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From The Sports World  SANDY KOUFAX ...what do he and Pres. Obama have in common? (see below) |
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Some excerpts from the Out of Left Field Library:
“I learned something of a triumph when the Dodgers won the National League pennant in 1941. I did not know who won in 1940. I learned years later that it was Cincinnati. I did not know any players in 1940. By the time I was nine in September of 1941 the names of the Dodgers marched through my mind like lyrics: Dolph Camilli, Billy Herman, PeeWee Reese, Cookie Lavagetto, Pete Reiser, Dixie Walker, Mickey Owen. The pitchers: Higbe, Wyatt and Hugh Casey. And I learned something about tragedy in the World Series when Mickey Owen missed the third strike on Tommy Henrich to give the Yankees another chance to win, which they did. I regret it still.
Listening to the scores-Pittsburgh 4, Chicago 2; Cleveland 8, Detroit 1-I felt connected to all the great cities I’d never seen, across the vast rolling reaches of the Republic, connecting me with them and the people there watching the games. I saw them. I smelled the steamy heat in the streets. Philadelphia, Washington, Cincinnati.
In that last summer before the war, listening to the radio….The sound of the bat amplified by the crowd mike. The call of the vendors, the organ playing, the sound of the fans yelling thing you never could make out. The effortless and certain cadences of the play-by-play announcers, all of it became like the sound of a mother’s heartbeat to her unborn child, the rhythm of life and certainty. The sound of permanence.”
…”Double Play,” by Robert B. Parker
“My favorite non-complainer of all time may be Jackie Robinson, the first African-American to play major league baseball. He endured racism that many young people today couldn’t even fathom. He knew he had to play better than the white guys, and he knew he had to work harder. So that’s what he did. He vowed not to complain, even if fans spit on him.
I used to have a photo of Jackie Robinson hanging in my office, and it saddened me that so many students couldn’t identify him, or knew little about him. Many never even noticed the photo. Young people raised on color TV don’t spend a lot of time looking at black-and-white images.
That’s too bad. There is no better role model than a person like Jackie Robinson.”
. …“The Last Lecture,” by Randy Pausch
“This is a pretty fancy group here, a pretty distinguished group. We’re got senators and representatives. We’ve got Supreme Court justices and successful entrepreneurs, rabbinical scholars, Olympic athletes-and Sandy Koufax. Sandy and I actually have something in common; we are both lefties. He can’t pitch on Yom Kippur; I can’t pitch.”
….President Obama in honor of Jewish
American Heritage Month
“[on vacation] Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens
swims every day in the ocean, plays tennis three times a week
and plays golf two or three times a week....He tries to maintain
this vigorous exercise schedule when he is in Washington, playing
tennis two or three times a week, often with one of his three
daughters…He is in such good physical shape that, in 2005,
at age of 85, he threw the first pitch at a Cubs-Reds game at
Wrigley Field and got it right over the plate.”
…Jeffrey Rosen, “NY Times Magazine,” Sept. 23,
2007
“Justice Stevens’ energy amazed me, especially because
he always seemed relaxed and unhurried…He would also have
gotten in a few sets of tennis in the morning…Maybe the
best example of Justice Stevens’ energy came a few years
ago. I and some other former clerks were planning a clerks’
reunion and one suggested a tennis tournament. Justice Stevens
didn’t approve. “Why not?” asked the organizer.
“Most of the clerks weren’t good,” he responded.
He didn’t want to waste his time playing with hackers. He
was 85 at the time.”
…Cliff Sloan, former Stevens clerk
©2010 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted July 19, 2010.
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