Sandy Koufax

by Jane Leavy

  He has no regrets about that night except that he lacked the foresight to keep a tangible reminder of it. Everyone else, it seemed, got something. Charlie Sheen, a six-day-old future actor with a passion for baseball memorabilia, got his lawyer’s signed scorecard—the only game Richard Hume ever scored. Kevin Kennedy, the eleven-year-old who stayed up past his bedtime listening to the radio, got to be Koufax’s friend. Jeff Torborg got to catch another two no-hitters. Harvey Kuenn got to heaven wth a .303 batting average. And Byron Browne got the satisfaction of knowing that Koufax would always remember his name. “It’s a pleasure to be mentioned in the same sentence as Sandy Koufax,” he says.

  Krug got over it. He moved on, bought a car wash, using Scully’s description of his leadoff at-bat in the ninth in a radio commercial: “Come to Chris Krug’s car wash. Chris Krug won’t strike out with you.” He went back to school, got a degree in landscape architecture, and became a facilitator of aspirations. “This will shake your boots,” he said. “You’ve seen my work.” The Field of Dreams constructed for the movie based on W. P. Kinsella’s novella is his. It is now the biggest tourist attraction in the state of Iowa.

  Koufax got a $500 raise from Walter O’Malley, the maximum then allowed under baseball’s unwritten law. Any more might have tempted a player to seek individual glory in lieu of team goals. Each of his teammates received a wooden plaque with a photograph commemorating the occasion. It is 9:46 P.M. in the City of the Angels. The count is 2 and 2 on Harvey Kuenn. Koufax stands on the precipice of perfection, delivering the 113th pitch of the game. A length of luminous zeroes is perched over his left shoulder, and the lineups, too, almost as if he is carrying them on his back. Only later, upon reflection, was it noted that the angle of the photograph is impossible. Someone had enhanced it, creating an impossible picture to document an implausible event. Like Koufax, it had to be perfect.

  What did Hendley get? A new name, “One-Hit Hendley,” and his picture on the front page of the newspaper, above the fold. “Almost Perfect,” the caption in the September 10 edition of the Chicago Tribune said. He looked like a man with a bad blister, which in fact he had the day the picture was taken.

  He got another two seasons out of his left arm. In 1967, he was a short relief man with the Mets, which was all his elbow had left to give. There were bone chips floating around inside the joint. “I would throw a pitch and my elbow would lock up,” he said. “The chip would slip down in the elbow joint. It felt like a pea in there. I’d walk off the mound, pull on it, and throw again.”

  After that season, he went home to Macon, Georgia, and finished college—“Enrolled in ’57 and graduated in 1970.” The same year Koufax was named Athlete of the Decade by the Associated Press. Two years later, Koufax became the youngest man ever elected to the Hall of Fame. By then, Hendley had gotten his teaching degree. He never did get elected to the Georgia State Hall of Fame, though he did donate a few items to their collection: a Braves equipment bag and an autographed ball.

  Hendley got a job at a nearby private school teaching physical education and coaching baseball, throwing the ball every day. “I haven’t left baseball,” he liked to say. “I just haven’t made money at it.” When he retired at the end of the 2001 school year, the Stratford Academy renamed the baseball field in his honor. Some of the boys had his baseball card. Almost none of them knew about the perfect game. He never talked about it until one kid showed him a card from a Trivial Pursuit game, asking, “Who was the other pitcher in Sandy Koufax’s perfect game?”

  “The fact that I played major league baseball doesn’t have anything to do with my purpose. My purpose is to teach the fundamentals of baseball, right and wrong. There are other things, lots of values outside of winning and losing, to offer them. My players know that I played. I think that’s enough. I don’t live by what I did but by what I do.”

  One day, back in the early eighties, the local paper sent a reporter to interview him. They ran their story with a picture of him striking out Sandy Koufax. Hendley’s son, Bart, the youngest, cut out the article and sent it to Koufax, who sent it back, signed, with a note: “Say hello to your father.” It was the first time their paths had crossed since September 1965.

  “I’d have loved to have done better,” Hendley said, “but I wouldn’t want to be famous. I wouldn’t want to be Sandy Koufax. I’d want to be me. I am who I am. I’m from where I’m from. I understand he has a problem wherever he goes, he’s swarmed. I don’t want to switch places. If roles were reversed? I’d still be who I am now.”

  Still, it would be nice to have a signed ball, something to pass on to his children and grandchildren. “I doubt that’s going to happen,” he said. “I know how he is about those things.”

  People think they know how he is. What they know is the public perception of the greatest lefty of all time, who walked away from baseball at age thirty and kept walking. Who allegedly valued his privacy so much the Dodgers had to send telegrams to his house when they wanted to reach him. Who said he was tired of all the hotel rooms and the travel but has wandered the globe ever since, moving so many times friends say they don’t know where the hell he is. Who showed up at Turner Field for the Team of the Century ceremonies in 1999, took one look at the press mob gathered around him, and announced: “I’d almost rather have root canal.” The quote was solemnly reported and recycled, absent context and humor.

  One thing for sure, Koufax wasn’t going to be another old ballplayer, hanging on, hanging around, trying to cram his former self into a pair of too-tight double-knits. “Baseball was what you did until you grew up,” he always said. “A way station in life.”

  He had no master plan for life after baseball except to live in the present tense. Asked once what he was doing to keep busy in retirement, Hank Aaron replied, “I’m being Hank Aaron.” It is the career choice of former greats. But Koufax didn’t want to grow old being Sandy Koufax. So his choices were limited.

  It came as no surprise to those closest to him that the woman he fell in love with and married didn’t know who Sandy Koufax was. “It was probably the first thing that attracted him,” said his old friend Trixie.

  Anne Widmark is the daughter of the movie star, Richard, the product of a star system even bigger than that of the L.A. Dodgers. They met on the beach and married in 1969. They bought an old house that needed lots of renovating, Wimkumpaugh Farm in Ellsworth, Maine, and went to work on it. It was during this period that he remained largely out of public view and earned the reputation of a recluse. Roger Angell, the great baseball writer for The New Yorker, a summer resident of Maine, invited him to go sailing one time. After accepting the invitation, Koufax abruptly declined. Strange guy, Angell thought. He wasn’t alone.

  Don Sutton regards him as a “clinical introvert,” someone who knows and values the difference between solitude and loneliness. Red Adams, the old Dodger pitching coach, concurs: “Sometimes people are misunderstood for being aloof when they’re really just quiet.”

  He had signed a ten-year contract with NBC for $1 million to do the Saturday Game of the Week. He looked male-model good in the blazer but was as stiff as the creases in his pants. All he had to do was look in the camera and be himself, which was the one thing he couldn’t do. Sports video geeks at the Classic Sports Network still cite a live 1971 World Series interview he conducted as one of the most painful moments in the history of broadcast sports. His partner, Joe Garagiola, tried to coach him through it, prompting. “Sandy, you’ve been there, lots of years.”

  “Definitely,” Koufax said.

  “You’ve been through it, the seventh game of the world series. You have anything to add?”

  “I don’t think you can add anything to what they said,” Koufax replied.

  He quit before the 1973 season, telling NBC execs to keep their money, and went home to Maine. In the received wisdom, he disappeared. Unlike the Yankee Clipper, a.k.a. Mr. Coffee, to whom he is so often compared, Koufax refused to cannibalize himself for pro
fit. “What people don’t understand is Sandy doesn’t cash in because Sandy feels he did cash in,” said Jerry Della Femina, the advertising maven from Lafayette High.

  The year after he retired, he turned down an offer from Gillette to market an updated paperback edition of his autobiography as a world series giveaway. He told his disappointed coauthor Ed Linn, “My giving them that is just giving them an endorsement. I’ve already turned that down.”

  “Evidence of an ethical life,” Sutton says.

  His lack of commercial visibility reinforced the notion of his reclusiveness. In another culture, it might have been viewed for what it was—a lack of venality. “He wasn’t driven by money, he wasn’t driven by fame,” said Fred Wilpon. “He has enough resources to be comfortable and happy. Possessions aren’t the gospel. He will often tell you, ‘The less possessions the better.’”

  “A minimalist,” Scully calls him. “To say the least.”

  Those who’ve known him longest say he hasn’t changed at all. Bill DeLury is a slight man with black horn-rimmed glasses and a Brooklyn accent that hasn’t faded with the years. He isn’t slick or smooth. He’s a throwback, a Brooklyn Dodger, who worked his way up in the organization from the ticket office to traveling secretary. “From the day Koufax came up to the day he left, he never changed. He’s a perfect gentleman. Koufax don’t need a Mercedes. Koufax don’t need a Jaguar. Give him a golf club and a sandwich after the game and he’s the happiest man in the world. We’re two peas out of the same pod. Don’t need publicity. Don’t need fame.”

  And so the refrain caught on: He’s just like DiMaggio—private, reclusive; the ghost of Dodgertown, Greta Garbo, and J. D. Salinger rolled into one. “There aren’t many people that Sandy has let into his life in terms of really knowing him,” said Wilpon. “But the degree to which he was more remote, the degree of being out of the public eye, has changed over the last forty years, depending on his circumstances. When he was married to Anne, that stage of his life, he was more remote.”

  The marriage didn’t last but the reputation did. Andy Etchebarren, who cherishes the distinction of being the last batter ever to face him, met him in a bar at one of those old-timer boondoggles soon after he and Anne parted. “It was a sad thing,” he said. “He stayed single a long time. He was really in love with this girl. He had just got divorced. He loved this girl something terrible. He was going from there to Indonesia. I remember sitting at the bar, knowing how down he was. I could see he was really hurting. He told me he loved her very much and it didn’t work out. I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, this guy’s really a nice guy.’ Not like everybody thought.”

  He is offended by the right things: a lack of civility, honesty, kindness. As Walter O’Malley once said of him: “Sandy gets a little disillusioned. He’d like a better world. He wants to see the best in everybody.” And so is disappointed when organizers of a dinner honoring his old college coach promise he’ll be just one of the guys and put his name on the awards program to sell tickets. Or when a rabbi asks him to sign yarmulkes for seventy-five bar mitzvahs and sells them. Or when Larry King, the talk-meister, goes around telling stories about how they were buddies back in high school. The story King tells most often is the Carvel story: an innocuous tale of high school joy-riding to New Haven, Connecticut, to buy Carvel ice cream, Koufax’s favorite, for fifteen cents a scoop. The only problem with the story is it never happened. David Finkel, a reporter at the Washington Post, working on a profile about King, wanted to hear Koufax’s version. A couple of days later “the recluse” returned his call, setting the record straight. “This is Sandy Koufax,” he said. “I’ve never been to New Haven.”

  The story tells more about Koufax than it does about King or ice cream. “Larry’s a publicist,” says Richard Kaufman, who knew them back in Brooklyn. “Sandy’s a privatist.” Friends told him to let it go. It’s just a story. So what if King improved it. What’s the big schmeer? But it was a big schmeer to Koufax.

  People are always placing themselves in the center of his orbit. The impulse is antithetical to him. He lacks the instinct or the appetite for self-aggrandizement. Because he chooses not to comment publicly on his life or to refute the collective impression of it, the assessment of him as aloof continues to solidify into hardened perception. When he was a no-show at the 1999 All-Star Game in Boston, his absence was cited as further evidence of his reclusive self. In fact, he never received an invitation. When he does show up, he is invariably asked about being a recluse. “My friends don’t think I’m a recluse,” he says frequently and pointedly.

  In the last summer of the old millennium, after the editors of Sports Illustrated named him their favorite athlete of the century, fans sought his autograph on the cover that bore the headline: “The Incomparable and Mysterious Sandy Koufax.” They were stunned to learn he hadn’t read it. Nor had he watched ESPN’s video profile for its series on the top fifty athletes of the century although he was the only pitcher named. “Don’t believe all that crap,” he told reporters. “I haven’t disappeared, I’m not lost, and I’m not very mysterious.”

  The profile made mention of the fact that the house in Maine he had shared with Anne thirty years earlier had been donated by a subsequent owner to the local fire department. The firemen torched the place and used it to practice their fire-fighting technique. When they were done, memorabilia bounty hunters scoured the charred remains for a piece of him like vultures drawn to carrion.

  To the extent that he removed himself from public view, it was not so much because he believed there are no second acts in American life as because he was determined to have one. He does not disavow who he was or what he accomplished. He is proud of it. He simply refuses to exist in cinders and ashes. He doesn’t speak of himself in the third person, but he does think of “Sandy Koufax” as someone else, a persona separate from himself. If he was seeking refuge from anything, it was that. “He may be the most misunderstood man in baseball,” his teammate John Kennedy said.

  He is a good friend, he remembers birthdays, he has an open heart—as Bob Hendley learned one day thirty-five years after the fact when an unexpected package arrived at his door. Koufax had taken his time thinking of the perfect inscription to write on the ball he had enclosed. “What a game,” he wrote, finally.

  Typical understatement from a man who devoted all of a page to it in his autobiography, seven paragraphs of which were about Hendley. There was also a note. “We had a moment, a night, and a career. I hope life has been good to you—Sandy.”

  When Hendley showed the ball to his son, Bart said, “Dad, this ball is from that era.”

  A Rawlings ball, not used these days. Signed by Warren Giles, the long-dead National League president.

  “I’d often been asked what it was like to be the other guy,” Hendley said. “I wrote Sandy a note and I said I always responded, ‘It’s no disgrace to get beat by class.’”

  “The thing I wonder is, what do you do all day?”

  The question, posed by his former teammate Claude Osteen, is the one everybody asks. After all, he was a young man, just thirty, when he left the game. Dusty Baker, the former Dodger, asked him about his plans one day and received this idiosyncratic reply. “He said he’s gonna just be a farmer someplace, have very few clothes on and ride a tractor around all day. I thought that was one of the coolest retirement plans I’d ever heard. He’s one of the coolest dudes I’ve met, ever.”

  “People ask all the time, ‘What’s he done with his life?’” Sutton said. “He’s enjoyed it.”

  “Tell ’em I’m having fun,” Koufax invariably replies when asked the same question.

  He has married and divorced twice. (One marriage lasted sixteen years, the other nine.) He never had children. He built a house and a golf swing. He learned to fly-fish and to fly, taking lessons in an old crop duster. He drove a tractor, ran marathons and triathlons, and tried to learn how to speak Italian. “He’s done a lot of things since baseball,” Sutton says. “He takes
up fly-fishing and masters it. He takes up golf and masters it. Whatever he does, he masters it. When he gets tired of it, then he goes on and finds something to challenge him. He has a vast and broad knowledge of a lot of things, from plays to symphonies to wine.”

  He educated himself, though not formally. He is as well traveled as he is well read. He used to carry a business card identifying himself as a Peregrination Expert. The novelist Philip Roth, whom some say he has come to resemble in late middle age, has an exacting standard for those he deems serious readers—people who think not only about what they read but about what they are going to read. The only subject matter that doesn’t interest Koufax is himself.

  “He wasn’t just a jock,” said Richard Kaufman, the Bensonhurst wrestler turned Washington economist. “He had a reflecting intelligence.”

  On March 27, 1979, Koufax showed up in uniform in the clubhouse at Dodgertown, the newest and most renowned minor league pitching coach in baseball history. “Like a lot of people living on a fixed income, I need the money,” he told reporters. Rarely, they noted, had anyone seemed so happy to be pedaling a stationary bike in a locker room.

  In all the published ruminations about his removal from the public scene, it never seemed to cross anyone’s mind that his self-imposed exile from baseball was a consequence of his love for the game, not his distaste for it. Koufax would admit as much years later, saying, “I really didn’t want to be around it for a while.”

  For nine years, he traveled the baseball boonies, eating pizza at midnight in some dive in Missoula, Montana, or getting dressed in a rinkydink minor league locker room while on assignment with the Albuquerque Dukes. Kennedy, also a roving instructor, would look over at him, not quite believing he was dressing next to Sandy Koufax. Maybe it was the uniform. Koufax looked a little funny in those rainbow uniforms the Dukes used to wear.