I read this book¹ (think of it! to read an encyclopedia) because I am interested in sports, interested in the Jews, and interested in the Jews in sports. Although professional sports have become big business in America, with a special kind of attraction, there remains a childhood connection, and by going through this work, I thought to refresh my memory, summon up old scenes, and so, through this external stimulus, this encyclopedia, make something of a moment in time that some of us share, a familiar enough exercise. I thought, too, that I might even come up with something outside the familiar stock of memories, and that is an unusual form of pleasure.

But, as is most often the case, when working from the outside, one finds little new (though I had never heard of Lon Myers, an incredible track star of the 1880’s in distances from 50 yards to a mile), mostly the re-enforcement of the old, and I had to be satisfied, in my memories, with run-of-the-mill stock, the way a peddler, on an established route, hesitates to exchange the proved, the salable merchandise, for the novelty which may or may not sell.

I recalled nights under lampposts when we traded picture cards (Rogers Hornsby for General Haig, Admiral Sims for Bill Wambsganss, Johnny Dundee for Clemenceau); the late afternoons when we’d outwit the corner news-dealer for a quick glance at the latest scores—you had to flip the paper, for the scores were at the bottom of the page; the simulated Olympic trackmeets in the street—one, two, and three sewer races, the figures streaking from the courtyard, trying to make the gutter in a hop, step, and jump, the run five times around the block, a foreshortened marathon; the basketball play in the schoolyard (real baskets), through the fire escape rungs, even into garbage cans, with a newspaper rolled into a species of regulation basketball; the staccato rhythms of Graham McNamee telling us, strapped in earphones, tickling the mysterious crystal, of what was happening on Saturday afternoons on those far-off gridirons while the shadows lengthened in the late afternoon (but George Trevor said it so much better in the pages of the Sun); the long conversations in the hallway, protected from the rain you could touch by putting out your hand, about the comparative abilities of the brothers Irish and Bob Meusel, outfielders on the Giants and Yankees, about the reality of Christy Mathewson’s fadeaway and its relation to Baseball Joe’s double shoot, about records and techniques (“never play a man too close”); the jaunts to Columbia’s South Field, where we’d wait outside for the inevitable home-run ball from the bat of Lou Gehrig; the stickball games frustratingly delayed by the disappearance of the ball over a roof, no great accomplishment on a block where the buildings were no more than four stories high (“you hit it, gaw head up’n get it”); the quarrels over the decision at a base, over hits and spans of an immy, over the unnecessary push under the basket, over a historical question (“Nah, he never hit more’n .370”), swiftly turning into fistfights in defense of accuracy, egotism, wounded pride, irreversible loss, and historical justice.

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So I made up my little package, could easily have added a hundred, a thousand bits of recall, toward a second-string Proustian flowering, cement style. But what about the Jews? That is a limiting factor. Now those of us who were Jews had, like the other minority kids (we were mostly all minority kids), a special interest. I don’t mean that Dempsey, Ruth, Grange, Paddock, Tilden, Jones, Weissmuller, meant the less to us, as the great American heroes in areas we understood (though we had little tennis and no golf) whose exploits we followed with the fascination which only contemporary history provides, what is living and dying before us.

But the Jewish athletes had for us another dimension, and this, not the pleasures of memory, is what I’m staying with; these athletes were champions for us in a world which we had far from made our own. Three of these champions were Benny Leonard, Nat Holman, and Benny Friedman.

These three athletes shared an attribute we called “form.” For us that was the highest praise, more important than strength, almost more important than victory. Form meant skill, speed, wariness, agility, it meant the fullest use of your powers, it meant movement and exertion proper to the ever-changing situation. When Leonard feinted his opponent, jabbed, moved off, then under the guard, and off again, feinted, hooked, and danced off yet again, that was form. When Holman made the shadow of a move in one direction, another in the opposite direction, then moved in the original direction, or when he made a sudden blind pass, through a forest of bodies, to the man in the scoring position—that was form. And when Friedman, the masterminding quarterback, menaced by giant linemen, picked his receiver (generally the nimble Oosterbaan) and made his unerring throw in this apparently chaotic scene—that was form.

Form was our delight by day and our dream by night. It was a substitute for strength, proved that the good little man could make his way against the world’s obstacles. The song says that “it’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it”; Hemingway called it “grace under pressure”; it is the harmony of the means and the accomplishment, making the hard look easy. And it was a way of winning, without being hurt (is this possible?). Though form was a gift for some, it could be learned, you had to make the fundamentals second nature. You had to watch Ty Cobb in action, watch that incredible accommodation of act to purpose, the ferocious exploitation of limits.

The influence exerted on us by those agile lightweights, forwards, and quarterbacks seemed related (I see it that way now) to the history of the Jews in the way of the minority situation, of the dispersal, and in the concept of the champion.

The light weight (135 pound limit) and absence of height are analogues to the minority position, which each generation learns for itself. I remember the shocked reaction of a child, in a neighborhood and school fairly Jewish, who discovered (suddenly?) that the Jews were a small minority in America, a tiny one in the world. “You mean most people aren’t Jews?” he asked. Suddenly he felt reduced.

And didn’t the dispersion, the wandering, call for the agility we admired, the traveling light and fast? “In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.” Didn’t that fine sentence of Emerson make sense, one generation removed, as we were, from the pogroms?

And then these figures as champions, our champions. But in what sense were they fighting for us? Sports heroes struggle for victory, for fame, for money, but there is no higher cause involved (sportsmanship is more a principle of behavior, an adherence to rules of the game so that skill is fairly tested), one’s life is not being laid on the line for a cause beyond the victory. Yet the sports champion is best in his class, and he partakes of the older and nobler meaning of the word, one who fights for others, for his country, his people, his cause (Hawthorne’s Grey Champion). So ring, court, gridiron stood for field of battle, and our heroes represented us against the world which, we were coming to know, was filled with enemies, threatening us for obscure reasons. These heroes were fighting back for us—each hook, pass, basket, was a kind of blow against oppression, against the insults and injuries which we were not experiencing much in our own land (we had a strong sense and need of being Americans), but through the ancestral remembrances, and our slow involvement in the great and brutal rhythms of history, where Black Hundreds loomed and struck in the distant night. Here was Benny Leonard (and many another champion, all listed in this encyclopedia) to give us strength against the invisible enemy (but he was around the corner, hollering “Christ Killer”) and we fell into a natural hero worship.

Natural because we needed a champion, not only as kids (everybody is so big) and therefore as Oedipal casualties, but as Jewish kids, and so our hero was lost in the champion, and that champion—light, agile, brave, and with great form (look how he followed through on that sling shot!) was David, the poet/warrior, though we were interested less in the poet than in the warrior, he who was angered because Goliath “hath taunted the armies of the living God.”

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Here was the classic example of the good little man in action, who gave away size, weight, reach, girth (imagine the chest measurement, the ankle and wrist measurements, of the Philistine champ, I don’t mean Babbitt) and knocked off his opponent. David disdained the offered armor, he traveled and fought light, chose the vulnerable spot, hit the enemy champ on the head (apparently no armor there), and the fight was over. It was a one round K.O. and not a blow struck in return, the way Joe Louis would knock out an opponent while a spectator leaned over to tie a shoelace, and so never saw the action. The biblical details are sparse (should we expect the author of the Book of Samuel to be a sports-writer?) but the Shepherd Kid, obviously in a good position, saw his opening and threw his haymaker.

Much later (and, grown now) we faced a new enemy, and no champion appeared for the Jews (not even a Golem). Our sports heroes remained sports heroes, or became war heroes—like Barney Ross—in the general war. The daydreams of a million kids and young men came to nought. The methodical destruction of the Jews could not be stopped by a single champion (but what if someone had worked his way behind the lines and knocked off Hitler?). Great armies were required, and they were fighting the Nazi armies for reasons—historically significant, essential—which had little to do with the Jews, who went to their deaths nobly, ignobly, or outside the realm of nobility, in the manner of men. A champion did not arise, the struggle was dynastic. The fighters in Warsaw, and elsewhere, fought a losing defensive battle, noble in form, in spirit, quixotic in content. Victory for the Jews was not on the agenda. Only survival was, conquest being in the heated imaginations of mad and calculating enemies.

But the need for a champion dies hard and we still see him in the sports pages (then in the encyclopedias). Today it is (or was, until a moment ago) the peerless Sandy Koufax, throwing his curve and fast one against what enemies? The enemies are now quiet, or slumbering—guilt and exhaustion are having their day—but the need for a champion exists, it always exists for a minority, because the terror is projected, and if friends do not appear when the chips are down, we are thrown back on our own resources, our own bitter form of struggle, traveling light, swift, agile, and light, in the way of our archetypal sports champions, against powerful enemies in being, or in the wings.

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¹ Bernard Postal, Jesse Silver, and Roy Silver, Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports, Bloch, 526 pp., $12.95.