Sandy Koufax

by Jane Leavy

  He worked with some of the best arms in the Dodger system: Orel Hershiser, Dave Stewart, John Franco, Bob Welch. Hershiser still remembers the particulars of a twenty-five-year-old conversation that took place on a bench in an instructional league dugout, listening as Koufax articulated the intricacies of the game, the mechanics of pitching; pointing out how the field was playing and what the wind direction was and why the pitch selection was wrong; why as you fatigue a certain pitch becomes better. Angell contacted him again, wanting to write a piece about Koufax, the pitching coach. Again, after initial enthusiasm, he was rebuffed. Again, Angell thought, Strange guy.

  Just staying beneath the radar, friends explained. But not exactly off the screen. Jim Belshaw, an Albuquerque reporter, was visiting Pat McKernan, president and general manager of the Dukes, one day and mentioned in passing how much he’d like to meet Koufax—not write about him, just talk to him. “The next day at work, the phone rang around eight-thirty A.M. I answered and a brief conversation followed:

  ‘Jim?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is Sandy.’

  ‘Sandy?’

  ‘Koufax.’

  “He then asked if I’d like to join him for breakfast at his hotel, which is how a baseball fan stumbled into a two-hour conversation with the greatest left-handed pitcher in the history of the game.”

  At a Cracker Jack old-timers game in Buffalo, a reporter followed him into the shower. “He came up to me laughing,” promoter Dick Cecil said. “He said, ‘I was doing this interview. It was late. I’m heading for the shower. I get in the water and he’s in there with me.’ The guy was just so happy to be talking to Sandy Koufax he’d follow him anywhere—which he did.”

  At another Cracker Jack game played at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., in the mid-1980s, Koufax took the mound for the National League in the first inning, just throwing the ball over to let people hit it. “And then somebody from the American League started throwing hard, trying to pitch to us,” Billy Williams recalled. “And Sandy said, ‘I didn’t know that they wanted us to pitch.’ And the next inning, he went out there and he threw twelve pitches and struck out everybody.”

  Afterward, in the locker room, Williams was sitting with Lou Brock, Willie Stargell, and Willie McCovey when Joe Garagiola wandered by this quartet of fair hitters and wondered out loud how many home runs they had hit collectively off Koufax. “That’s when Koufax appeared,” Williams said. “Sandy, right away, says, ‘I’ll tell you.’ So he pointed to me. ‘You hit two, and you hit none, you hit none, and you hit one.’ He knew. He could count ’em.”

  It was at one of those Dodger Fantasy Camps that he first met Dave Wallace. Wallace watched from the third base coaching box the transformation in the aging left-hander when his mettle was questioned. “He was in throwing shape because he had thrown batting practice in the summer for the minor league teams. And you’re throwing the ball and having a little fun and some wise-ass fantasy camper walking up to the plate says, ‘Goddamn, Koufax, is that all you’ve got?’

  “I mean to tell you, his eyes changed like that. He threw four or five pitches there’s no doubt in my mind were on the verge of ninety miles an hour. ‘Take that, you smart-ass sonofabitch.’”

  At the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the Dodgers’ 1955 World Championship, Koufax prevailed upon his old teammate Roger Craig to teach him the new split-fingered fastball he had developed. Koufax figured he needed to know how to throw it if he was going to teach it. “He was throwing it pretty good,” Craig said. “A couple of days later, he said, ‘I could make a comeback.’ He coulda got people out.”

  Terry Collins thought so, too. He was working for Buzzie Bavasi’s son, Bill, at the time. “Bill said, ‘Hey, Sandy, if I give you the hundred grand Buzzie wouldn’t give you, would you give me three starts?’” Collins said. “Oh, God, I laughed. Shit, he was throwing bee-bees. I said, ‘Sandy, God, get in shape.’”

  He was in shape: thirty pounds lighter than his playing weight. His second wife, Kim, was an exercise enthusiast. He became a serious runner, a marathoner who smoked, competing in Europe, where he was least likely to be recognized. Year-round employees at Dodgertown became accustomed to finding him in the workout room in the morning before anyone else arrived. “I came in and there was a guy sitting in the dark on the Exer-cycle watching Sports Center at seven A.M.,” said Grant Greisser, then general manager of the Vero Beach Dodgers. “I said, ‘You mind if I turn on the light?’ I turned on half the bank of lights. It was Koufax on the Exer-cycle. After forty-five minutes, he was still going at it. I didn’t want to quit and look bad.”

  He resigned his position with the Dodgers in 1990, saying he wasn’t earning his keep. Peter O’Malley says the fault was his for not giving Koufax enough to do. Friends, reading between published lines, blamed his estrangement from the organization on an uneasy relationship with manager Tommy Lasorda, who, Collins says, resented Koufax’s work with his pitchers. There was also the slight matter of the farm director who questioned his expense reports.

  Four years later, when Kennedy became manager of the Texas Rangers, he asked Koufax’s second wife, Kim, if she thought he might like to work with his pitchers in spring training—among them Nolan Ryan. “She said, ‘I’m sure he’d love it. All anybody ever had to do was ask and he’d be there. People never ask. Like everybody else he just wants to be wanted.’

  “He called me back the same day. He said, ‘Tell the owners, I don’t want to be paid or employed. I won’t wear a Rangers uniform.’ He wore Ranger blue pants and a generic hat.”

  Osteen was in Texas with Koufax and Kennedy that spring, too. “One night riding back to the apartment, at the end of the day, he said to me, ‘You know, I’ve really enjoyed this. I’ve kind of missed it—the camaraderie, the talk, as much as the on-the-field stuff.’ I can’t tell you how good that made me feel. I never thought I’d hear that from him.”

  Years later, when Ryan entered into the Hall of Fame, he spent the morning of his induction walk-through in the library at Cooperstown reviewing photos of Koufax’s career, marveling at his form and demonstrating for the archivists how Koufax did what he did.

  Now, he mentors informally—showing up at the Mets spring training camp in Port St. Lucie to help Wilpon’s team and until recently, at Dodgertown, eschewing face-time for distant mounds where he works with young pitchers. In this way, Koufax is not unlike Milt Gold, Milt Laurie, and Milt “Pop” Secol, Brooklyn men, coaches, who volunteered their time to help other men’s sons realize their potential. This is where he can be a baseball player again, Collins says—and a teacher. “You should be better,” he told Al Leiter one day after observing him in spring training. “I know,” Leiter replied.

  A couple of days later, Wilpon passed on Koufax’s telephone number and a message: “Call anytime.” Leiter was honored and astonished, unsure what he had done to merit the attention. Unlike so many self-satisfied players, Leiter wanted to get better. As Koufax likes to say, When a pupil is ready, a teacher will come.

  One night, not long after, Leiter returned home after pitching eight shutout innings to find a message from Koufax on his answering machine: “Way to go. Great job. But when you’ve got him set up for the outside corner, you gotta nail it.” And then he hung up.

  He shows up: a small phrase redolent with clubhouse meaning. Koufax shows up at charity banquets and charity golf tournaments and charity banquets at charity golf tournaments; at induction ceremonies and funerals; at the Final Four and high school basketball games. Occasionally, he shows up in the pages of glossy magazines, as he did a while back with Kevin Costner in People at a benefit for pediatric AIDS. Or on the front page of the New York Times with all the other Hall of Famers who were among President George W. Bush’s first guests at the White House in March 2001. Or on a banquet dais demanding to know of a surprised Gene Oliver, “How did a putz like you hit .392 off me?” (Oliver’s polished reply: “He thought I was Jewish and took care
of me.”)

  He is in constant demand, and the demand is insatiable, especially in the Jewish community. Every year, the board of directors of the Jewish Community House of Bensonhurst asks Pearl Kane, their head of development, why she can’t get Koufax for their fund-raiser. “Because he doesn’t want to be gotten,” she finally told them. “People want his money, his autograph. You know what I want? I want him to come here and meet the fifty thousand Russian kids in Bensonhurst—they all know him—show them how to hold a baseball and tell them about his immigrant family and how they once came here and how baseball made him an American.” As if 50,000 Russian émigré teenagers know from Sandy Koufax. He engenders hyperbole—particularly in fund-raisers. He would no doubt be appalled to learn that staffers at the “J” Xeroxed copies of his annual dues check and plastered it all over the building—just so they could have a copy of a copy of his signature.

  Koufax is the anomalous celebrity who employs a business manager largely for the purpose of rejecting prospective deals. Often when his attendance at a fundraiser or an interview is being requested, he returns the calls himself. People are always surprised—and invariably unhappy when he politely declines. “Why didn’t he have his people call if he was just going to say no?” one executive complained later, oblivious to the irony in the query. Precious few celebrities return their own calls. Koufax is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.

  Harlan J. Warner, whose company, Art of the Game, has represented Koufax for nearly twenty years, says he could make $5 million a year every year if he so chose. “He has made more in one day than he did in three or four years of pitching,” Warner said.

  Koufax has not done an autograph show since the spring of 1999. When Jerry Schein, a beer vendor at Yankee Stadium, arrived at 8:00 A.M., he was third on line. Three hours and three hundred people later, Koufax arrived. “I gave him three balls to sign and I said, ‘Thanks for helping me grow up,’” Schein said. “Sandy laughed and said, ‘Did you grow up? I know I didn’t.’”

  Since then Koufax has done only private signings, usually one a year, which are arranged by brokers who send objects to be signed for an up-front fee. In the winter of 2003, Steiner Sports was asking $499 per signature. Warner says he never signs more than two thousand pieces a year. He doesn’t hate the memorabilia industry—it’s how he makes his living—but loathes its seamy underside. He also understands the perks of being public property.

  “It’s a good deal being a celebrity,” said Abe Singer, one of his Final Four buddies. “To some degree he’s self-absorbed, but he still thinks like a human being. He’s an iconoclast, and iconoclasts aren’t always predictable. One year we were sitting in the stands in Indianapolis and those four guys from the Miller commercial were sitting right behind us and getting all the attention. I said, ‘Sandy, easy come, easy go. One beer ad and you’re history.’ He laughed of course.

  “There are moments when he’s not recognized where it bothers him. We were in the lobby one year and nobody’s coming up to him. He wanted to leave and there was no reason to leave. We were waiting for somebody. Sandy was kind of awkward when people didn’t approach him.”

  They approach him all the time. Back in 1965, Geri Akan wrote to him, saying her sister had painted his portrait and could they arrange to give it to him the next time the Dodgers were in New York. “My phone at work rang one day and it was Sandy,” Akan said. “He apologized that he couldn’t meet us during that visit but promised to call the next time the team was in New York. True to his word, he called and we arranged to meet for lunch at the Roosevelt Hotel, where the team stayed.”

  Koufax promised to leave tickets for them when the sisters visited L.A. and wrote them a letter, which Akan still has, making the necessary arrangements.

  Terry Wood, a young airline reservation specialist, was working in Minneapolis in 1980 when a customer called wanting to make reservations for a flight to Los Angeles. The name was Koufax—the Koufax. Wood asked to meet him before his flight. Sure, Koufax said. “So I meet him and his wife in the Horizon Room in the Minneapolis airport. We talked for about forty-five minutes. He autographed a book with him on the cover, wrote a note to my aunt and uncle who were celebrating their golden wedding anniversary.”

  Ten years later, Wood contacted him again asking for an autographed picture for their sixtieth anniversary. Within ten days, he received an 81?2-by-11 glossy. Five years later, he wrote again asking Koufax to call them on their sixty-fifth anniversary. “I received a letter back from Mr. Koufax with the card signed and a little note saying, ‘Dear Terry, Sorry too late, been away, Sandy.’ It was only two weeks since I’d sent it to him.”

  He always shows up for teammates. He showed up at Rachel Robinson’s side at Shea Stadium during ceremonies marking the fiftieth anniversary of her husband’s major league debut. And at Cooperstown for Sutton’s induction into the Hall of Fame. Sutton, the son of Alabama tenant farmers, wanted to thank Koufax publicly for teaching him how to tip in a restaurant and a clubhouse; how to tailor a suit and a mound; how to behave like a professional.

  In Al Campanis’s final years, when so many others in the Dodger family were distancing themselves from the old scout, who had embarrassed himself and the franchise with insensitive racial remarks on ABC’s Night-line, Koufax called and said: “Don’t let one incident ruin your life. We know how you are. You know how you are.”

  When Campanis died some years later, Koufax and Scully were among the mourners. “We need some young guys to pick up the front end of the casket,” Al’s son Jimmy would recall the funeral director saying. “Vin and Sandy start backing away. I said, ‘Sandy, you and Vin are the young guys.’ As they’re carrying him out, Sandy starts laughing and Vin says, ‘Your dad is probably turning over in his grave.’”

  Linn always thought Koufax looked for occasions to laugh—and found them even in the darkest situations. Mark Reese, Pee Wee’s son, remembers being with Koufax and his dad in an airport lounge at LAX after Drysdale’s funeral. Koufax wore a green baseball cap with one of those long, faux ponytails then in fashion. They killed time reveling in the double takes he engendered.

  His sister’s death in 1997 marked another turning point. He was divorced from his second wife soon after. Life is too short for one to be pinned down to unhappiness. He has a loving relationship with a mature woman who is his equal and nieces and nephews to spoil. Friends say he’s never been happier or more at ease with “Sandy Koufax.” They also say he is a genuinely modest man who dismisses idolatry with a practiced throwaway line: “The older I get, the better I used to be.”

  In 1998, when the Dodgers retired Sutton’s uniform number, an invitation to the festivities never reached Koufax. O’Malley assumed Koufax knew he was invited based on an earlier conversation and did not want a form letter to be sent to him. So Koufax paid his own way, showing up at the stadium unexpected. There was no mention of him in the pre-written script. After the ceremony, Sutton told Koufax how much it meant that he had come. “How could I not?” Koufax replied. “You’re the only three-hundred-game winner I ever played with.”

  He had brought an old equipment bag with him and filled it with some of the trophies the Dodgers had been holding for him. O’Malley assured him they would always be safe at Dodger Stadium. But the franchise was passing into the corporate portfolio of Rupert Murdoch. It wasn’t the Dodgers anymore.

  (In 2003, Koufax severed his ties with the organization in response to a false and defamatory article published—and later retracted—by Murdoch’s New York Post, ironically the same tabloid that trumpeted the hurtful adoption scoop in 1963. Koufax, an absolutist in the age of corporate synergy, adheres to the principle that it is reasonable to hold a corporation responsible for the actions of its subsidiaries. He let it be known that he would reconsider his decision when News Corporation’s intended sale of the team became a reality.)

  On the flight home after Sutton’s retirement ceremony he was seated beside Joe Pietro, an Avon Com
pany executive, who grew up a Yankee fan but rooted for Koufax. “You had to root for Koufax,” he said. Pietro waited until the plane took off to acknowledge the obvious. “I’m a big, big fan,” he said.

  “He got that boyish, sheepish grin. He said, ‘Thanks, thanks a lot.’ He nodded and smiled. He wasn’t turned off. I said, ‘One of the things I remember was the seventh game of the 1965 World Series. You’re pitching with two days’ rest and one of your two pitches wasn’t working.’

  “‘Nothing was working that day,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how I got through it.’ There was a gleam in his eye—a little pride.”

  But he quickly turned the conversation around, wanting to know what Pietro did, where he came from. Pietro thought, He could be your next-door neighbor or your best friend. If only people would let him. When the plane landed, they shook hands and said good-bye. At the baggage claim, Pietro saw him sitting alone on the conveyor belt waiting for his belongings. He couldn’t help but watch. He wanted to see Sandy Koufax pick up his bag. Inside were the trophies ransomed from Dodger Stadium. Later, he would dig a hole and bury some of them at an undisclosed location, other Dodgers would confide. It wasn’t as if he was burying the past or running away from it. Just putting it in its place.

  He is invariably described as intensely private. “Cloistered,” the Washington Post called him in a 2003 story relating—without irony—how he telephoned Yankee manager Joe Torre to praise his young second baseman, words Koufax surely knew would become public. An intensely private person does not present Randy Johnson with his fourth Cy Young Award at the Baseball Writers Association of America dinner as Koufax did in January 2003. Nor does he grab the microphone at a Baseball Assistance Team dinner for an impromptu salute to a childhood friend. “I don’t do this very often,” Koufax said, meaning commanding center stage. “But I think it should be noted that Fred Wilpon is the only owner in baseball who comes to this event every year.”