'SANDY KOUFAX' | A review Athletic triumphs and cultural dignity

To Jews, Koufax was not just a terrific baseball player but also a role model.
By MICHAEL OLESKER
THE BALTIMORE SUN
"Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy," by Jane Leavy (HarperCollins, $23.95).
Among Jews of my baby-boom generation, baseball's Sandy Koufax was a kind of inside joke. Among ourselves, we "kvelled" over him. But, if a gentile friend mentioned the Dodgers' glorious lefty and his religious heritage, we were apt to strike a nonchalant pose and say, "Koufax? Uh, yeah, he's probably one of the better Jewish ballplayers."
As if. As if there were hundreds of others, past and present. As if we could hold aloft Hank Greenberg and Al Rosen and simply keep going forever, instead of digging for the likes of Mike Epstein and Ron Bloomberg and Rod Carew, who was never actually a Jew but at least married one. When you're this desperate for role models, close counts.
But Koufax was the real thing. Now, in "Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy," Jane Leavy tells us about his athletic triumphs and cultural dignity in ways we didn't entirely know. His pitching record -- the no-hitters, the strikeouts -- we already had committed to memory. His refusal to pitch the opening World Series game because it fell on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement -- this has become part of our folklore.
But Leavy furnishes context. "[Koufax] was an object lesson to bar mitzvah boys," she writes, "a standard to which Jewish parents held their children, as well as a measuring stick of their assimilation into American culture. In the Brooklyn yeshiva where [attorney] Alan Dershowitz studied, they discussed Koufax's parentage with Talmudic fervor. They heard he was adopted but (Thank God!) Jewish by birth. 'That's all we ever cared about,' Dershowitz said. 'We wanted to make sure we can claim our rights.'"
It counts
Because baseball is such an intrinsic part of the American fabric and mythology, such things count. In the whole history of baseball, Leavy writes, there is general agreement that maybe 150 Jews have played at the major-league level.
To any minority (and Jews represent only about 2 percent of the American populace), public recognition in any field is a signal to all the brethren that we're mainstream, we're accepted. Koufax put us at the very heart of the American game.
A bumper sticker from the era proclaimed, "You don't have to be Jewish to love Sandy." Casey Stengel, who'd played and managed since baseball's primordial days, when asked about the greatest pitcher of all time, declared, "Forget the other fellow, Walter Johnson. The Jewish kid is probably the best of them." Milton Berle called him "the best Jewish athlete since Samson." And Sports Illustrated, doing a millennium tribute to its favorite all-time ballplayer, headlined the piece, "Sandy Koufax: The Left Arm of God."
Leavy gives us not just Koufax, but Koufax's America: the borough of Brooklyn, N.Y., where he grew up, the Bensonhurst neighborhood of lower-middle-class Italians and Jews "who were just as likely to read Il Progresso and the Jewish Daily Forward as the Daily News," she writes, and a New York of egg creams and corner grocery stores, where "cab drivers were sages and kids went to sleep in their uniforms so they'd be ready to play ball in the morning."
What kind of ball? Stickball, punchball, basketball. All the playground and street stuff that created a generational "multiculturalism before there was a word for it. Diversity was a fact, not a goal," Leavy writes.
It's important to remember that. Koufax came out of the urban American mix, and ultimately triumphed over the best of it. Then, in retirement, he became that rare athlete who hasn't tried to cash in on his fame. Nobody has caught him doing Miller Lite ads. And, when Leavy approached him about doing a bio, Koufax politely said no. He wouldn't stand in her way. He'd let his friends talk to her. But he wasn't going to boast about himself.
At his peak, he was not only baseball's premier pitcher but also labored through terrible pain and awful medical concoctions that kept him going. And he helped destroy an ethnic stereotype of the nebbishy bookworms who wouldn't know a bat from a ballpoint pen.
He made the people kvell. Leavy tells us why he mattered so much to the Jews, and to any minority who ever searched a box score in search of a name to embrace.