LEFTY'S LEGACY: FIGHTING FOR WHAT'S RIGHT
Date: Tuesday, February 25, 2003
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY
I was about 10 years old, sitting in the box seats with my dad at Wrigley Field, cheering for the visitors.
The Dodgers were my favorite team, though I was a Chicagoan who had never been to Brooklyn or Los Angeles. I loved their lore, their soul, their exquisite heartbreaks against the Yankees.
Out of the bullpen in the late innings, the Dodgers called on this kid Koufax.
"Oh, I've heard of him," I told my father. "He's really fast."
I'd heard right. Tall, gangly, strong, the young Sandy Koufax threw the fastest balls I ever saw.
And they were balls, not strikes. Koufax kicked his big right leg high, stretched it impossibly far, uncoiled his long left arm and sent the ball sailing into the backstop.
A couple of years went by. Koufax learned control. And dominated baseball as perhaps no pitcher ever has.
In four incomparable years, 1963 to 1966, he pitched four no-hitters, including a perfect game.
He led the Dodgers into the World Series three times. And in 1965, he refused to pitch the Series' opening game because it was Yom Kippur.
Out of respect for his forebears and the sacrifices they made for their beliefs, he wouldn't play that day. He taught a couple of generations of Jewish kids that some things were more important even than the World Series.
Long into adulthood, many of us -- even the doubters and disaffiliated -- would consider it sacrilege to work on the High Holy Days because of Koufax's unforgettable example.
And then he was gone. Quit at age 31, after winning 27 games in 1966, rather than risk permanent damage to an elbow rent by arthritis.
Sandy Koufax became a willing ghost, a legend who resisted the limelight.
"Sandy is somebody," his biographer, Jane Leavy, has said, "who craves his anonymity."
