by Jane Leavy
The unhappy former world champions, minus Koufax and Drysdale, set off on an exhibition tour of Japan. Midway through the trip, Wills bolted from the team. It was an omen and a precursor. Back on the West Coast, Koufax was doing his best to avoid phone calls from reporters, all of whom wanted to know his plans and many of whom he considered his friends. On the evening of November 17, while Collier and his wife were at the Ice Capades, their baby-sitter took a message from Mr. Koufax.
Collier didn’t require an explanation. When he got Koufax on the phone, Koufax told him, “When I get up in the morning I’m going to call the wire services and tell them I’m holding a press conference at the Beverly Wilshire at twelve P.M. Do you need anything?”
Having honored his commitment not to write what he had known for fourteen months, Collier was honored with the scoop. “I said, ‘Sandy, I wrote the story six, seven, eight months ago.’ I had it in the drawer. He said, ‘Why don’t you come up and go with me?’ They played that thing on page one, across the top, in the kind of type you’d use for the end of World War Two. The guys in L.A., the other writers, they were so pissed off. They said, ‘How the hell could you sit on that for fourteen months?’”
That night Koufax also called Bavasi. Wait until O’Malley returns from Japan, he pleaded. Wait until the winter meetings. Koufax demurred. Bavasi was worried about leverage and trading options; Koufax was worried about his integrity. He told Bavasi he was going ahead with the announcement. He didn’t want to lie anymore. Ask Bavasi now what made Koufax different from everyone else, he’ll tell you, “I don’t think Sandy ever told a lie in his life.” Bavasi told the wire services the announcement would do the team “irreparable harm.” (And, by the way, thanks for the memories.)
The next day, one hundred reporters in dark suits and thin ties dutifully scribbled Koufax’s words as a single ray of light, slanting through the ballroom window, illuminated his face. Women, none of them carrying press cards, cried. Hard-boiled baseball writers crafted open letters to their sons imploring them to grow up to be like Sandy Koufax. No one from Dodger management attended.
Fifteen microphones amplified his words as he read a short written statement acknowledging his request to be placed on the voluntary retired list. “Why, Sandy?” a reporter asked.
Koufax repeated the question slowly. “The question is, ‘Why?’ I don’t know if cortisone is good for you or not. But to take a shot every other ballgame is more than I wanted to do and to walk around with a constant upset stomach because of the pills and to be high half the time during a ballgame because you’re taking painkillers, I don’t want to have to do that.”
“What about the money?” someone asked.
“Well, the loss of income…” He paused. He said he’d rather have full use of his arm—bend it, for example. “If there was a man who did not have the use of one of his arms and you told him it would cost a lot of money if he could buy back that use, he’d give every dime he had, I believe. I don’t regret one minute of the last twelve years but I think I would regret one year that was too many.”
When Trixie tracked him down by phone the next day, Koufax picked up after one ring, as if anticipating the call. All Tracewski could say was “Sandy.” Koufax replied, “Well, all of my sport coats have two different arms in them. I can’t go on doing this medication thing and pitching. It’s going to kill me.”
In later years, he reiterated the notion, time and again, saying he never regretted the decision; he regretted having to make it. Still, there were disbelievers because, as Tom Boswell, the baseball bard, said in the Washington Post, “He wasn’t at his peak, he was above it.” His record for the last five years of his career was 111 and 34. His earned run average was 1.95, more than one and a half runs less than the rest of the National League average.
His retirement was invariably described as shocking. No one should have been surprised, certainly not Bavasi. The handwriting was not only on the wall, it was in print. Back issues of sports magazines and deadline newspaper stories from 1964 on reveal endless speculation over how long and how effectively he could pitch.
No, what was disconcerting, revolutionary even, was the idea. Athletes don’t quit, certainly not after their best season. They don’t walk away. They limp away. They play until the joints play out, until bone rubs against bone, until they are shown the door. Those who retire on their own terms are few and legend: Jim Brown, Rocky Marciano, Gene Tunney. Bill Bradley soldiered on in the NBA deliberately past his prime, choosing to experience the inevitable downward arc of his athletic career so he wouldn’t be tempted later to find out how much air was left in the jump shot. “Koufax quit when he had to, when he wanted to, when he needed to,” Newcombe said.
The shock that greeted his announcement was rooted in the assumption that athletes need to play in order to be complete. Koufax needed to quit in order to be whole. It was an act of imagination to see himself as something other than just a ballplayer, an asset to be depreciated on someone else’s books. “He had a real sense of what life really is,” his friend Dave Wallace would say years later. “And baseball’s a game. We hold on to it until we find out it has held on to us.”
Which explains his hold on fans such as Al Meyers, who wasn’t born until after Koufax retired. “It’s that he put his health ahead of being a figurehead,” Meyers said. “He didn’t need baseball to be Sandy Koufax.”
In the coming days, months, and even years, tabloid conjecture was at a lather. Would be come back? Could he come back? Should he have gone on? Could he have gone on? “Probably,” he says now, but at what level and at what cost? His arm? His sanity? That, too, was questioned.
Quitting was the sanest thing to do. It took him six years to become the pitcher some believed he would never become; to devise Sandy Koufax. He wasn’t about to sully that, to compromise, subject himself to renewed doubt. “He went from the shithouse to the castle,” Wallace said. “It was ‘I’m not going back to where I was. I’m walking away with my head held high.’”
“He expected so much of himself all the time,” Mauch said. “I think part of the reason he retired as early as he did (after having the two best years I could imagine a pitcher having) is that he expected that of himself and he knew that every time he went out there, if he pitched a seven-hitter and won 5–3, that wasn’t gonna please anybody. And I honestly thought that just wore on him, just wore him down. The expectancy on the part of everybody of him doing something super every time he went to the mound.” Perhaps that’s what Koufax meant when he confided to a friend years after he retired, “Maybe I was just tired of being me.”
The jolly pink cover of the 1967 Dodger yearbook featured a goofy caricature of a Dodger juggling four world series crowns. The cartoon was meant to convey an abundance of postseason riches. It could just as easily be interpreted as an image of the franchise reeling under the weight of Koufax’s departure. No mention was made of his retirement or of the trades that sent Wills to Pittsburgh and Tommy Davis to the Mets. Billy Hitchcock, manager of the Atlanta Braves, offered the definitive epitaph: “The Dodgers start twenty-seven games out.”
His career ended, the rest of his life began. Koufax went for a walk on the beach, alone.
Epilogue
THE AFTERLIFE
ON SEPTEMBER 9, 1965, Dave Smith had to choose between hormones and baseball. His high school girlfriend was leaving for college in the morning. Sandy Koufax was pitching for the Dodgers at Chavez Ravine. Koufax was his favorite player on his favorite team. Dave was so devoted to the Dodgers that he charted twenty-five consecutive games every year, pitch by pitch, in his Peterson’s ScoreMaster Scorebook. But he was also a teenage boy with other urges. Before leaving the house to meet his sweetheart, Dave set up a reel-to-reel tape recorder in his bedroom, which, in his hormonal zeal, he neglected to turn on. It was the bottom of the second inning when Dave’s father, Hugh, wandered into his son’s bedroom and flipped the switch, muttering under his breath to his wife—because he knew
how much Dave would regret the missed innings—“If he doesn’t like it he can just drop dead.” As the reels began to turn, Scully was setting the scene: “One ball, one strike, one out, second inning, no score.” And Hugh can be heard growling over the play-by-play: “Did you hear that, David? If you don’t like it, you can drop dead.”
Hugh Smith wasn’t much of a baseball fan. It was his wife Nancy’s passion for Duke Snider that ignited the son’s flame. But when Dave returned from his date with the girl who would become his first wife, mother of his daughter, Sandy, Hugh was waiting for him at the front door. “He ushered me into my room, where he insisted that I sit down with him and listen to the game all the way through,” Smith said. “I kept asking, ‘Did he do it?’ But my father just grinned. It was pretty obvious that the answer was yes or we wouldn’t have been sitting there listening but he wouldn’t tell me in advance. We went to bed about a quarter of two.”
On September 9, 1965, Sandy Koufax and Bob Hendley pitched one of the best baseball games ever played. Hendley pitched a one-hitter, the game of his life, and lost on a young catcher’s error. The only run scored on a walk, a sacrifice, a stolen base, and a bad throw. As Scully said, “The only hit, you almost couldn’t dignify as one.” Hendley’s teammate, Ken Holtzman, calls it “the greatest loss in baseball history.”
Koufax threw a perfect game, his fourth no-hitter, then a major league record. He never pitched better than he did those last three innings and rarely, if ever, has anyone pitched better than that. It was, he would say later, “As total as it’s ever been.”
Today, Dave Smith is a professor of microbiology at the University of Delaware, and the head of Retrosheet, a nonprofit, volunteer organization dedicated to the collection and publication of play-by-play accounts of every major league game played since 1901. According to his research, it is the only game in major league history to qualify as a true one-hitter, the only no-hitter in which the losing pitcher allowed one hit, the only nine-inning game won by the home team in which the home team didn’t go through the batting order three times; it holds the record for fewest total batters (fifty-three), fewest men left on base (one), fewest total bases (two), and fewest base runners (two), both of whom happened to be Lou Johnson (the next lowest total is four). Dave keeps track of these things. It is as close to perfect as baseball gets, albeit “a minimalist version of perfection,” Smith says. “Doing the best at allowing the least.”
The morning after, Koufax kept his regularly scheduled appointment with the team doctor, who examined his arthritic pitching arm—and found it miraculous. Garry Jones, the catering truck driver, went to work with a cardboard sign around his neck advertising Koufax’s accomplishment and his own exhaustion. Jack Epstein forgave his father for missing Jim Bunning’s perfect game. Greg Figge, the high school photographer who made it his profession, processed his film and turned the contact sheets in to his teacher—and never saw them again. The negatives disappeared. He got an A for the course.
Russell Gilbert spoke about the game in his bar mitzvah speech; Bliss Carnochan wrote about it in his memoirs. Zev Yaroslavsky continued counting outs at the ballpark but never again reached twenty-six.
Barry Pinsky’s friend, Rich Procter, held on to his ticket stub; Steve Stern did not. It disappeared one year, when his parents insisted upon painting his room, into the never-land of junk his father kept in the garage—a fact he made sure to mention at his father’s funeral. When Jess Whitehill Sr. died in March 2003, Jess Jr. displayed his perfect scorecard at the church where he was eulogized. And every year until his death, Maxine Goldsmith’s father reminded his grandson what he had given up the day the boy was born.
Yet, apart from the official scorecard and yellowed newspaper clippings, there was little known documentation of the game that came as close to perfection as baseball gets. The broadcasting industry may have been on the precipice of a technological revolution but radio station KFI was still airing “re-creations” of out-of-town ballgames the way Ronald “Dutch” Reagan once did as the voice of the Chicago Cubs. Allan Roth, the statistician who kept pitch-by-pitch records of every Dodger game beginning in 1947, had left the team in August 1964. All that survived was Scully’s memorable call of the top of the ninth inning. Pressed into vinyl, it acquired a life of its own. It was sold at stadium concession stands for the next twenty years, its cadence memorized and internalized by fervent fans, including Bob Costas.
Steve Soboroff, a future candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, bought a copy of the 331?3 RPM record with “Angel Town” on the B-side as soon as it was released, but gave it to the Dodgers later, when he was told there wasn’t one in their archives. This is what callers now hear when stadium operators put them on hold.
Every September 9, Dodger broadcasters observed the anniversary by pulling the tape from the vault and finding someone still in uniform who had been on the field that night. Finally, only Joey A. was left. Every year the radio guys asked the same question, and every year Amalfitano replied: “Let’s change the script this time.”
It did change. Absent the technological exactitude of the present, it was replayed in memory and reimagined. Guys who were there now swear that no one took a bat off a shoulder in the ninth, that Koufax struck out the side on nine pitches, every one a fastball, that his hat flew off with each vehement delivery. It wasn’t enough that he struck out the last six men he faced, that he threw so hard his hat flew off at all. That he was perfect. Jeff Torborg still insists he called only one curve in the ninth inning. Ernie Banks is still convinced he homered off Koufax four days later (it was Billy Williams). Ron Santo still swears he never swung his bat in the second inning. Whish, whish, whish. “Are you sure?” he says. “I remember three fastballs. I remember taking all three. I thought it was Billy who popped up.”
Then, one day, a videotape arrived in the mail from Major League Baseball Productions. It was an unedited highlight reel of Koufax’s career, images spliced together, black and white, and leached of color, snippets without order or organizing principle.
Koufax smiling, dimples prominently displayed. Koufax talking without sound. Koufax signing autographs at Holman Stadium. Dugouts draped with bunting. Shadows creeping across distant fields. A sea of white broadcloth and skinny ties. Women wearing sunglasses as big as fantails. The Dodgers serenading Moose Skowron: “M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-O-S-E.” Ritual world series handshakes: Bob Shaw (1959), Whitey Ford (1963), Jim Kaat (1965), and Jim Palmer (1966). Koufax leaping. Koufax leaping again.
And then this:
Two minutes of black-and-white footage. In the distance, foul poles loom and a 410-foot outfield sign. A limber, young catcher crouches behind home plate, the number on his back obscured by the elastic bands of his chest protector. There is nothing whatsoever to verify the time or the place: no names stitched in satin, no advertisements on the outfield wall. The footage is raw and pure, disembodied and archetypal. It exists out of time and context. Only one thing is clear: the man on the mound with the number 32 on his back, tugging on his cap after each heave threatens to carry it away.
Jeff Torborg knew what it was immediately. No longer a punk receiver but a middle-aged former catcher squatting before a VCR, he leaped from his crouch. “They told us nothing existed! They told us there wasn’t anything!”
Torborg had no guess as to the film’s genesis or its whereabouts since then. It was Koufax’s suggestion to ask Bill Buhler, the retired trainer, who died in May 2003. Buhler recognized his handiwork immediately. “Yup, that’s mine,” he said almost shyly, his voice as thin as an old man’s hair. “Don’t know who else it could have been.”
He remembered the day and the dispute with the unctuous usher and the Dodger vice president who had him removed from his spot behind home plate, preventing him from recording the last three outs of Koufax’s perfect game. When it was over, Buhler turned the unprocessed film over to the front office and never laid eyes on it again. The identity of the club v.p. remains his training room secret.
Thanks to Buhler’s raw cinematography and Dave Smith’s reel-to-reel recording of the broadcast on KFI, all nine innings can now be revisited. The difference between what is seen and heard and what is remembered offers a lesson in history and imagination, the human impulse to perfect the former with the latter. That isn’t the only revelation. What leaps from the tape is the experience of surprise. So little was expected of Hendley and so much of Koufax. No one expected this. In history, it is The Perfect Game, a fait accompli. When Dave Smith’s father turned on the tape recorder in his son’s bedroom, it was just another Thursday night in September with no score at the end of two.
By the time Dave and his father listened all the way through, it was nearly 2:00 A.M. on September 10. The Cubs had just arrived in San Francisco, their short, late-night flight the culmination of a very long day. Nobody got much sleep. Reality didn’t set in until breakfast. It greeted Hendley in the hotel coffee shop like the last cold cup from the urn. “You go down to eat, you know you’ve been through something,” he said.
Krug didn’t feel a whole lot better. Not only had his error cost Hendley the game but when he arrived at Candlestick Park, a local writer demanded to know whether he had thrown the ball away on purpose. “I just about went after him, it angered me so,” Krug said.
He found Hendley shagging fly balls on the warning track and summoned the words of apology that had eluded him the night before. “Sorry I screwed it up for you,” he said.
Hendley has no memory of the conversation, preferring instead to remember his next start, four days later, when he hooked up with Koufax again on a raw, windy Chicago afternoon. There were 6,000 people in the stands at Wrigley Field. He threw a four-hitter and beat Koufax 2–1. It was the last of their six major league encounters. Hendley won three and lost one; Koufax beat him only once, the night of the perfect game. “Krug didn’t screw it up, I’m sure that’s what I told him,” Hendley said. “He threw the ball away at third. But he didn’t put the guy on base. He didn’t let him steal third. I didn’t blame him. I didn’t blame anybody. You didn’t then. You probably do now.”