Dispatches from the Sporting Life by Mordecai Richler Read Free Book Online

clearly deserves, considering what a draw he is at the gate, he claims that most of the players were for him and Drysdale during their 1966 holdout. “The players felt—I hope—that the more we got paid, the more they would get paid in the future,” which may be stretching a point some.
    Koufax was not an instant success in baseball. He was, to begin with, an inordinately wild pitcher, and the record for his 1955 rookie year was 2–2. The following year he won two more games, but lost four, and even in 1960 his record was only 8–13. Koufax didn’t arrive until 1961, with an 18–13 record, and though some accounts tell of his dissatisfaction with the earlier years and even report a bitter run-in with the Dodgers’ general manager, Buzzy Bavasi—because Koufax felt he was not getting sufficientwork—he understandably soft-pedals the story in his autobiography. Koufax is also soft on Alston, who, according to other sources, doubted that the pitcher would ever make it.
    If Koufax came into his own in 1961—becoming a pitcher, he writes, as distinct from a thrower—then his transmogrification goes some way to belie the all-American image; in fact there is something in the story that will undoubtedly appeal to anti-Semites who favour the Jewish-conspiracy theory of history. Koufax, according to his own account, was helped most by two other Jews on the team, Allan Roth, the resident statistician, and Norm Sherry, a catcher. The turning point, Koufax writes, came during spring training, at an exhibition game, when Sherry told him, “Don’t try to throw hard, because when you force your fastball you’re always high with it. Just this once, try it my way….”
    “I had heard it all before,” Koufax writes. “Only, for once, it wasn’t blahblahblah. For once I was rather convinced….” Koufax pitched Sherry’s way and ended up with a seven-inning no-hitter and went on from there to superstardom. The unasked question is, Would Norm Sherry have done as much for Don Drysdale?
III. P OSTSCRIPT
    “Koufax the Incomparable” appeared in
Commentary,
November 1966, and led to a heated correspondence:
    MARSHALL ADESMAN, BROOKLYN, N.Y., WROTE:
    As a professional athlete in the highest sense of the word, Hank Greenberg would never have purposely failed to tie or break Ruth’s record. The material gain he could have realized by attaining this goal would have been matched only by the great prestige and glory that naturally come along with the magical figure of sixty home runs. Greenberg failed only because the pressure, magnified tenfold by the press, weighed too heavily on his shoulders. Very rarely is one able to hit the ball into the seats when he is seeking to do so. Home runs come from natural strokes of the bat, and Greenberg’s stroke in those last five games was anything but natural. The pitchers, also, were not giving the Detroit slugger anything too good to hit, not wishing to have the dubious honour of surrendering number sixty. In short, it was the pressure that made Greenberg’s bat too heavy, not the political atmosphere. Perhaps Mr. Richler should check his facts before his next article on the National Pastime.
    SAMUEL HEFT, LONG BEACH, N.Y., WROTE:
    I am stunned by…some startling statements made by Mordecai Richler….
    Even to hint at the possibility that the Hall of Fame baseball player Hank Greenberg “held back” in his efforts to break Babe Ruth’s home run record, for any reason, is shocking. To state that Greenberg considered it would be “pushy” of him to do so, is almost too silly for comment. I shudder to think of a player in the Hall of Fame being accused of not giving his all….
    Richler states that “many boys found oppositionat home” when they went out for sports. This is understandable. Our parents were not sports-minded, because of their European sufferings….I’m
    sure our people didn’t get many opportunities to play ball in the
shtetl,
while running away from pogroms.
    I