Leavy, Jane: Sandy Koufax

Sandy Koufax was the consummate pitcher: elegant, dominant, unsurpassed. He defined and distinguished himself by what he did on the baseball field and what he refused to do. He challenged batters and stereotypes. On the evening of September 9, 1965, he pitched a perfect game against the Chicago Cubs. Less than a month later, he achieved another kind of perfection by refusing to pitch the opening game of the World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Until then, he was a ballplayer, perhaps the greatest lefthander of all time. Forever after, he would be a symbol, the one thing he never wanted to be.

A year later, he was gone -- done with baseball at age thirty. No other sports hero retired so young, so well, or so completely. Opting out of celebrity, refusing to cannibalize himself for profit, he is described by one former Dodger "as the most misunderstood man in baseball." Part biography and part cultural history, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy gets as close to the legend as he will allow.