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. ...

In memoriam: Muhammad Ali (1942 -2016)

June 5, 2016

Kings and presidents die, and nobody cares, Muhammad Ali once said. But Joe Louis died, and everybody cried.

Are they crying now for Muhammad Ali, who died Friday in Scottsdale, Ariz. of complications from Parkinson’s disease? No doubt.

Boxers are perhaps the most poignant of athletes, for in a sense, they absorb the blows for the rest of us. Boxing, the novelist Joyce Carol Oates observed in her nonfiction work, “On Boxing,” is “America’s tragic theater.” ...

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. ...

‘Downhill racer’ indeed

January 25, 2016

I didn’t want another day to elapse without acknowledging the passing of skier Bill Johnson, who died Jan. 21 in an assisted living facility in Gresham, Ore. at age 55. Johnson was in deteriorating health for a number of years following a stroke. But I think that many would say that life killed Bill Johnson.

If you are of a certain vintage, then you remember the moment – the Olympics, Bjelašnica, Sarajevo, 1984 – when brash Bill, in Joe Namath/Muhammed Ali fashion, announced that the gold in the men’s downhill was his and everyone else was skiing for silver. No American man had won the gold in the downhill. But on that day, Johnson was better than gold. He was as good as his word. ...