Word: koufax
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Like many of my fellow baseball fans, I sought to preserve the legacy and tradition of pitching for the future, refusing to let events like the Glorious Uprising of 1968 fade into oblivion. The names of past heroes—Mathewson, Grove, Gibson, Koufax, Seaver, among many others—were invoked in the darkest hours, when the onslaught of home runs, the rapidly inflating offensive records, and the skyrocketing ERAs grew too much to bear...
Sure, you’ve got legends like Sandy Koufax and Hank Greenberg and Mark Spitz—the token Chosen Athletes often evoked, quite indignantly, at the suggestion that the Jewish culture and the athletic culture might not go hand-in-hand—but the list does not continue far beyond these names...
...former sportswriter for the Washington Post, Leavy represents Koufax's career vividly, from the time he was first scouted by the Dodgers ("The hair on my arms rose," Al Campanis reported) through those five years in the 1960s when he may have been the greatest pitcher ever--so dominating, said slugger Willie Stargell, that hitting against him was like "trying to drink coffee with a fork." In his last season Koufax won 27 games yet chose to retire at the age of 30, his left arm so ravaged by then that he was living on cortisone...
...Leavy is less interested in the ballplayer than in the man and in how the world reacts to him. His closest friends on the Dodgers were usually the subs at the end of the bench. When a former player approaches Koufax for an autograph, she writes, he blanches because a "peer [has] become an acolyte." As one of the very greatest of living ballplayers, still venerated by fans--especially Jewish fans, who embraced him with a fervor bordering on idolatry--Koufax could build a very profitable life out of his fame, yet he appears at maybe one autograph show...
When Doug Harvey--a former umpire so esteemed by National League players that they called him "God"--said to Leavy, "I have as much respect for Sandy Koufax as for any man I've ever met in my life," he wasn't talking about Koufax's skill. It was not his matchless talent that exalted Koufax beyond his greatest contemporaries so much as it was his knowledge that character was not connected to talent. He never discredited his majestic accomplishments--"How could you do the things I did and not love it?" he asked Leavy in an unguarded moment...