Hall of Fame sportswriter Leonard Koppett dies at 79

Playing stickball a block from Yankee Stadium, a young Leonard Koppett quickly realized he'd never be taking aim at its tantalizingly short right-field porch. That's not to say he wouldn't be spinning yarns about the men who did, however.

"I did notice these fellows coming out [of the stadium] after each game, carrying these boxes and realized those were the guys who write about it. At the time in New York we had 11 or 12 newspapers...I understood there's a way to make a living out of watching the ball games. And what I understood about writing is that it required no heavy lifting, it was easy to do," he told the Palo Alto Weekly in 1996.

Koppett avoided heavy lifting long enough to become the first writer elected to the baseball and basketball halls of fame.

The Palo Alto resident died following an apparent heart attack Sunday. He was 79.

The Russian-born, New York-bred Koppett was not the stereotypical, hard-drinking, cigar-chomping Oscar Madison-type sportswriter. Friends would say he knew more about music than he did about baseball -- and he knew more about baseball than just about anyone -- and he was just as at-home writing liner notes for chamber music recitals as he was filing deadline stories from Ebbets Field or Candlestick Park.

Koppett was partaking in his legendary passion for music Sunday, attending a concert at San Francisco's Davies Symphony Hall, when he collapsed and died.

"He was a real personality. He was so warm. He was never referred to as Leonard; it was always 'Koppy.' Even his wife referred to him in that way," recalled Rabbi Sidney Akselrad, the rabbi emeritus at Los Altos Hills' Congregation Beth Am. Koppett had been a member of the Reform congregation and a friend of Akselrad's since he moved to the South Bay 30 years ago to become The New York Times' first West Coast correspondent.

Added longtime friend Jim Stewart, "This is one of the happiest people I ever knew. And also probably one of the most intelligent people I ever knew. He was thrilled with the work he did, with the books he wrote. He enjoyed going to the games, sitting in the press box."

Stewart would always ask his sportswriter buddy to play the part of a prognosticator, but Koppett would never oblige. The unpredictability of sports was what gave them their spice.

Koppett was born in Russia in 1923. His family ran a fish cannery and was sent to New York for business purposes by the Soviet government in 1928. When the communists began executing food distributors during a famine, the Koppetts opted to stay in the United States. "We were assimilated on both continents," a laughing Koppett told the Bulletin last year.

Koppett was brought up by musical parents and trained on the piano by some of the world's great Russian musicians. Living a block from Yankee Stadium proved to be too great a distraction, however.

After graduating from Columbia University in 1944, he worked for the New York Herald Tribune, the Post and, finally, started with the Times in 1963. He covered a variety of editorial positions -- sports and otherwise -- for the Peninsula Times Tribune from 1979 until the paper's demise in 1993. In the past decade, he was a well-published freelancer.

Koppett, who wrote 15 books, loved being a sportswriter and chose his profession at the right time. In a lengthy interview with the Bulletin last year, he bemoaned the blurring of sports and entertainment, the adversarial relationship between athletes and the media and the debilitating effect of television on the print media.

"I don't think many of today's writers, especially the young ones, have a fan-like appreciation of what they're looking at. To them, it's only grist for the mill as writers, and I think it's a shame. I think they don't enjoy it as much," he said.

"I would not have liked this kind of life at all. I'd have gotten out at a very early stage."

Good thing he didn't.

"He was an incredibly erudite man, and it showed up in his writing," said Joyce Moser, a Stanford lecturer who had been an avid reader of Koppett's before befriending him in the late 1980s.

"People would just go and ask him about sports, music or something else. He was a really level-headed, kind, smart man. He was a serious pianist, very good, and his son is a brilliant concert pianist."

Leonard Koppett is survived by his wife of 39 years, Suzanne; his son, David, the producer of Oakland A's baseball on Fox Sports Net; and his daughter, Katharine, a corporate training consultant and actress. Bittersweetly, Katharine delivered the Koppetts' first grandchild the day after his death, a girl named Lia. A public memorial will be held on Monday, July 7 at 10:30 a.m. at Congregation Beth Am. Contributions can be sent to Rabbi Janet Marder's Charitable fund at Beth Am, 26790 Arastradero Road, Los Altos Hills, CA. 94022 or Columbia University.

"I spent my whole life avoiding real work. I don't think I was very ambitious," Koppett told the Palo Alto Weekly. "And sports is all the better because it's fun."