MEMO KOUFAX: SEE CRUISE
Let me start by saying that you have no idea how much I love baseball. Not only that, I have lived and breathed the Dodgers since the mid-60s, whch, needless to say, included a very excellent pitcher named Sandy Koufax. In fact, it was his exploits, mentioned in a comic strip, read to me by my father, that started me on my path of baseball, and Dodger baseball, fandom. Sandy Koufax, who refused to make a start during a World Series game scheduled on Yom Kippur, the holiest of Jewish holidays. A role model to so many, and in so many ways.To this day I still live and breathe each season, and participate in many a baseball "fantasy" league so that I might totally saturate myself with baseball while there is baseball to enjoy.
Imagine my dismay then when I first read that Sandy Koufax was severing all ties with the Dodger organization, an organization with which he had been involved for almost 50 years. "What could they have done!?" I asked myself.
Then, I learned that it was because of a gossip item in the New York Post, not the Dodgers themselves.
I breathed a sigh of relief, yet still wondered what the Post might have done to cause Sandy Koufax to be so angry that he would not allow himself to be part of anything that Mr. Murdoch, owner of both the Dodgers and the Post, was a part of.
And then I found out what.
A two line blind item, reported the same way in almost every media outlet:
In December, the Post in a gossip column said that a “Hall of Fame baseball hero” had “cooperated with a best-selling biography only because the author promised to keep it secret that he is gay. The author kept her word, but big mouths at the publishing house can’t keep from flapping.” Koufax was not specifically named by the paper. “Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy,” written by Jane Leavey, was published last September.
Many sad things will stem from this, about an article very few noticed until Koufax made his announcement.
Koufax will be on record as believing the possibility that somebody might be gay is so heinous, that it is a crime worth throwing away a 48 year relationship.
If he is not gay, he needed to say nothing.
If he is gay, he needed to say nothing.
Nobody cared.
Until now.
Now I care, and am very saddened that Koufax, while certainly a product of his generation as my other half, Publisher of Lesbian Worlds reminds me, felt it was horrific enough to take public offense.
And that, sadly enough, I find quite offensive indeed.
My own relationship with the Dodgers will remain unchanged, but I will never be able to think of Sandy Koufax with quite the same joy in my heart.
In Pride,
Deborah
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