[Review: Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy, by Jane Leavy (New York: HarperCollins; 282 pg; $23.95)]
"In an age of promiscuous self-promotion," writes Sandy Koufax's newest and best biographer, Jane Leavy, "a woman dressed as the Cat In The Hat who stands outside the Today Show studios with a poster announcing 'I am having breast cancer surgery tomorrow' is thought normal. A man who opts out of celebrity, declining to prolong or exploit his allotted fifteen minutes, is thought odd. There must be something wrong. Something hidden."
America as usual, wanting it both ways, always. Let a stratospheric achiever hang around beyond his peak, and we wish he had gotten the hell out whle his flight was still the kind that made us admire him in the first place. But let him get the hell out at the peak beyond his peak before he is forced back to earth - and a peak beyond his peak was where Sandy Koufax was when he retired - and we think he's somewhere between an enigma and a basket case.
"An enigma defies understanding," Leavy writes, in Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy. "Koufax defies nothing, except perhaps the expectations of a debased, media-driven age. Nor does he defy understanding; he just doesn't particularly need to be understood, an anachronistic impulse in our 'tell-all' culture."
Perhaps that, in part, is because he tried to be understood, once, and it did him less good than a Roman peace feeler might have done to stop Attila the Hun.
A Time profile after the 1965 World Series sketched Koufax as "an anti-athlete who suffers so little from pride that he does not even possess a photograph of himself." Koufax produced (with his autobiographical collaborator, Ed Linn) a rejoinder, hoping to "bury without any particular honours" the myth that baseball "lured" him from higher learning, causing him to rue "forever after...the life of fame and fortune that has been forced upon me." He also produced a gentle autobiography which forged much the same point.
That'll teach him. "(A) sad effort at self-vindication," wrote Mordecai Richler, in Commentary. It tells you something, though, of how tall Koufax stood - especially when he refused to open the World Series because it began on Yom Kippur, making him a Jewish as well as a baseball icon - that that august journal of Jewish as well as literary-political thought reviewed him, period. Richler called the book "a forced attempt to prove once and for all that he is the same as everybody else."
Richler, like so many, missed the point. On the pitcher's mound, Sandy Koufax wasn't the same as anybody else, but off the mound, Koufax acquired a reputation for being a fellow that some people believed couldn't possibly have belonged in the real or alleged Philistia of the professional jock shop. Not even if he was also a loyal and ecumenical teammate who befriended the scrubs and minorities as easily, if not just slightly more so, as the other regulars.
"Sandy Koufax is not exactly a character invented by Al Capp," wrote Jim Murray, the irreplaceable Los Angeles Times bellettrist (he was just too deep of his own league to be called a mere sports columnist), as Koufax began going from prospective to greatness in 1961.
But he is a rare specimen for baseball. In a game where the vocabulary runs to four-letter words and the vocal range registers from loud to hoarse, Sandy is articulate and soft spoken. Where the musical tastes run to rock 'n' roll and hillbilly gutbucket, Sandy prefers Mendelssohn and Beethoven...
Where teammates seek out the nearest cowboy picture, Sandy looks for the foreign art film. Where other players' raiment make them look as though they're trying to be sure the deer hunters see them, Sandy's is subdued - but expensive. There are those who think Sandy's salary just pauses briefly in his pocket on the way to the alpaca sweater industry.
The absolute nerve of Koufax, being a nice, cultured, cultivated fellow (he also liked to listen to Frank Sinatra and read contemporary novels and nonfiction, but the world thought he was only kidding); the nerve of this guy, pitching as though he had reinvented the art and made it impossible to replicate - which is precisely what he did, at the peak of his peak - and then stepping back down to earth, rather than cripple himself for life just to stay a little longer in the astral neon he knew was borrowed and duplicitous.
Leavy does a splendid enough job re-examining what it was that made Koufax the Heifetz of the mound (her chapter, "Warming Up," is a baseball thinker's delight), even if you accept that breaking down how he did it - even when she cites his own words and sketches of how - is only slightly less difficult than breaking down the legendary secrets said to have been destroyed forever when Moses smashed the Tablets at the sight of the ancient Hebrews with the golden calf. Some think the source of Koufax's talent was one of those secrets.
With neither stodgy riff nor pontificating rhetoric, Leavy wraps Koufax's story around his 1965 perfect game (an early Koufax biographer said the game "prov(ed) that practise makes perfect": it was his fourth no-hitter in as many consecutive seasons), from the six early seasons of an outsize talent fighting team brain trust and its owner's anxieties to find its way to full fruit, to the commitment of thought and attention that sustained him once he found that way, seeing in the surreal perfect game a pinpoint metaphor for Koufax's career: it "paralleled the arc of Koufax's career: from nothing special to never better."
But she also examines, with the sobriety of a Talmudic scholar and the ease of a sports rat, the contrast of the glittering baseball virtuoso and the unpretentious guy who was too easily mistaken for aloof or indifferent. And, with the same sobriety, the sobriety of a man who finally shook off his immortal coil rather than destroy himself to sustain it. (Her description of Koufax's arthritic condition, and the extradimensional lengths to which he and the Dodgers' team physicisn went to keep him pitching, until he finally realised he might have been a step short of plain crazy to keep it going, is absolutely halting.)
And she has produced the biographer's version of that rare hitter who could time a classic Koufax curve ball, measure it right into his sights, swing with synchronic grace, and hit it soundly on the sweet spot for a run-scoring hit. Not that her subject made it any easier to biograph him than he used to make it for batters having to face him. Though Koufax gave Leavy carte blanche to interview anyone but close relatives, and to verify biographic or chronologic facts with him, he refused to give anything beyond.
The gentle Sporting News columnist, Dave Kindred, a friend of Leavy since their days on the Washington Post, bumped into Koufax in a coffee shop as the book approached publication. Kindred mentioned "what a classy book" Leavy was writing. "So," Koufax needled, "you haven't been able to talk her out of it, either, huh?"
Because Koufax refuses "to cannibalise himself for profit," he is still considered as elusive as when he owned baseball. Sports Illustrated in 1999 made him a cover story, "The Incomparable and Mysterious Sandy Koufax." When people asked him to autograph copies, they learned the hard way that Koufax couldn't bring himself to read it. "I haven't disappeared," he told the press after he saw the issue. "I'm not lost. And I'm not very mysterious."
Tell that to people whose sense that he vanished before his time compels them to hunt any trace of him where he is known to alight. Koufax and his first wife (he is twice divorced; the end of both marriages saddened him deeply but didn't destroy him) had bought and rebuilt a rustic house in semi-rural Maine. A later owner gave it to a fire department that incinerated it for firefighting practise. When they did, Leavy notes, "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 were 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 cinder and ashes. He doesn't speak of himself in the third person, but he does think of 'Sandy Koufax' as someone else, a person separate from himself."
In no particular order, Himself is: a self-made master carpenter, cook, oenophile, and bibliophile; an avid golfer and marathon runner (in Europe, Leavy reveals, where he won't be hounded for who he was); a music lover of passionate examination, a doting uncle (to his late elder sister's children and grandchldren; Koufax himself is childless); an enthusiastic and valued free-lance pitching instructor; a gentle, loyal friend - to old teammates, old competitors, and new people alike - whose heart is as broad as his wit is balanced between self-deprecating and mischieviousness. ("The older I get," he says about the idolatry he still inspires, "the better I used to be.") "The only subject matter that doesn't interest Koufax," Leavy says, "is himself."
When he does present himself in public, usually at things to do with baseball (Leavy says he accepts the booming memorabilia business as his living, but neither obsesses over it nor suffers its unscrupulous gladly), he has a gift for slipping a pound of dignity into contrivances that threaten its sacrifice that is almost on a level higher than the gift he had on the mound. We take you back to Turner Field, 1999 World Series, the All-Century Team preceding the evening's serious business between the New York Yankees and the Atlanta Braves. Maybe you had to be there to notice. Maybe it was enough beyond reach that it couldn't be appreciated as it transpired, or we've become enveloped too snugly between cynicism and resignation.
You probably remember: Pete Rose, allowed to show at all, never mind accept a thunderboomer standing O. And, NBC reporter Jim Gray, thrashed and trashed in an unwarranted firestorm, for daring with Rose, perhaps a little arduously, what honest reporters don't consider daring. (Would Gray's character assassins rip those reporters seeing fit not to ask O.J. Simpson, at his alma mater's Rose Bowl prep, "Hey, by the way, how's the hunt for the real killers going?")
You probably don't remember: Sandy Koufax, lingering at the dugout rim under his own thunderboomer standing O, until the next announcement. The "usual" Koufax reticience? No, sir. He had helped an old man onto the All-Century Team in the first place (learning of his own selection, Koufax replied that an All-Century Team without this old man was a joke; the organisers rounded up a panel and brought the old man aboard, post haste), and now he would offer an arm to guide him to the stage where he, too, belonged.
The old man was Warren Spahn, beaming, appreciation amplifying the eyes Thomas Boswell has called "at once merry and sad," pushing his surgery-and-age exhausted legs slowly across the grass, on the arm that once nudged him from the perch as baseball's penultimate lefthander. Koufax resembled a loyal son refusing to leave a worthy father unacclaimed, escorting Spahn as if it were nothing less than Spahn's due.
And yet he will meet someone on a cross-country flight, someone who will tell him "I'm a big, big fan," and he will flash the still-dimpled grin, thank his admirer warmly...and turn the conversation quickly to the admirer and what the admirer is, does, thinks, feels. And if that admirer leaves thinking he's just spent a five-hour flight with a guy whom he could bump into down the block or at the coffee shop, that is just as fine with Sandy Koufax as it once was to nail a World Series on two days' rest with nothing left but a suspect fast ball and a shutout to show for it.
So Koufax became a star while refusing to let it coarsen him, quitting, Leavy writes, as "an act of emancipation and imagination," choosing not to exploit his past or amplify his present, exchanging the neon artifices of the athlete for the soft flame of a man, and "the assessment of him as aloof continues to solidify into hardened perception."
Sonny Barger, the legendary Hell's Angels president, was once quoted lamenting the outlaws' encephalophonic press coverage: "There's not much good you can write about us, but that don't give people the right to make up stuff. All that bullshit, hell, ain't the truth bad enough for 'em?" There's nothing bad you can write about Sandy Koufax (well, ok - he admits it, he once drilled Lou Brock on purpose, Brock having bedeviled him with some flamboyantly pesty on-base and stealing escapades). But why make up stuff, or find some presumed meaning that doesn't exist, Leavy is trying to say, when the man is even more likeable than the pitcher was admirable? Ain't the truth good enough for 'em?
» Jeff Kallman is a writer and editor living in Huntington Beach, California.
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Copyright © 2003 by Jeff Kallman. Posted April 25, 2003.
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