Going his way: Sandy Koufax and the other ‘Last Innocents’

June 23, 2016

When I was a child, I raced home one day from school to turn on the TV to see a 20-year-old pitcher who would soon become a favorite, Jim Palmer of the Baltimore Orioles, outduel Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 2 of the 1966 World Series. It wasn’t even close. Dodger centerfielder Willie Davis lost two fly balls in the October sun and the Dodgers, defending Series’ champ, went down 6-0, losing the series in four straight.

It was the last game Koufax ever pitched for afterward he announced his retirement from baseball, having battled traumatic arthritis along with the drugs that kept it at bay for a number of years. He was just 30 years old. ...

Where have you gone, Jackie Robinson?

April 10, 2016

I saw Jackie Robinson in person once. It was at Yankee Stadium on Old Timers’ Day, and Iike a lot of other wiry kids, I craned my neck to take in as many legends on the field as possible. I thought then that Robinson looked old and sickly for his age. (And indeed he would die of a heart attack, complicated by diabetes, at age 53.) The other thing I remember thinking was that he was a big man, larger than life – which he certainly was.

I was reminded of Robinson – the man who had that special combination of physical and spiritual grace to break baseball’s color barrier in 1947 – because Ken Burns’ miniseries about him is set to debut Monday and Tuesday, April 11 and 12, and because Jay Caspian Kang has written a column for The New York Times Magazine’s April 10 edition in which he suggests that racism is killing baseball. ...

Jason Collins, the gay Jackie Robinson

February 25, 2014

Jason Collins has rejoined the Nets with a difference: He becomes the first openly gay athlete in any of America’s four major sports.

There’s lots of symbolism here: The team now plays in Brooklyn, where Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball. The Nets are owned by Mikhail D. Prokhorov, from Russia, which has taken a tough anti-gay stance. And Collins will wear his regular No. 98, in honor of Matthew Shepard, the college student who was murdered for being gay in 1998.

Collins may soon be joined in pro sports by Michael Sam, who’s just come out and is on-target to be drafted by the NFL.

All of which makes me look prescient for publishing “Water Music,” a novel about four gay athletes and how their shifting rivalries color their personal relationships with one another.