Sandy Koufax
(1935 - )
Sanford "Sandy" Koufax (born Sanford Braun on December 30, 1935 in Brooklyn, New York) is a former left-hand pitcher in Major League Baseball who played his entire career for the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers from 1955 to 1966.
He is best known for his string of six amazing seasons from 1961 to 1966 before arthritis ended his career at the age of 31. A notoriously difficult pitcher to hit against, he was the first major leaguer to pitch more than three no-hitters, the first to allow fewer than seven hits per nine innings pitched over his career, and the first to strike out more than nine batters per nine innings pitched in his career. Among National League pitchers with at least 2,000 innings pitched who have debuted since 1913, he has both the highest career winning percentage (.655) and the lowest career earned run average (2.76); his 2396 career strikeouts ranked 7th in major league history upon his retirement, and trailed only Warren Spahn's total of 2583 among left-handers. Retiring virtually at the peak of his career at age 31, he later became the youngest person ever elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame at age 36. He is arguably the greatest left-handed pitcher of all time.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Koufax
Koufax regularly did not play on the High Holidays; in 1963 for example, he quietly left the team on the road and returned to spend Rosh Hashana with his parents in Los Angeles. This is all the more fascinating because Koufax was a thoroughly secular Jew. He spent Yom Kippur of 1965 not in synagogue but in his hotel room, while Don Drysdale took his opening spot in the rotation. Despite growing up in the shtetl of Brooklyn, he was not bar mitzvahed. He married and divorced Anne Widmark, the daughter of actor Richard Widmark, and had no children. After his retirement, Koufax studied Italian. Though he read voraciously, he showed no particular interest in Jewish texts.
This makes his refusing to walk to the mound on Oct. 6, 1965 all the more impressive. Under an unwelcome spotlight, Koufax, who was neither an observant nor an involved Jew, saw not playing as his responsibility. In doing so, he touched not only his generation but generations to come. When I asked my 9-year-old son if he'd heard that Koufax would not pitch on Yom Kippur, he answered, "Of course, Dad, it's a known fact."
by Howard Kaplan
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