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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 doesown 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.
    Projecting an all-American image or not, Koufax hasn’t one unkind or, come to think of it, perceptive, word to say about the game or any of his teammates. Anecdotes with a built-in twinkle about this player orthat unfailingly end with “That’s John [Roseboro],” or “That’s Lou [Johnson],” and one of his weightiest observations runs “Life is odd,” which,
pace
Fresco Thompson, is not enough to imply alienation.
    Still true to the all-American image, Koufax writes, nicely understating the case, that though there are few automobiles he couldn’t afford today, nothing has given him more joy than the maroon Rollfast bicycle his grandparents gave him for his tenth birthday when he was just another Rockville Center kid. “An automobile is only a means of transportation. A bike to a ten-year-old boy is a magic carpet and a status symbol and a gift of love.” Self-conscious, perhaps, about his towering salary, which he