Interviews

An Interview with Jane Leavy

Barnes & Noble.com: What made you want to write this book? Given Koufax's reputation as being reluctant to talk to the press, how did you get him to cooperate with you?

Jane Leavy: What I wanted to do, and this is what I told Sandy when I first begged his indulgence and tried to acquire his cooperation, was that I was going to write a book that was not just biographical but was also a social history using his career to show how much had changed in baseball and sports and to a certain degree, in America. Koufax made it clear from the get-go that he preferred nothing be written at all -- he is not a man who wants to live in the past tense. But, he said, if it is going to be written, he preferred it be done right. To that end, he agreed to give me access to his friends -- telling them it was okay to talk to me -- and to verify biographical facts. So I describe his cooperation as circumscribed but invaluable. When Sandy Koufax didn't pitch on Yom Kippur, he had lodged himself in my soul. He was impressive by refusing to pitch in the World Series on Yom Kippur, and by refusing to play as long as others do -- and going out on top -- he was unlike a lot of other athletes. Sandy knew when to quit.

B&N.com: He faced a certain amount of anti-Semitism from other players and other baseball people. Please tell us about that.

JL: When Sandy came up in '55 -- and here is this nice Jewish man from Brooklyn with this big contract which was more than many made -- not everybody was entirely for him being on the roster. A few Dodgers, marginal players as well as stars, actually went to the black players on the team and said, "What is that kike, Jew son of a bitch doing taking our job?" And, as Don Newcombe said to me, the black players were astonished, not just at the anti-Semitism -- that they expected, because the black players more than anyone else knew baseball was not a bastion of liberality -- but they couldn't believe the white guys could be dumb enough to be complaining to them. Of course, in 1955, ten years after the liberation of the concentration camps, blacks and Jews still identified with each other as minorities. So the response of the black guys on the Dodgers -- Newcombe, Joe Black, and Jackie Robinson -- was to embrace and take under their wing this nice Jewish boy. It was a world still rife with stereotypes.

B&N.com: In the days when Florida, where the Dodgers had spring training, was still segregated, Koufax made friends with many black players before that was common. What was it about Koufax that brought this about?

JL: That was partly due to his growing up in Brooklyn and being a basketball player who went out and competed at all the best courts, and the people who were the best were black guys. I think he was a man who was very comfortable in his own skin and everybody else's. After practice, the black players would go back to the black hotel, and Sandy would go back to the white hotel. But Koufax used to like to come over to the black hotel. He fit right in.

B&N.com: You use Koufax's perfect game against the Cubs in 1965 as an anchor, so to speak, for your biography. Why is that?

JL: I picked the perfect game for two reasons. One was that morning in New York, the guys who run baseball announced that the first game of the World Series would be played on Yom Kippur. So when Sandy went to the mound that night, September 9, 1965, he knew that if the Dodgers were lucky enough to win the pennant, and that was no assured thing, that he wouldn't be opening the World Series.

The second reason I picked it was because he had been struggling, his arm was already suffering the ravages of degenerative arthritis. He had already told one of the beat reporters whom he was very close to, a guy named Phil Collier, that the next year would surely be his last.

The other reason is because the game in many ways mirrors the arc of his career. It started out as a no-big-deal game that night. It went from nothing special to never better, much the way Sandy's career did. Those last two innings where he struck out the last six batters he faced, threw so hard that his hat fell off his head with more than one vehement delivery. No one had ever seen Koufax throw that hard, and rarely, if ever, has anyone thrown harder than that. He was never better than that.

B&N.com: Koufax became a hero to Jews when he refused to pitch in a World Series game because it was Yom Kippur. He gained the respect of Gentiles as well. Was Koufax a particularly religious man, and was this a difficult decision for him to make?

JL: He had never pitched on any of the High Holidays. It is just that none of them had ever coincided with the opening game of the World Series before. Well, he declined it because he was a Jew and Jews don't work on Yom Kippur. To him, it was no big deal. He was thinking, [Don] Drysdale will start the first game, and I'll start the second game. We'll win both of them and go back to Los Angeles two games up on the Minnesota Twins. Whoever would have thought both of those guys would lose? When Drysdale got hammered in the first game and Alston came out to get the ball, Drysdale said, "Well, Skip, I bet you wish I was Jewish today, too, huh?"

B&N.com: Koufax and Don Drysdale were considered rebels when they held out for higher salaries for the 1966 season in an age before free agency. What made them do this? What was the historical importance?

JL: It was Ginger Drysdale's [Don's wife] idea. They were certainly tired of [Dodger general manager] Buzzie Bavasi's act of playing them against each other and saying, "How can you ask for so much money when Don has only asked for this?" And so Ginger said, "Why don't you not sign unless both of you are happy." Sandy liked to challenge authority, and he already knew that next season was going to be his last. What they asked for in dollars, which Drysdale said was like asking for the moon at that time, was not nearly as significant in my estimation as the demand to be reckoned with. To say we don't want to be dictated to, we want to be negotiated with. And to demand the right to have representation, which in fact they did have. So, it was really an understated and very historical event in the evolution of labor wars in baseball.

B&N.com: You've subtitled the book "A Lefty's Legacy." What is Koufax's legacy?

JL: I think it is a legacy of uncommon decency and uncommon grace, both of a physical and nonphysical kind. I think that he is somebody whose way of being simply elevated him above sport, and I think people continue to revere him. And I have been astonished by it -- why 37 years after the man has pitched people still care. I think intuitively people sensed about this guy that he was better, not just in the way he threw a ball but in the way he behaved in public and the way he comported himself. He defined himself by what he did but also by what he refused to do. Not just for his decision not to pitch on Yom Kippur but also his refusal of continuing just for a buck, his refusal to endorse roach spray, and his refusal to get himself indicted for autograph merchandise fraud. He really is unsullied.

B&N.com: What will your next book be?

JL: The book I would like to write next is a novel about Babe Ruth. I have been working on it for a long time already, but whether I continue to do that or go back and write another nonfiction book, I'm not clear. I may do both at once. You never know.