Dispatches From the Sporting Life Read online

  Finally, if the encyclopedia fails, on balance, to rectify the oldest myth about the Jew—that he is “a stranger to athletics”—it must be allowed that this is a pioneering work and a step in the right direction. Let us hope that Messrs. Postal, Silver, and Silver, thus encouraged, will now take on other foul anti-Semitic myths, for instance, that Jews don’t drink or practice homosexuality widely enough. I, for one, look forward to an encyclopedia (for delinquent bar mitzvah boys, perhaps) on Jewish Drunks, High School Dropouts, and Thugs from Noah to Today. I would also like to see a compilation of Famous Jewish Homosexuals, Professional and Amateur, Throughout History.

  II. KOUFAX THE INCOMPARABLE

  Within many a once-promising, now suddenly command-generation Jewish writer, there is a major league ball player waiting to leap out; and come Sunday mornings in summer, from the playing fields of East Hampton to the Bois de Boulogne to Hyde Park, you can see them, heedless of tender discs and protruding bellies, out in the fresh air together, playing ball. We were all raised on baseball. While today there do not seem to be that many Jewish major league stars about, when I was a kid there were plenty we could identify with: Sid Gordon and Al Rosen and of course Hank Greenberg. Even in Montreal we had, for a time, one of our own in the outfield, Kermit Kitman. Kitman, alas, was all field and no hit and never graduated from the Royals to the parent Dodgers, but it was once our schoolboy delight to lie in wait for him over the clubhouse at Saturday afternoon games and shout, “Hey, Kermit, you pipickhead, you think it’s right for you to strike out on Shabbes?”

  Baseball was never a bowl of cherries for the Jewish player. The Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports observes that while the initial ball player to accept money for playing was a Jew, Lipman E. Pike, there were few known Jewish players. The Sporting News, in 1902, wrote of one player, “His name was Cohen and he assumed the name of Kane when he became a semi-professional, because he fancied that there was a popular and professional prejudice against Hebrews as ball players.” Other major leaguers were more militantly Jewish. Barney Pelty, for instance, who pitched for the St. Louis Browns from 1903 to 1912, seemingly did not object to being known as “The Yiddish Curver.” Still, the number of our players in any era has been small, possibly because, as Norm Sherry, once a catcher with the Dodgers, has said, “Many boys find opposition at home when they want to go out for a ball-playing career.” Despite opposition at home or in the game, the Jew, as the Encyclopedia happily notes, has won virtually every honour in baseball. If there remains a Jewish Problem in the game today, it hinges on the Rosh Hashanah–Yom Kippur syndrome, for the truth we all have to live with is that much as the Reform temple has done to lighten our traditional Jewish burdens, the rush for the pennant and Rosh Hashanah, the World Series and Yom Kippur, still sometimes conflict.

  Should a nice Jewish boy play ball on the High Holidays? Historical evidence is inconclusive. Harry Eisenstadt, once a pitcher for the Dodgers, was in uniform but not scheduled to pitch on Rosh Hashanah 1935, but when the Giants began to hurt his team he was called into the game and his first pitch was hit for a grand-slam home run. And yet—and yet—one year earlier, Hank Greenberg, with the Tigers close to their first pennant since 1909, played on Rosh Hashanah and hit two home runs. Greenberg went to shul on Yom Kippur, alas, and the Tigers lost. The whole country, rabbis and fans at odds, was involved in the controversy, and Edgar Guest was sufficiently inspired to write a poem, the last verse of which reads:

  Come Yom Kippur—holy fast day

  world-wide over to the Jew—

  And Hank Greenberg to his teaching

  and the old tradition true

  Spent the day among his people

  and

  he didn’t come to play.

  Said Murphy to Mulrooney “We

  shall lose the game today!

  We shall miss him in the infield

  and

  shall miss him at the bat,

  But he’s true to his religion—and

  I honour him for that!”

  Honour him, yes, but it is possible that Greenberg, at that time the only Jew in the Hall of Fame, was also tragically inhibited by his Jewish heritage. I’m thinking of 1938, when he had hit fifty-eight home runs, two short of Babe Ruth’s record, but with five games to play, failed to hit another one out of the park. Failed … or just possibly held back, because Greenberg just possibly understood that if he shattered the Babe’s record, seemingly inviolate, it would be considered pushy of him and, given the climate of the times, not be such a good thing for the Jews.

  Greenberg, in any event, paved the way for today’s outstanding Jewish player, the incomparable Sandy Koufax. So sensitive is the Dodgers’ front office to Koufax’s religious feelings that Walter Alston, the Dodgers’ manager, who was once severely criticized for scheduling him to play on Yom Kippur, is now reported to keep a Jewish calendar on his desk.

  Koufax, who has just published his autobiography, is not only the best Jewish hurler in history, he may well be the greatest pitcher of all time, regardless of race, colour, or creed. His fastball, Bob Feller has said, “is just as good as mine,” and Casey Stengel was once moved to comment, “If that young fella was running for office in Israel, they’d have a whole new government over there….” Koufax has won the National League’s Most valuable Player Award, the Cy Young Award as the outstanding major league pitcher of the year, and the Hickok Pro Athlete of the Year Award. He has pitched four no-hit games, more than any other major league pitcher. He holds the major league record for both the most shutouts and the most strikeouts in one season and also the major league record for the number of seasons in which he has struck out more than three hundred batters. He has tied the major league record for most strikeouts in a nine-inning game, and also tied World Series records. I could go on and on, but a nagging question persists. This, you’d think, was enough. Koufax, at least, has proved himself. He is accepted. But is he?

  Anti-Semitism takes many subtle shapes, and the deprecating story one reads again and again, most memorably recorded in Time, is that Sandy Koufax is actually something of an intellectual. He doesn’t mix. Though he is the highest-paid player in the history of the game, improving enormously on Lipman E. Pike’s $20 a week, he considers himself above it. Fresco Thompson, a Dodger vice-president, is quoted as saying, “What kind of a line is he drawing anyway—between himself and the world, between himself and the team?” Another report quotes Koufax himself as saying, “The last thing that entered my mind was becoming a professional athlete. Some kids dream of being a ball player. I wanted to be an architect. In fact, I didn’t like baseball. I didn’t think I’d ever like it.” And the infamous Time story relates that when Koufax was asked how he felt after winning the last game in the 1965 World Series, he said, “I’m just glad it’s over and I don’t have to do this again for four whole months.”

  In Koufax, which the pitcher wrote with the dubious relief help of one Ed Linn, he denies the accuracy of most of these stories. In fact, looked at one way, Koufax’s autobiography can be seen as a sad effort at self-vindication, a forced attempt to prove once and for all that he is the same as anybody else. Possibly Koufax protests too much. “I have nothing against myths,” he begins, “but there is one myth that has been building through the years that I would just as soon bury without any particular honours: the myth of Sandy Koufax, the anti-athlete.” He goes on to state flatly that he is no “dreamy intellectual” lured out of college by a big bonus, which he has since regretted, and as if to underline this point, he immediately lapses into regular-guy English. “Look, if I could act that good I’d have signed with 20th Century–Fox instead of Brooklyn….” Koufax protests that though he is supposed to read Aldous Huxley and Thomas Wolfe and listen to Beethoven, Bach, and Mendelssohn, if anybody dropped in at his place they would more likely find him listening to a show tune or a Sinatra album. All the same, he does own up to a hi-fi. “I wish,” he writes, “my reading tastes were classier, but they happen to r
un to the bestseller list and the book-club selections,” which strikes this reader as something of an evasion. Which book clubs, Sandy? Literary Guild or Readers’ Subscription?

  Koufax insists the only thing he was good at in school was athletics (he captained the basketball team that won the National Jewish Welfare Board hoop tournament in 1951–52) and denies, to quote Time again, that he is an anti-athlete “who suffers so little from pride that he does not even possess a photograph of himself.” If you walk into his room, Koufax writes, “you are overwhelmed by a huge, immodest action painting,” by which he means a picture that shows him in four successive positions of delivery. Furthermore, he denies that “I’m mightily concerned about projecting a sparkling all-American image,” and yet it seems to me this book has no other purpose. Examined on any other level it is a very bush-league performance, thin, cliché-ridden, and slapped together with obnoxiously clever chapter headings such as, “Where the Games Were,” “La Dolce Vita of Vero Beach,” “Suddenly That Summer,” and “California, Here We—Ooops—Come.” A chapter called “The Year of the Finger,” I should hasten to add in this time of Olympia and Grove Press books, actually deals with Koufax’s near tragic circulatory troubles, his suspected case of Raynaud’s syndrome.

  Projecting an all-American image or not, Koufax hasn’t one unkind or, come to think of it, perceptive, word to say about the game or any of his teammates. Anecdotes with a built-in twinkle about this player or that unfailingly end with “That’s John [Roseboro],” or “That’s Lou [Johnson],” and one of his weightiest observations runs “Life is odd,” which, pace Fresco Thompson, is not enough to imply alienation.

  Still true to the all-American image, Koufax writes, nicely understating the case, that though there are few automobiles he couldn’t afford today, nothing has given him more joy than the maroon Rollfast bicycle his grandparents gave him for his tenth birthday when he was just another Rockville Center kid. “An automobile is only a means of transportation. A bike to a ten-year-old boy is a magic carpet and a status symbol and a gift of love.” Self-conscious, perhaps, about his towering salary, which he clearly deserves, considering what a draw he is at the gate, he claims that most of the players were for him and Drysdale during their 1966 holdout. “The players felt—I hope—that the more we got paid, the more they would get paid in the future,” which may be stretching a point some.

  Koufax was not an instant success in baseball. He was, to begin with, an inordinately wild pitcher, and the record for his 1955 rookie year was 2–2. The following year he won two more games, but lost four, and even in 1960 his record was only 8–13. Koufax didn’t arrive until 1961, with an 18–13 record, and though some accounts tell of his dissatisfaction with the earlier years and even report a bitter run-in with the Dodgers’ general manager, Buzzy Bavasi—because Koufax felt he was not getting sufficient work—he understandably soft-pedals the story in his autobiography. Koufax is also soft on Alston, who, according to other sources, doubted that the pitcher would ever make it.

  If Koufax came into his own in 1961—becoming a pitcher, he writes, as distinct from a thrower—then his transmogrification goes some way to belie the all-American image; in fact there is something in the story that will undoubtedly appeal to anti-Semites who favour the Jewish-conspiracy theory of history. Koufax, according to his own account, was helped most by two other Jews on the team, Allan Roth, the resident statistician, and Norm Sherry, a catcher. The turning point, Koufax writes, came during spring training, at an exhibition game, when Sherry told him, “Don’t try to throw hard, because when you force your fastball you’re always high with it. Just this once, try it my way….”

  “I had heard it all before,” Koufax writes. “Only, for once, it wasn’t blahblahblah. For once I was rather convinced….” Koufax pitched Sherry’s way and ended up with a seven-inning no-hitter and went on from there to superstardom. The unasked question is, Would Norm Sherry have done as much for Don Drysdale?

  III. POSTSCRIPT

  “Koufax the Incomparable” appeared in Commentary, November 1966, and led to a heated correspondence:

  MARSHALL ADESMAN, BROOKLYN, N.Y., WROTE:

  As a professional athlete in the highest sense of the word, Hank Greenberg would never have purposely failed to tie or break Ruth’s record. The material gain he could have realized by attaining this goal would have been matched only by the great prestige and glory that naturally come along with the magical figure of sixty home runs. Greenberg failed only because the pressure, magnified tenfold by the press, weighed too heavily on his shoulders. Very rarely is one able to hit the ball into the seats when he is seeking to do so. Home runs come from natural strokes of the bat, and Greenberg’s stroke in those last five games was anything but natural. The pitchers, also, were not giving the Detroit slugger anything too good to hit, not wishing to have the dubious honour of surrendering number sixty. In short, it was the pressure that made Greenberg’s bat too heavy, not the political atmosphere. Perhaps Mr. Richler should check his facts before his next article on the National Pastime.

  SAMUEL HEFT, LONG BEACH, N.Y., WROTE:

  I am stunned by…some startling statements made by Mordecai Richler….

  Even to hint at the possibility that the Hall of Fame baseball player Hank Greenberg “held back” in his efforts to break Babe Ruth’s home run record, for any reason, is shocking. To state that Greenberg considered it would be “pushy” of him to do so, is almost too silly for comment. I shudder to think of a player in the Hall of Fame being accused of not giving his all….

  Richler states that “many boys found opposition at home” when they went out for sports. This is understandable. Our parents were not sports-minded, because of their European sufferings….I’m

  sure our people didn’t get many opportunities to play ball in the shtetl, while running away from pogroms.

  I disagree that there is a Jewish problem in baseball today. If Walter Alston keeps a Jewish calendar on his desk … it is because he is a good administrator and needs this reminder in his scheduling of pitchers’ rotations, and not because of “sensitivity.”

  So far as playing baseball on the Jewish holidays goes, and yelling pipickhead at Kermit, this is not a baseball problem. I see with my own eyes too many Jews of all denominations mowing lawns, shopping, and doing numerous other chores on the Shabbes….

  Mr. Richler’s article may do serious harm in the struggle against discrimination…. Maybe, according to Richler, even Kermit Kitman might have been a good hitter, but he was afraid the Montreal non-Jewish population would think he was “pushy.”

  E. KINTISCH, ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA, WROTE:

  …Richler very obviously doesn’t think much of Koufax. Then why did he bother reading the Koufax book, or writing about it?…

  JEROME HOLTZMAN, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, CHICAGO, ILL., WROTE:

  I am but one of approximately two to three dozen Jewish baseball writers—writers from big-city newspapers—who cover major league baseball teams from the beginning of spring training through the World Series—and as such should inform your readers that Mordecai Richler was off base quite a few times in his “Koufax the Incomparable.”

  Richler indicates that Hank Greenberg was “tragically inhibited by his Jewish heritage” and thus held back and hit fifty-eight home runs instead of breaking Babe Ruth’s record of sixty because the breaking of such a record “…would be considered pushy of him…and not a good thing for the Jews.” Balderdash! Greenberg didn’t hit sixty because pitchers stopped giving him anything good to hit at—probably because he was Jewish, and probably also because no pitcher wants to be remembered for throwing historic home-run balls. We must assume also that the pressure was a factor, as it always is; what also hurt was that a season-ending doubleheader (in Cleveland) had to be moved to a bigger ballpark with a longer left field, and that the second game wasn’t played to a nine-inning finish….

  I agree that the Time magazine cover story on Koufax was distorted, but to a
ccuse Time of anti-Semitism is presumptuous. Time has erred on plenty of other sports cover stories, as have many of the other slicks. The image of Koufax as an intellectual (which he is not) was featured, I suspect, because it made “a good angle” and probably because a Time stringer spotted a bookshelf. Moreover, that Koufax likes his privacy isn’t unusual. Many star players, Feller, Musial, Williams et al., roomed alone in their later years and did their best to avoid the mob.

  Author Richler is looking too hard, also, when he emphasizes that Koufax, in his autobiography, points out that he was helped most by two other Jews … Sherry, a catcher, advised Koufax not to throw hard, advice I’m sure Sherry has given to dozens and dozens of Gentile pitchers, and advice which previously had been given to Koufax by Gentile coaches. Sherry simply happened to mention this at precisely the right moment, before a meaningless exhibition game, and when Koufax was…eager to listen….

  As for Allan Roth, he was a statistician with the Dodgers, the only full-time statistician employed by a big league club. Roth borders on genius in this field. It was his job to keep and translate his findings to the Dodger players and the Dodger management. Whatever information Roth gave Koufax (and I don’t know what this was), I’m sure was part of the routine. Richler’s attitude is disgusting if he thinks that Roth would favour Koufax because both are Jews. In effect, Richler is saying that Roth would withhold significant statistics from Gentiles such as Drysdale, Newcombe, or Podres.