, “You mad at me, Koufax?” Koufax replied, “Young man, I don’t even know you, but as long as you’re hitting in front of Henry Aaron, you’re going to have a tough time with me.”
Over the course of his career, he faced twenty-one Hall of Fame hitters. Among them, Aaron had the highest batting average—.362. Altogether, they batted .245 against him, compared to .205 for all National League hitters, and .198 for non–Hall of Famers.
The Dodgers not only counted on him to win, they counted on him to make them all better, to infuse even the most modest among them with his quiet bravado. If he was bullet-proof, so were they. He wasn’t exaggerating when he told Ron Fairly late in the season, referring to rookie Jim Barbieri, “If I pitch well from here on out, I can double the man’s income.” And when a television network offered him $25,000 to film a documentary on a day in his life, he said he would do it for $35,000—and only if $1,000 was given to every member of the team and coaching staff.
His teammates recognized their indebtedness to him. Wills tells the story of an otherwise meaningless ground ball hit to him in the ninth inning of a lopsided shutout. There was one out with a man on third. The correct play was to go to first for the sure out. Wills threw home instead. It was hard to say who was more surprised—Roseboro or Koufax. “I just knew that he had pitched his heart out, like he’s done so many times,” Wills said. “He deserved a shutout.” Afterward, in the locker room, Wills told him: “I only owe you three now.”
Though Wills remembers it as if it were yesterday, baseball statisticians can find no record of any game that resembles this scenario. In baseball, stories like these acquire a life of their own. They become an inheritance. Thirty years later, in September 1996, when Roger Clemens had twelve days left in his Boston Red Sox career and a chance to tie Cy Young’s record of thirty-eight shutouts, manager Kevin Kennedy promised him that if the situation arose, he would play the infield in to preserve the shutout, invoking the legend of Koufax and Wills.
The Dodgers relied on Koufax more than ever in 1966. Missing spring training may have worked to Koufax’s benefit but Drysdale struggled all season. And the Dodger offense was no juggernaut, “piling up runs,” Jim Murray wrote, “at a rate of one every nine innings.” At the end of May, the world champions were two and a half games out of first place. At the All-Star break, they were in third place, five games behind the Giants. Koufax had already won fifteen games.
Alston named him to start the All-Star Game in St. Louis—the first time he had been so honored. On two days’ rest! Jim Bunning was warming up in the bullpen when Koufax threw his first pitch. “I couldn’t figure out why Walter Alston would do that except that Koufax was hurting,” Bunning said.
The day was a scorcher, 105 degrees in the stands and ten degrees hotter on the field. “NBC packed its cameras in ice,” Bunning recalled, “and the little metal disks on the seats were burning people.”
Marvin Miller, newly installed as executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, lasted one inning longer than Koufax before retreating to the air-conditioned sanctuary of the clubhouse. “The only one in the locker room was Sandy,” Miller said. “He was sitting with his entire arm and shoulder in a bucket of ice, with his back to me. He turned around to see who was there and raised his arm. I’ve never seen an arm swollen like that in my life. He saw that look of horror and he said, ‘Don’t worry, it goes down. This happens every time I pitch.’ He only pitched three innings! We didn’t discuss the future. With an arm that looked like that, there wasn’t much to talk about. It was as big as a basketball.”
Koufax was still icing his arm when Bunning joined them, having completed his two innings of work. “My God, how can you be hurting and throw the ball a hundred miles an hour?” he asked. “Some of us are not hurting and we can only throw it ninety.”
In fact, Koufax could throw as hard as ever—just not as often. One National League umpire told Regan at the end of the season, “If he loses as much next year as what he’s lost from ’65 to ’66, he’ll be an ordinary pitcher.” He began experimenting with new pitches. “He tried a slider but that hurt his elbow,” said Joe Torre, who caught him at the 1966 All-Star Game. “He tried a forkball but it didn’t work for him physically. Then he started cutting the fastball toward the end, which was tough on a right-handed hitter because normally when you faced Koufax he threw the fastball and the curve.”
After all those early years of disuse and misuse, Koufax wasn’t about to complain about overuse. Besides, he knew it was the last time around. On July 27, he and Bunning faced each other in a brilliant scoreless duel, the first-ever meeting of perfect-game winners.
There were 45,000 at Dodger Stadium that Wednesday night, among them Ira Green, a Koufax fan from Chicago. Growing up, Ira was a lefty pitcher who threw hard but not quite hard enough. As a teenager, he walked four miles to Wrigley Field to see Koufax. Money was almost as scarce as Jewish major-leaguers. Ira would buy a sixty-cent ticket for a grandstand seat and volunteer to help clean up after the game. “You’d work a half an hour,” he said. “If you were real lucky, you’d get to work on the field and pick up hot-dog wrappers. Each kid had a row. We’d race each other, flipping the seats up. If you lifted up a whole row, they’d give you a free pass to the next game. Those were our season tickets.”
That was the only way he could afford to see Koufax. But he paid his way into Dodger Stadium for the game against Bunning, sitting in seats so high behind home plate he could barely make out the form on the mound. It didn’t matter.
He could say he was there. Later, Ira played semipro ball and had a son, Shawn, who also loved baseball. It wasn’t until after Shawn signed an $84 million contract with the Dodgers in 1998 that his father told him about seeing that game. “You saw Sandy pitch at Dodger Stadium?” Shawn said.
“Yeah,” Ira replied sheepishly.
“Wow,” his son, the multimillionaire, said.
Bunning struck out eleven, Koufax sixteen. It was tied 1–1 after eleven innings, when both left the game. The Dodgers won in the bottom of the twelfth—Koufax got a no-decision. Regan came in to get the win. That was the day Koufax nicknamed him “the Vulture.”
The second week of August 1966, there was a rematch between Koufax and Atlanta pitcher Denny Lemaster, whom he’d beaten 2–1 earlier in the year. Slugger Eddie Mathews, who was nearing the end of his run with the Braves, struck out in his first three times at bat. The game was delayed endlessly by rain. It was two o’clock in the morning when Mathews came to bat again in the ninth. “They’ve had Sandy in the ballgame, sitting down during the rain delay, back in the ballgame, sitting down during the rain delay, back in the ballgame,” Mathews said. “Never in the world did I understand why they did that to Sandy. But at two A.M.I hit a home run off him to beat him. I’ve never seen a pitcher abused like that in my life.”
“Alston never took him out,” infielder John Kennedy said. “It could be ten to two, ten to four, ten to five, ten to six. Alston wouldn’t take him out unless it was tied. He was afraid to take him out of there.”
As summer ceded to fall and the season wound to a close, Koufax went to Alston and told him, “Use me any way you want, as often as you want.” He did not explain his reasoning. The manager took him at his word. In the last twenty-six days of the season, Koufax started seven games, completed six, and won five, giving up just a fraction over one run per game. He had almost as many cortisone shots as complete-game wins.