Word: koufax
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...which suits Sandy fine. Alone among ballplayers, Koufax is an anti-athlete who suffers so little from pride that he does not even possess a photograph of himself. TV and radio interviewers have learned to be careful with personal questions-or risk a string of billingsgate designed to ruin their tapes. One Los Angeles sportswriter had to spend two years buttering Sandy up before he got permission to take photographs of his Studio City, Calif., home Last year, when the Union Oil Co. sent him a questionnaire for its baseball booklet, Koufax reacted with typical taciturnity. "Any off-season jobs...
Sandy's reserve carries over into his dress (mostly blues, greys and blacks), his carefully modulated speech, even his taste in cars. In 1963, when he was awarded a Corvette as a prize for being the most valuable player in the World Series, Koufax called up a friend and sighed: "It's a toy-but what the hell." He is rarely seen in the Sunset Strip nightspots, hates the telephone so much that he used to hide it in the oven He even refuses to hire an answering service because that would mean calling back...
Things improved a little after the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles: Sandy won eleven games in 1958, and in 1959 he struck out 18 batters in one game to tie a record. But in 1960 Koufax took stock of himself and did not like what he saw. "Suddenly I looked up," he said, "and I had a few grey hairs-and I finally realized that either I was going to be really successful or I was in the wrong profession. Maybe the problem was that I never had a burning ambition to be a baseball player...
...Likes Baseball? To his teammates, even to his few close friends Koufax's aloofness is often downright annoying. "Imagine," says Dodger Catcher John Roseboro, "being goodlooking, well-off, single-and still so cool. I know guys who would be raising all kinds of hell on those stakes." Dodger Vice President Fresco Thompson considers him a heretic. "I don't think he likes baseball," mutters Thompson. "What kind of a line is he drawing anyway-between himself and the world, between himself and the team...
...line of ability, for one thing. Nobody, including Sandy Koufax, had any idea how good he was to become when, as an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Cincinnati, he was spotted playing on a sandlot team. In 1954, Sandy signed a Dodger contract for $6,000 plus a $14,000 bonus. Scout Al Campanis wrote in his memo to Dodger Owner Walter O'Malley: "No. 1, he's a Brooklyn boy. No. 2, he's Jewish." The Dodgers' move to Los Angeles was still four years away. In the meantime, says General Manager...