Dispatches from the Sporting Life (5 page)

The encyclopedia should first of all be judged by its own exacting standards. If I am not guilty of misunderstanding editors Postal, Silver, and Silver, they compiled it not to turn a buck in the non-book trade, but for two altogether admirable reasons: that Jews might be made more aware of their sports heritage and to dispel “one of the oldest myths about the Jew…the curious belief that he was a physical coward and a stranger to athletics,” or, as Senator Ribicoff puts it, that he is “nimble in the head, perhaps, but not too nimble with the feet.” On this test alone, the encyclopedia fails. It will, I fear, make trouble for
us
with
them.
It’s dynamite! Rotten with proof of Jewish duplicity and athletic ineptitude.

Until I read the encyclopedia, for instance, I had no idea that Mushy Callaghan (world junior welterweight champion, 1926–30) was really born Vincente Morris Schneer, and I wonder if this will also be a revelation to his Irish-Catholic fans. Neither did I suspect that anybody called Al McCoy (world middleweight champion, 1914–17) answered more properly to the name Al Rudolph, and was actually the son of a kosher butcher who had changed his name because his parents objected to his boxing activities.

Then consider these far from untypical baseball entries:

Is this the stuff the Jewish Hall of Fame is made of? Doesn’t it suggest that in order to fill only 526 pages with Jewish athletic “Achievement” Messrs. Postal, Silver, and Silver were driven to scraping the bottom of the barrel, so to speak? Still worse. Put this volume in the hands of an anti-Semitic sportsman and can’t you just hear him say, “Nimble in the feet? Ho ho! Among them 0–0 pitchers and nothing hitters count as
athletes.”

Orthodox Jews will also be distressed by certain entries in the encyclopedia. Was it necessary, for example, to include Cardinal, Conrad Ceth, a pitcher with a 0–1 record, when he is only half Jewish? Or the playboy pitcher Belinsky, Robert “Bo,” just because he is the son of a Jewish mother? This is more than a purist’s racial quibble. Such entries could lead, if this volume is the first of a series, to the inclusion of, say, Elizabeth Taylor in a compilation of Jewish Playmates from Biblical Times to Today.

Of course there is another possibility. Half-Jewish players of dubious achievement were included in the book because the editors are not only racialists, but cunning ones at that, and what
they intended by listing Belinsky and Cardinal was an oblique but penetrating comment on the capabilities of the issue of mixed marriages.

Something else. You and I might be pleased in our hearts to know that the first man to take money for playing baseball, the first real pro, was a Jew, Lipman E. “Lip” Pike, whose name appeared in a box score for the first time only one week after his bar mitzvah in 1864, but anti-Semites could easily make something unfortunate out of this information. Neither was I proud to discover that, according to a Talmudic scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Jews—as early as the second century C.E.—had a special prayer for horse players; and that the bettor was advised to “take this [prayer] tablet and bury it in the ground of the hippodrome where you want to win.”

There are some regrettable omissions. While Joe Reichler earns an entry because he is a baseball writer and Allan Roth, resident statistician with the Dodgers, is also included, there is no mention anywhere of Mailer, Norman, who has reported memorably on boxing for
Esquire.
Neither could I find the names of Malamud, Bernard, author of a baseball novel, or Schulberg, Budd, who has written a novel about boxing. Does this suggest an anti-intellectual bias on the part of Messrs. Postal, Silver, and Silver?

This is not to say that
The Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports
is entirely without merit. The three-page ice hockey section pleased me enormously if only because it included my favourite Jewish defenceman, one-time National League player, the astute
Larry Zeidel. An issue of
Jewish Press,
a New York publication, once carried the following Canadian report:
“ONLY JEW IN PRO HOCKEY PLAYS A ROUGH GAME.”
“Larry Zeidal,” the story began, “owns a scar for every one of the 20 years he marauded through organized hockey. ‘When you’re the only Jew in this bloody game,’ he said, ‘you have to prove you can take the rough stuff more than the average player.’” The story went on to say that Zeidal, in contrast to his teammates, read
Barron’s Business Weekly
between periods, perhaps taking “Lip” Pike as his inspiration. Pike, the encyclopedia notes, played baseball at a time when other players were usually gamblers and drunkards. “However, Pike was an exception. Throughout his career contemporary journals commented on his sobriety, intelligence, wit, and industry.”

Finally, if the encyclopedia fails, on balance, to rectify the oldest myth about the Jew—that he is “a stranger to athletics”—it must be allowed that this is a pioneering work and a step in the right direction. Let us hope that Messrs. Postal, Silver, and Silver, thus encouraged, will now take on other foul anti-Semitic myths, for instance, that Jews don’t drink or practice homosexuality widely enough. I, for one, look forward to an encyclopedia (for delinquent bar mitzvah boys, perhaps) on Jewish Drunks, High School Dropouts, and Thugs from Noah to Today. I would also like to see a compilation of Famous Jewish Homosexuals, Professional and Amateur, Throughout History.

Within many a once-promising, now suddenly command-generation Jewish writer, there is a major league ball player waiting to leap out; and come Sunday mornings in summer, from the playing fields of East Hampton to the Bois de Boulogne to Hyde Park, you can see them, heedless of tender discs and protruding bellies, out in the fresh air together, playing ball. We were all raised on baseball. While today there do not seem to be that many Jewish major league stars about, when I was a kid there were plenty we could identify with: Sid Gordon and Al Rosen and of course Hank Greenberg. Even in Montreal we had, for a time, one of our own in the outfield, Kermit Kitman. Kitman, alas, was all field and no hit and never graduated from the Royals to the parent Dodgers, but it was once our schoolboy delight to lie in wait for him over the clubhouse at Saturday afternoon games and shout, “Hey, Kermit, you
pipickhead,
you think it’s right for you to strike out on
Shabbes?”

Baseball was never a bowl of cherries for the Jewish player.
The Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports
observes that while the initial ball player to accept money for playing was a Jew, Lipman E. Pike, there were few known Jewish players.
The Sporting News,
in 1902, wrote of one player, “His name was Cohen and he assumed the name of Kane when he became a semi-professional, because he fancied that there was a popular and professional prejudice against Hebrews as ball players.” Other major leaguers were more militantly Jewish. Barney Pelty, for instance,
who pitched for the St. Louis Browns from 1903 to 1912, seemingly did not object to being known as “The Yiddish Curver.” Still, the number of our players in any era has been small, possibly because, as Norm Sherry, once a catcher with the Dodgers, has said, “Many boys find opposition at home when they want to go out for a ball-playing career.” Despite opposition at home or in the game, the Jew, as the
Encyclopedia
happily notes, has won virtually every honour in baseball. If there remains a Jewish Problem in the game today, it hinges on the Rosh Hashanah–Yom Kippur syndrome, for the truth we all have to live with is that much as the Reform temple has done to lighten our traditional Jewish burdens, the rush for the pennant and Rosh Hashanah, the World Series and Yom Kippur, still sometimes conflict.

Should a nice Jewish boy play ball on the High Holidays? Historical evidence is inconclusive. Harry Eisenstadt, once a pitcher for the Dodgers, was in uniform but not scheduled to pitch on Rosh Hashanah 1935, but when the Giants began to hurt his team he was called into the game and his first pitch was hit for a grand-slam home run. And yet—and yet—one year earlier, Hank Greenberg, with the Tigers close to their first pennant since 1909, played on Rosh Hashanah and hit two home runs. Greenberg went to
shul
on Yom Kippur, alas, and the Tigers lost. The whole country, rabbis and fans at odds, was involved in the controversy, and Edgar Guest was sufficiently inspired to write a poem, the last verse of which reads:

Honour him, yes, but it is possible that Greenberg, at that time the only Jew in the Hall of Fame, was also tragically inhibited by his Jewish heritage. I’m thinking of 1938, when he had hit fifty-eight home runs, two short of Babe Ruth’s record, but with five games to play, failed to hit another one out of the park. Failed … or just possibly held back, because Greenberg just possibly understood that if he shattered the Babe’s record, seemingly inviolate, it would be considered pushy of him and, given the climate of the times, not be such a good thing for the Jews.

Greenberg, in any event, paved the way for today’s outstanding Jewish player, the incomparable Sandy Koufax. So sensitive is the Dodgers’ front office to Koufax’s religious feelings that Walter Alston, the Dodgers’ manager, who was once severely criticized for scheduling him to play on Yom Kippur,
is now reported to keep a Jewish calendar on his desk.

Koufax, who has just published his autobiography, is not only the best Jewish hurler in history, he may well be the greatest pitcher of all time, regardless of race, colour, or creed. His fastball, Bob Feller has said, “is just as good as mine,” and Casey Stengel was once moved to comment, “If that young fella was running for office in Israel, they’d have a whole new government over there….” Koufax has won the National League’s Most valuable Player Award, the Cy Young Award as the outstanding major league pitcher of the year, and the Hickok Pro Athlete of the Year Award. He has pitched four no-hit games, more than any other major league pitcher. He holds the major league record for both the most shutouts and the most strikeouts in one season and also the major league record for the number of seasons in which he has struck out more than three hundred batters. He has tied the major league record for most strikeouts in a nine-inning game, and also tied World Series records. I could go on and on, but a nagging question persists. This, you’d think, was enough. Koufax, at least, has proved himself. He is accepted. But is he?

Anti-Semitism takes many subtle shapes, and the deprecating story one reads again and again, most memorably recorded in
Time,
is that Sandy Koufax is actually something of an intellectual. He doesn’t mix. Though he is the highest-paid player in the history of the game, improving enormously on Lipman E. Pike’s $20 a week, he considers himself above it. Fresco Thompson, a Dodger vice-president, is quoted as saying, “What kind of a line is he
drawing anyway—between himself and the world, between himself and the team?” Another report quotes Koufax himself as saying, “The last thing that entered my mind was becoming a professional athlete. Some kids dream of being a ball player. I wanted to be an architect. In fact, I didn’t like baseball. I didn’t think I’d ever like it.” And the infamous
Time
story relates that when Koufax was asked how he felt after winning the last game in the 1965 World Series, he said, “I’m just glad it’s over and I don’t have to do this again for four whole months.”

In
Koufax,
which the pitcher wrote with the dubious relief help of one Ed Linn, he denies the accuracy of most of these stories. In fact, looked at one way, Koufax’s autobiography can be seen as a sad effort at self-vindication, a forced attempt to prove once and for all that he is the same as anybody else. Possibly Koufax protests too much. “I have nothing against myths,” he begins, “but there is one myth that has been building through the years that I would just as soon bury without any particular honours: the myth of Sandy Koufax, the anti-athlete.” He goes on to state flatly that he is no “dreamy intellectual” lured out of college by a big bonus, which he has since regretted, and as if to underline this point, he immediately lapses into regular-guy English. “Look, if I could act that good I’d have signed with 20th Century–Fox instead of Brooklyn….” Koufax protests that though he is supposed to read Aldous Huxley and Thomas Wolfe and listen to Beethoven, Bach, and Mendelssohn, if anybody dropped in at his place they would more likely find him listening to a show tune or a Sinatra album. All the same, he does
own up to a hi-fi. “I wish,” he writes, “my reading tastes were classier, but they happen to run to the bestseller list and the book-club selections,” which strikes this reader as something of an evasion. Which book clubs, Sandy? Literary Guild or Readers’ Subscription?

Koufax insists the only thing he was good at in school was athletics (he captained the basketball team that won the National Jewish Welfare Board hoop tournament in 1951–52) and denies, to quote
Time
again, that he is an anti-athlete “who suffers so little from pride that he does not even possess a photograph of himself.” If you walk into his room, Koufax writes, “you are overwhelmed by a huge, immodest action painting,” by which he means a picture that shows him in four successive positions of delivery. Furthermore, he denies that “I’m mightily concerned about projecting a sparkling all-American image,” and yet it seems to me this book has no other purpose. Examined on any other level it is a very bush-league performance, thin, cliché-ridden, and slapped together with obnoxiously clever chapter headings such as, “Where the Games Were,”
“La Dolce Vita
of Vero Beach,” “Suddenly That Summer,” and “California, Here We—Ooops—Come.” A chapter called “The Year of the Finger,” I should hasten to add in this time of Olympia and Grove Press books, actually deals with Koufax’s near tragic circulatory troubles, his suspected case of Raynaud’s syndrome.