Leonard Koppett, a Moscow-born Jew and longtime Bay Area resident who was one of the most influential sportswriters of the 20th century, has been inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.
The honor comes nearly eight years after Koppett died of a heart attack at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco at age 79.
Koppett honed his craft as a sportswriter in New York and then spent the final 25 years of his 55-year career in the Bay Area, mainly with the now-defunct Peninsula Times Tribune. He lived in Palo Alto and was a member of Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills.
While he was alive, he was given special sports media recognition by both the baseball and basketball halls of fame, located in Cooperstown, N.Y., and Springfield, Mass., respectively. Now he also is being memorialized in Israel: The IJSHOF is located in Netanya.
“This is a real honor for him,” said Koppett’s son, David Koppett, who followed his dad into the sports media field and is a senior executive producer at Comcast SportsNet Bay Area.
“It was really interesting to see some of the other names on the [Jewish Hall of Fame’s] list of inductees — some of whom he had a long association with, like Sandy Koufax.”
After emigrating from Moscow with his family in 1928 at age 5, Koppett grew up in New York City in the era of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. He began his career at the New York Herald Tribune in 1948, when players such as Joe DiMaggio and Jackie Robinson were in the headlines, and later wrote for the New York Post and New York Times.
Seeking a more suburban upbringing than the Bronx for his two children, David and Kat, he moved his family to Palo Alto in 1973. His widow, Suzanne, 78, lives in Menlo Park and remains a member at Beth Am.
Koppett wrote 16 books on sports, including “The Thinking Fan’s Guide to Baseball” and “Koppett’s Concise History of Major League Baseball.” He was a sports editor and columnist for the Palo Alto–based Times Tribune, and after it folded in 1992, he wrote freelance columns about baseball that appeared in many East Bay papers. He also wrote for the Sporting News for 20 years.
“At the [IJSHOF’s] inaugural inductions in 1979, Hank Greenberg, one of 18 honored that evening in Beverly Hills, told the Hall’s founders: ‘Don’t make it easy to receive this honor,’ ” said Joe Siegman, chairman of the IJSHOF election committee. “Leonard’s achievements have already been recognized by two major sports halls of fame — so he has far and away exceeded the ‘difficult’ criteria of the election process, and probably should have been recognized by the IJSHOF years ago.”
The IJSHOF has inducted 350 sports figures from 24 countries in its 32 years. While it inducts a new class every year, formal ceremonies occur only once every four years, in conjunction with the Maccabiah Games in Israel; the ceremony that includes Koppett will be in July 2013.
He joins a handful of other sportswriters in the Jewish sports shrine, including Maury Allen, Red Fisher, Jerome Holtzman and Shirley Povich. Others in the hall include just about every Jewish sports figure of note, from Red Auerbach of Boston Celtics fame to former San Francisco 49ers lineman Harris Barton to Olympic gold medal swimmer Dara Torres.
Art Spander, a longtime Bay Area sports columnist and member of Temple Sinai in Oakland, said the posthumous honor for his old friend is well deserved.
“Leonard Koppett was one of the smartest people I ever met,” Spander said. “He could talk about the most complex subject, like a collective bargaining agreement or the issues in an umpire’s strike, and make you understand it. He had a brilliant mind.”