Growing up in Roslyn in the 1950s, sportswriter Jane Leavy would hang out at local Little League games, hoping she’d be allowed to pitch in late lopsided affairs long after the boys of summer stopped caring about the outcome.
Those days were rare, Leavy said Friday by phone from her Washington, D.C. home, but her love of baseball grew out of intense stickball battles and trips with her father to her grandmother’s apartment, located mere blocks from Yankee Stadium.
“She was always one long, loud foul ball away from home plate,” said Leavy, 61.
Leavy would sit under her grandmother’s piano on Sunday afternoons with her “crappy Sammy Esposito glove” and hear the roar of the crowd emanating from the field echo on her transistor radio, “and it was easy as a four-year-old to imagine that you were even closer than that,” she said.
“I always loved the identification of my dad and the time I had with him, as well as the idea that being near my grandmother meant being near Yankee Stadium, and being near Yankee Stadium meant being near my grandmother,” Leavy said.
Leavy, a 1970 graduate of Roslyn High School, has gone on to write two bestselling books about two of the biggest New York baseball icons of her childhood, 2002’s “Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy” and 2010’s “The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood.”
The books were praised by critics not because they championed the accomplishments of their subjects, but because they were humanized in ways past tales had not.
“She transcends the familiarity of the subject, cuts through both the hero worship and the backlash of pedestal-wrecking in the late 20th century, treats evenly [Mantle’s] belated sobriety and the controversial liver transplant (doomed mid-surgery by an oncologist’s discovery that the cancer had spread), and handles his infidelity with dispassion,” wrote media personality Keith Olbermann in his 2010 review of “The Last Boy” for the New York Times.
For her Mantle book, Leavy said she interviewed more than 600 people who offered insight into the 20 key days in the Yankee slugger’s life upon which the biography is based.
Leavy framed “A Lefty’s Legacy” in similar fashion, detailing Koufax’s 1965 perfect game through snippets of his personal life and experiences at baseball’s negotiating table, which helped galvanize the players union.
“For me to have a sports story be interesting enough to spend three years or five years working on it, it has to have a dimension that’s greater than just the confines of a baseball field or whatever the venue may be,” Leavy said. “In each of the cases that I spent so long on, there were other dimensions.”
Leavy graduated from Barnard College in 1974 and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1976.
She began her reporting career at Women’s Sports Magazine, where she said her “most important contribution” was a series of profiles on female athletes who were self-described tomboys as kids, as well as a stint at Self Magazine, before joining the Washington Post in 1979.
“I was lucky to come along at a time when they were just starting to need to have women writing about sports, and therefore it was really lucky timing for me to parlay that into jobs that I don’t think I would have otherwise have gotten,” Leavy said.
In 1990, Leavy published her first book, “Squeeze Play,” a piece of baseball fiction that Entertainment Weekly writer Allen Barra called “the funniest, raunchiest, and most compassionate baseball novel I’ve ever read and is sure to offend some people who cried during “Field of Dreams” – and that’s good enough for me.”
Following the birth of her two kids, Nick and Emma, Leavy left the Post and worked as a freelance reporter throughout the 1990s, until she began researching “The Lefty’s Legacy” in 1998 as the first of a three-book deal with HarperCollins Publishers.
When she began work on “The Last Boy,” Leavy reached back into her childhood to write about the player she most identified with as a girl, a fragile Oklahoman farmboy with power from both sides of the plate and speed on the bases – Mickey Charles Mantle.
“Mickey came along at a time in American history, not that I could have articulated any of this as a little kid, that seemed to evoke a sense that anything was possible,” Leavy said. “We had beaten the Germans, we had beaten the [Japanese], we were rebuilding Europe, and there was something about his completely fabulous smile that spoke to possibility.”
But, Leavy said, she wanted to provide a retrospective on her subject, juxtaposing Mantle’s 16 All-Star appearances, three Most Valuable Player awards and seven World Series titles with his alcoholism and sexual abuse as a boy.
“I wanted it to be an examination of not just a particular life but the particular life that has remained, despite everything we know about him and his failures and his disease, and I wanted to get to the bottom of why that was the case,” Leavy said. “I wanted to use myself as a case-in-point when you see your hero close up and that fall off the pedestal that is so commonplace now. How does that happen and how do you reassess who that person is and why he matters and how he matters.”
Currently, Leavy is working on shaping the idea for her third work of non-fiction, and though she said she’s not yet settled on a topic, it’ll most certainly focus on sports.
“For me, it has to be something that’ll sustain my interest and my friends’ [interest],” Leavy said. “They say, ‘Can we listen to you talk about this for four years?’ and if it’s ‘No,’ I say, ‘Forget it. Frankly, I’d like to move on out of sports and do other things, but this is what I’m known for at this point and am most likely to get published. But at this point, I’m lucky to have a niche that people are still interested in reading about and publishing.”
