He Has Risen Above the Greatest of Sleaze

The legend is awesome, with its near mythic tales of no-hitters, strikeout records and home-run sluggers reduced to quivering lumps at the sight of the fearsome fastball.

But we did not know the true measure of Sandy Koufax’s clout until Friday, when the Hall of Fame pitcher and Dodger icon stared down Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. media conglomerate ... and mighty News Corp. flinched.

Incensed over a two-month-old gossip-column item in Murdoch’s New York Post that insinuated he was gay, Koufax has severed all ties with another News Corp. property, the Los Angeles Dodger Baseball Club. His decision became public Thursday.

Less than 24 hours later, News Corp., which is dead-set on global domination and the ruination of journalism and unapologetic about all of it, decided to apologize.

For the record, the Post did the apologizing. In today’s editions, the Post issued a brief statement saying it was sorry “for getting it wrong.”

But consider: News Corp. owns the Dodgers, is currently trying to sell the Dodgers and is smart enough to realize that alienating the most famous Dodger of them all is not particularly good for business.

Did News Corp. have anything to do with the Post’s very rare public apology?

Did Koufax win a lot of games for the Dodgers?

Early Friday, before the firestorm swept through the newsroom, the mood was different at the Post. In the morning, The Times’ Jason Reid spoke with Richard Johnson, editor of the Post’s “Page Six” gossip section, which on Dec. 19 ran the “blind item” suggesting that a “Hall of Fame baseball hero” recently the subject of a best-selling biography was secretly gay.

“Our policy on blind items is that we don’t discuss who they’re about for obvious reasons,” Johnson told Reid, “so I’m not going to discuss who this item is about. And it’s presumptuous to assume you know who it’s about.... I’m not even going to say this story is about Sandy Koufax, so why would I feel responsible?”

Johnson went on to add that “if Sandy Koufax is going to be upset at anyone, I believe he would be upset at the [New York] Daily News. Did you hear about that? Our item was [the] first because we’re originators [at the Post], that’s what we do. But I’m not going to say anything else.”

About that last bit, Johnson was right. By the afternoon, phone calls to Johnson reached his voice mail and were not returned. Another call to the Post’s sports editor was referred to the newspaper’s publicity department, which said the paper would soon be issuing a statement and saying nothing else.

The statement said the Post was “very sorry” for the “series of unfortunate consequences” resulting from its Page Six item. After suggesting in December that this baseball hero cut a deal with biographer Jane Leavy to “keep secret that he is gay,” the statement noted that Leavy called the item “erroneous,” adding, “we apologize to both Koufax and Leavy for getting in wrong.”

And the cross-town Daily News?

On Jan. 5, Daily News gossip columnist Michael Gross responded to the Post item this way:

“Koufax gay? Nothing wrong with that -- but no way!

“The Word easily confirmed that Koufax lives in Greenwich Village and in Bucks County, Pa., with a woman he met on Tortola, where they both spend time. She bears an uncanny resemblance to Carly Simon.”

Two New York City tabloids bickering about the quality of the gossip they spew -- not exactly what the founding fathers imagined when they were putting the quill to the First Amendment.

In today’s he-said, she-repeated-it, so-it-must-be-fact environment, Koufax might have been better served if he had ignored the tabloids. The Post item was two months old and still, few living outside Manhattan were aware of it. Had Koufax said nothing and simply turned up at the Dodgers’ spring camp, same as he does every year, the item most likely would have died an anonymous death.

When Koufax, through a Dodger spokesman, expressed his feelings about cutting ties with the team, the issue became national news and fodder for the kind of media feeding frenzy Koufax is said to abhor.

Those who know Koufax say he isn’t the type to just let it be, that he’s a man of principle and this, in Koufax’s mind, was a principle worth fighting for. Certainly, it got News Corp.’s attention, in near-unprecedented fashion. And it caused others in the media to re-examine, if only for a day, the high long-term fallout of multimedia mergers and corporate sports ownership, as well as their own principles.

Leavy told The Times she is canceling a tour of spring training camps to promote the Koufax book. “I don’t have any real appetite for that right now,” she said. “Besides, I don’t want to profit from this.”

Keith Olbermann announced on his Friday radio show that he was pulling out of a book deal with HarperCollins, which is owned by News Corp.

“I still have a contract with the publishers, HarperCollins, to write a sports book,” Olbermann said. “I will not write it for them. I’m sending the money back. They certainly could use the dough: It might enable Rupert Murdoch and his employees to buy their souls back.”

Jim Buzinski, publisher of the gay sports Web site outsports.com, said he has mixed feelings about the outrage over the Post item.

“It sort of has an implication that if you’re named as being gay, it’s somehow this terrible slur and accusation,” said Buzinski, also an editor for the Times’ foreign desk. “While I’m not defending some wrong thing in the New York Post, someone like [radio host] Lee Hamilton called it ‘character assassination.’

“Assuming someone’s gay, that’s assassinating their character? That always kind of bothers me, that the gay thing gets twisted around, as if the worst thing you can accuse a person of is being gay.

“Koufax is obviously a man of great integrity and he did what he felt he had to do, but I’m sort of troubled by some of the reaction of people saying, well, go get ‘em.... Something about it strikes me as [strange], that even in the sports world the whole thing of being labeled as being gay is considered so scurrilous that you have to go and do something like Koufax did, which was sever ties with the team that he’s been a legend with.”

In the preface of her book, Leavy wrote, “Sports in the modern incarnation is a jungle -- the name Jim Rome has given to his call-in radio show out of ‘SoCal’ where ‘clones’ wait on hold for hours in order to trade ‘takes’ and ‘smack’ in a guttural and debased competition for air time.

“It is impossible to imagine Koufax in that jungle. In virtually every way that matters, ethically and economically, medically and journalistically, he offers a way to measure where we’ve been, what we’ve come to, what we’ve lost.”

In recent weeks, much to his dismay, Koufax was introduced to the jungle. In one of his most amazing accomplishments, Koufax went into the jungle and wrestled out an apology.