Overview

In an era when too many heroes have been toppled from too many pedestals, Sandy Koufax stands apart and alone, a legend who declined his own celebrity. As a pitcher, he was sublime, the ace of baseball lore. As a human being, he aspired to be the one thing his talent and his fame wouldn't allow: a regular guy. A Brooklyn kid, he was the product of the sedate and modest fifties who came to define and dominate baseball in the sixties. In Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy, former award-winning Washington Post sportswriter Jane Leavy delivers an uncommon baseball book, vividly re-creating the Koufax era, when presidents were believed and pitchers aspired to go the distance. He was only a teenager when Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley proclaimed him ""the Great Jewish Hope"" of the franchise. But it wasn't until long after the team had abandoned Brooklyn that the man became the myth. Old-fashioned in his willingness to play when he was injured and in his acute sense of responsibility to his team, Koutax answered to an authority higher than manager Walter Alston. When he refused to pitch the opening game of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, he inadvertently made himself a religious icon and an irrevocably public figure. A year later, he was gone - done with baseball at age thirty. No other sports hero had retired so young, so well, or so completely. Despite Sandy Koufax's best efforts to protect his privacy, his legend has grown larger ever since. Part biography, part cultural history, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy gets as close to that legend as he will allow. Through meticulous reporting and interviews with five hundred of his friends, teammates, and opponents, Leavy penetrates the mythology to discover a man more than worthy of myth.

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9780060195335

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Reviews

A baseball classic; the first in-depth reporting on the life and career of the Dodger icon.a must read. -- New York Daily News

A baseball classic; the first in-depth reporting on the life and career of the Dodger icon a must read. --New York Daily News

A baseball classic; the first in-depth reporting on the life and career of the Dodger icon...a must read. --New York Daily News An exhaustively researched study that paints an intriguing portrait of the famously reclusive Dodger pitcher. --Sports Illustrated

A baseball classic; the first in-depth reporting on the life and career of the Dodger icon...a must read. --New York Daily News A perfect game of a book...Jane Leavy scatters the clouds of mythology to show us, after all these years, the man Koufax. --The Sporting News An exhaustively researched study that paints an intriguing portrait of the famously reclusive Dodger pitcher. --Sports Illustrated Leavy has hit it out of the park...A lot more than a biography. It's a consideration of how we create our heroes, and how this hero's self perception distinguishes him from nearly every other great athlete in living memory...a remarkably rich portrait. --Daniel Okrent, Time magazine Ms. Leavy has done a dizzying amount of reporting--more than 400 interviews--and Koufax doesn't just survive the scrutiny, he emerges from it larger than ever. . . Ms. Leavy humanizes her subject even as she demythologizes him. The incomparable and mysterious Sandy Koufax is revealed...This is an absorbing book, beautifully written. --Jonathan Mahler, Wall Street Journal

Author Information

Jane Leavy, award-winning former sportswriter and feature writer for the Washington Post, is author of the New York Times bestsellers Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy, The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood, and the comic novel Squeeze Play. She lives in Washington, D.C. and Truro, Massachusetts.

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