Excitement about Jews in Sports

Jews and Sports

By Rob Eshman – JewishJournal.com

What is it about Jews and sports that gets people so excited?

When Shawn Green joined the Dodgers in 2000, you’d have thought from all the hoopla that he’d found the cure for cancer and the answer to Middle East peace. The Jewish press covered his every at-bat as if we’d all really cared about baseball all along. Even I, who only ever attend baseball games for the sun, peanuts and beer, got seats just above the dugout once, and when he emerged I heard a loud “Shalom Shawn!” from the bleachers. We both smiled.

You could say all the Shawn-mania was because Jewish pro ballplayers are so few and far between, but that’s just not true. The stereotype of the slope-shouldered, un-athletic nebbish endures — thank you, Woody Allen — but the reality is different. Jews make up just 2 percent of the American population but have been proportionately represented in the top ranks of every sport, from Princeton’s Phil King, one of the greatest American football and baseball players of the 19th century, to five-time Olympic champion Dara Torres.

(By the way, Woody Allen, himself, has often said that, in real life, he was an excellent and avid ballplayer as a kid.)

There have been top Jewish basketball players, boxers, tennis stars, even bullfighters. When Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1932 that Latin America’s only great American-born matador “is a better, more scientific, more intelligent, and more finished matador than all but six of the full matadors in Spain today and the bullfighters know it and have the utmost respect for him,” he was talking about Sidney Frumkin, a Jew from Brooklyn. Olé.

The real excitement over Jewish sports heroes is not about their rarity, but rather their willingness to take their Jewish identity onto the field. When they do embody athletic excellence as well as their heritage, they earn the undying devotion of the Tribe.

The classic example of this is Dodger pitcher Sandy Koufax’s refusal to play on Yom Kippur — something Shawn Green must have been thinking about when he, too, sat out a game on the holiest day of the Jewish year.

“I felt like it was the right thing to do,” Green said at the time. “I didn’t do this to gain approval. I thought it was the right example to set for Jewish kids, a lot of whom don’t like to go to synagogue.”

That is the go-to example, but there are other instances of a Jewish sports man or woman becoming a Jewish sports hero: When Green decided to donate $250,000 of his salary each year to charity, when he became a spokesman for literacy; when baseball great Hank Greenberg in the 1930s and ’40s stood up to anti-Semites. Greenberg once went into the Chicago White Sox clubhouse to call out manager Jimmy Dykes for a racial slur.

One of my favorite examples is the 1950s-era English Jewish tennis star Angela Buxton, whose own experience with prejudice compelled her to stand up for black American tennis great Althea Gibson. The two teamed up to win the women’s doubles title at the French Championships and later at Wimbledon. Buxton, who turns 76 this month, is one of the great Jewish champions of all time.

There have been more Jewish athletes than you would ever think, but men and women like these — they are the champions.