Opinions and ‘Fax

In a heavily promoted television production that appeared recently, ESPN tried to offer a portrait of Sandy Koufax, the great left-handed pitcher, who courts obscurity and grows ever more private, even as he approaches the age of 63. After years of reclusive behavior, Koufax had agreed to a brief interview, for which ESPN people lustily congratulated themselves. I was reminded of what happened shortly after sound first came to motion pictures. That long-ago publicity campaign announced: Garbo Speaks!

I don’t remember what words spilled forth from Greta. On ESPN Koufax looked gray-haired and splendid and was predictably courteous and bland. He appeared amid a sea of talking heads--mine included--assembled, cropped and edited to support ESPN’s essentially hysterical point that Koufax was the greatest pitcher since the Pleistocene Age.

How does ESPN know who is the greatest pitcher of all time? Simple. The network has compiled a list of “the 50 greatest athletes of the 20th century.” Koufax is the only pitcher on the roster. Goodbye, Cy Young. Take a hike, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, Bob Feller. Sorry, guys. Pick up your unconditional releases on the way out of the studio. Of course, one next might ask how ESPN knows the 50 greatest athletes of the century. But this grows tiresome.

Making arbitrary lists can be fun, but it’s sports-bar stuff, not adult journalism. I once asked Pete Rose to name the greatest pitcher he ever faced and this is what Rose said. “That would be three. Hardest thrower--Koufax. Toughest competitor--Bob Gibson. Most complete pitcher--Juan Marichal, in a jam Marichal could throw any one of five pitches for a strike.” According to Rose, the greatest modern pitcher is three people. That is, perhaps, too complicated for ESPN.

In 1905, Mathewson started 37 games, completed 32 and posted a record of 31-9 for the New York Giants. He led the National League in strikeouts and finished with an earned-run average of 1.28. Then, as the Giants won the World Series, the Olympian Mathewson shut out the Philadelphia Athletics three times in six days. Does ESPN want us to believe that Koufax was better than that? Nobody was better than that, and as a matter of fact Koufax’s own World Series record (despite an ERA of 0.95 in 57 innings) was a decidedly earthbound 4-3. True, in Mathewson’s time the ball was dead, helping a pitcher. But the fielder’s gloves were tiny and the infields were rocky, helping the hitter. One can banter along these lines toward morning.

The ESPN show was visually attractive, slick and superficial. Koufax is visually attractive, but slick and superficial are among the last words I would choose to describe him. He is complex, sensitive, inward and aware not only that he was a great pitcher but that he was a great Jewish pitcher in a game where ethnic needling is as much a tradition as second base.

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Koufax appeared as a subdued 19-year-old in spring training, 1955, on a veteran Brooklyn Dodger team, peopled by such future Hall of Famers as Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese and Duke Snider. He had been studying architecture at the University of Cincinnati. “Only two times in my life,” Al Campanis of the Dodger front office told me then, “has the hair literally stood up on the back of my neck. Once was when I saw Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel. The other time was when I first saw Sandy Koufax throw a fastball.”

He was wild, but all left-handers start out wild, everybody said. He had a bad time in batting practice throwing fastballs into the dirt or into the backstop. He was also awed, a Brooklyn kid, suddenly working on the same ballfield as Brooklyn legends. In those days I used to play half-court two-man basketball in Vero Beach, teaming with Joe Black, the fine relief pitcher. Koufax joined our games, choosing as his partner a bespectacled publicity man, who seemed to be playing hoops for the first time.

Black and I moved way ahead, trying not to giggle. Then Koufax took over. He drove to a corner and sank a gorgeous left-handed hook shot. He faked the same drive and made a jumper. He could drive, leap and maneuver, but most of all Sandy could shoot. In this game, if you scored you kept the ball. Black and I didn’t get the ball back that day.

“Joe,” I said later, “help me figure this out. The kid can sink a hook shot from the corner. He’s got the most delicate touch. Then he goes out in batting practice and can’t throw a fastball over the plate. How can you have so much control on the court and none on the mound?”

“Up here,” Black said, pointing to his head. “The problem has got to be up here.”

The Dodgers moved on to Miami for exhibition games where the fierce tabloid reporter, Dick Young, and I wrote our first-edition stories in the cabana of a hotel called the Sea Gull, which I confess we renamed the Siegal. Baseball ethnic needling infected everyone. Koufax’s mother, an attractive dark-haired woman, was staying there and one afternoon, as I shoved paper into my portable typewriter, Mrs. Koufax asked, “Did you put Sandy’s name in the paper this morning?” “I wanted to, Mrs. Koufax, but he didn’t pitch.”

She dropped her voice. “You’re a Jewish boy. Sandy’s a Jewish boy. Put his name in the paper today, please.”

Unhappily I said, “It doesn’t work that way, Mrs. Koufax.” After she left, Young leered and said, “I guess she thinks you work for the Tel Aviv Herald Tribune.”

That season Koufax pitched only 41 innings. The season after he pitched 58 innings. Thus a grave problem was joined. Ignoring a young pitcher with the Sistine Chapel in his arm is no way to develop a talent. Spot his starts. Throw him into long relief. Keep him working. “A pitcher has to work,” said the fine coach, Johnny Sain. “An arm will rust out before it wears out.” Besides, sitting on the sidelines, about as important as the bat rack, shrivels the confidence. Talk to the youngster. Make him feel that he’s part of the team, an important part. Tell him you care for him. Tell him he’s going to be great. One reason Willie Mays became so good so quickly was that his manager, Leo Durocher, kept telling Willie he was the finest ballplayer on earth. With that support, Willie came to believe he was. In his second full major league season, Mays at 24 won the most-valuable-player award.

Dour Walter Alston was little if any help to Koufax. The result: Koufax spent his first six seasons as a losing pitcher, condemned to Dodger Siberia. In fact, the late Don Drysdale told me that Koufax wondered if his six years in the gulag were dictated by latent anti-Semitism in Alston. It is a fair question, although at this date one cannot be sure.

In Koufax’s third year, when he won five and lost four, a tabloid came barreling into his solitary life. Milton Gross of the New York Post ran down a tip that there had been a divorce in Koufax’s family. Gross found Koufax’s biological father, a man named Braun, selling phonograph records in downtown Brooklyn. Irving Koufax, CPA, the man who had been presented as Koufax’s father, was actually his stepfather. The Post splashed this story in great headlines across its front page. Koufax would not comment. Whatever divorce may be today, in the sedate Jewish community where Koufax grew up, divorce was scandalous. Koufax had been staying inside a shell. Now he built a shell around the shell. Then the Dodgers left Brooklyn and Koufax had to learn to live in California, a continent away from old friends and family.

He pitched a splendid World Series game in 1959, losing a 1-0 decision to the Chicago White Sox, but his period of greatness dates best from June 30, 1962, when he pitched a no-hitter against the Mets. That season he led the National League with a 2.54 ERA. Then came his years of thunder. In 1963, (25-5 with 11 shutouts) he started the World Series in Yankee Stadium by striking out the side. A key was Bobby Richardson, the Yankees’ No. 2 batter, who got most of his hits off high fastballs. Koufax knew that. He threw Richardson three high fastballs and struck him out. Then Koufax gave the Yankee dugout a hard look that said, “I can pitch it to your power and I’ll still strike you out.”

The uncertain youngster who had fled the mound for an asphalt basketball court was history. Mr. Sanford Koufax now embodied command and an appropriate arrogance. He won the game, 5-2, and wrapped up a Dodger sweep by beating the Yankees in Game 4, 2-1. In his 18 innings he struck out 23. He went on to win the Cy Young Award three times before he retired after the 1966 season (a 27-9 record with a 1.73 ERA) because of circulatory problems in his left arm, or arthritis or because the glare of public life had worn him out.

The ESPN special suggested that a tip from the Jewish Dodger catcher, Norm Sherry--”don’t grip the ball so tightly”--transformed Koufax from lost soul to Hall of Famer. That’s neat and ridiculous. After six years in the majors, Koufax’s record stood at 36 victories and 40 losses. Pitchers, including Mathewson, including Koufax, forever fiddle with grips and spins. To attribute Koufax’s glorious sunburst to the sudden discovery of a looser grip, after six years of living and breathing pitching is simplistic. The difference between the journeyman Koufax and the triumphant Koufax lay not in the finger, hand or arm. The difference lay inside his head.

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In one of his great years, Time magazine published a long feature saying that you could find Koufax between starts plugging in his portable phonograph and listening to the Mendelssohn violin concerto. Ah, those preppy Yalies who used to run Time. What would a Jewish pitcher listen to, except the plaintive work of a Jewish composer? Koufax expressed disgust. “I listen to Sinatra a hell of a lot more than I listen to Mendelssohn,” he said.

Some other ballplayers gave him a nickname. If they thought it would flatter him, they were delusional. They called him Superjew.

Koufax put up complex defenses. Ed Linn, a gifted collaborator, who had worked with Bill Veeck and Durocher, signed on for the obligatory autobiography of a superstar. Any anti-Semitism along the way? he asked. None, Koufax said. Linn dug deep and found Koufax’s old sandlot catcher, a fellow with an Irish background who was working as a Brooklyn police detective. The detective told Linn that he and Koufax played for a mixed Jewish-Irish team near Coney Island and that their big rival was a squad of Italian-Americans. The Italians disliked Koufax not out of innate bigotry but because they thought he threw too hard for the league. This led them to call him names. After a while Koufax silenced the Italians by throwing fastballs into their ribs. Linn liked the story and wrote it. Koufax excised it from the book.

In 1966 Otto Friedrich of the Saturday Evening Post asked me to write a long piece about Jewish life in America, as part of a series he was publishing on the Jewish experience around the world after the Holocaust. I wanted to touch on Jews in sport and thought of two athletes, Al Rosen, who hit 37 homers as a Cleveland rookie and batted in at least 100 runs in each of his first five full seasons, and Koufax. Since I was in Los Angeles first, I talked to Sandy in the Dodger clubhouse. He was polite, even cordial, but said he wished I wouldn’t do a story like that, “Too much is made of me as a Jewish pitcher,” he said, “and not enough just as a pitcher.”

I respected that and remarked on an irony. Sandy’s mother had pleaded with me, on ethnic grounds, to put his name in the paper. Now he was avoiding publicity, particularly that which stressed his Jewish background. I thought that twist might amuse my old hook-shooting, half-court basketball buddy. It did not. Koufax fixed me with a glacial smile and announced that what I said could not be true because his mother had never been to Florida. But a onetime Dodger publicist remembered Mrs. Koufax well. “When she was in Florida for spring training,” Irving Rudd said, “she always wanted a lot of tickets.” I had run into a case of intense denial.

As it happened, Koufax’s revisionist history contrasted vividly with Rosen’s thrilling account of his own life. Rosen’s first wife, a Miss Alabama, became manic depressive and committed suicide, leaving Rosen as an itinerant infielder and single parent. He kept himself and his family together by using two remarkable instruments, love and courage. Sure, Rosen said, he’d heard lot of anti-Semitic garbage on the ballfields, but if I was going to write that, and I should, I also ought to write about the Christian teammates who took his side, the shortstop George Strickland, for example, and the great second baseman Joe Gordon.

We fell to talk about the Holocaust. I was mystified why Roosevelt had not bombed the railroad line to Auschwitz. Rosen said that people who wondered why Jews had not counterattacked against the Gestapo were naive.

“I was a pretty fair boxer,” Rosen said, “but a big thing about fighting is how much do you have to lose. Ten guys can terrorize a thousand. Look at the motorcycle crowd. I suppose something like that was true of the early Nazi thugs.”

But on some level as a big league star, Rosen was making a forceful point. Jews are tough. “They threw at me a lot,” he said, “and a 90-mph fastball hurts. The worst is when it catches the funny bone in the left elbow. That happened to me twice. But there’s not a guy living who ever saw me rub.”

He lit a pipe, a big graying man in a well-tailored tweed jacket. “When I was up there in the majors,” Rosen said, “I always knew how I wanted it to be about me. I wanted it to be, ‘Here comes one Jewish kid that every Jew in the world can be proud of.’ ”

Is that the way it was for Sandy Koufax? ESPN forgot to ask.