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

not anti-athlete. It is unfortunate that Koufax didn’t control his anger, not only at the
Time
story but at several minor pieces that preceded it. In his book, Koufax tells us almost nothing about his Jewishness; that he is Jewish is mentioned almost in passing. But he doesn’t owe us any detailed explanations. As a baseball book, and as a text in pitching, I found it excellent.
    I should think that
Commentary,
in this rare instance when it did touch on sports, could havedone better than offer the long-distance musings of a novelist….
    AVRAM M. DUCOVNY, NEW YORK CITY, WRITES:
    I am shocked that Mr. Richler in his treatise on Curve Balls: Are They Good or Bad for the Jews? overlooked Willie Davis’s three errors in one inning behind Koufax in the 1966 World Series—which was one of the most flagrant acts of Negro anti-Semitism since the panic of 1908.
    He does get somewhere in pointing out the Jewish-conspiracy angle in the Norm Sherry–Koufax cabal; however, he does not really go deep enough. What of Norm’s brother Larry—also a Dodger pitcher at the time—stopped from the advice that made a super start because of piddling sibling rivalry? There’s one for Bill Stern!
    And yea, verily, let us weep for the likes of Don Drysdale—disenfranchised WASP—alone in a sea of Gentile coaches whose knowledge of baseball never had the benefit of the secret indoctrination into the
Protocols of the Elders of Swat.
By the way, what is that resident genius, Norm Sherry, doing today? Have I somehow missed his name among the current great pitching coaches of baseball?
    And finally, finally, the true story of the whispered Greenberg caper, wherein he was visited by representatives of the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and Congress, and the many, many Friends of the Hebrew University, who said unto him: “Hershel, thou shalt not Swat; whither Ruth goest, thou goest not.”
    I am looking forward with great anticipation toMr. Richler’s exposure of Mike Epstein (the self-labelled “super-Jew” rookie of the Baltimore Orioles) who all “insiders” know is a robot created at a secret plant in the Negev and shipped to Baltimore for obvious chauvinistic reasons.
    FINALLY, THAT VERY GOOD WRITER DAN WAKEFIELD WROTE A MOST AMUSING LETTER THAT BEGAN:
    I greatly enjoyed Mordecai Richler’s significant comments on Sandy Koufax, and the profound questions he raised about the role of Jews in American sports. Certainly much research still needs to be done in this area, and I hope that some of the provocative points raised by Richler will be picked up and followed through by our social scientists, many of whom are capable of turning, say, a called strike into a three-volume study of discrimination in the subculture of American athletics.
    I REPLIED:
    The crucial question is, Did Hank Greenberg hold back (possibly for our sake), or was the pressure too much for him? Mr. Adesman, obviously a worldly man, suggests that Greenberg couldn’t have held back, because of “the material gain he could have realized” by hitting sixty home runs. This, it seems to me, is gratuitously attributing coarse motives to an outstanding Jewish sportsman.
    Mr. Heft is stunned by my flattering notion that Greenberg might have placed the greater Jewish good above mere athletic records and goes on to nibble at a theory of Jewish anti-gamesmanship based on our parents’ “running away from pogroms.” Thistheory, clearly unattractive if developed to its logical big league conclusion, would surely have resulted in a more noteworthy Jewish record on the base paths. Mr. Heft is also of the opinion that if Walter Alston keeps a Jewish calendar on his desk, it is because he is a good administrator. Yom Kippur, Mr. Heft, comes but once a year, and surely Alston doesn’t require a calendar to remind him of one date. If Koufax had also been unwilling to take his turn on the mound on Tishah-b’Ab or required, say, a
chometz-free
resin bag for