Regardless of whether he's gay, Koufax clearly considers the allegation humiliating. It's certainly not the ideal way for a famously private man to come out. Most sports commentators preferred to sidestep the subject of his alleged homosexuality, choosing instead to vilify News Corp. Is there anything more disappointing than a good sex story ruined by a lot of huffing about journalistic integrity? The essential story of interest in the Koufax-News Corp. drama involves sexuality in sports, not ethics in journalism.

The Post has done nothing out of character, nor has it done anything blatantly wrong. That is, until it offered a murky apology. Understand that the Post employs shameless gossips; they engage in this sort of teetering-on-the- razor-edge-of-decency stuff all the time, and people love it. Or, at least, they read it: NYPost.com receives over 33 million page-views per month. In a purely democratic 50 million-Elvis-Fans-Can't-Be-Wrong kind of way, the New York Post is exactly what we want, whoever we are.

In 1982, 20 years before the Post dished on Koufax, Martin Greif wrote "The Gay Book of Days," a who's who of history's homosexuals and alleged homosexuals. For each day of the year a different gay person (or a very likely gay person) was profiled in short essays, and the book was segmented into months. At the conclusion of his book, Greif includes a list of persons underneath the headline "I Know They Are, You Know They Are, and They Know They Are, but Initials Will Just Have to Do." His last entry is "S.K., American baseball player."

This proves very little, of course, and it certainly doesn't prove that Koufax is gay. However, it does suggest that rumors of Koufax' homosexuality existed long before the Post amplified them. Page Six staffers didn't spin a wheel in the newsroom to randomly match a public figure ("Paltrow"... "Pitt" ... oh, it stopped on "Koufax!") with a shocking circumstance ("Space Alien" ... "Dating Justin" ... oh, the wheel stops on "Gay!") The Post is a conduit for gossip and innuendo, not a factory for it, and the Koufax rumor is a workhorse (to borrow from baseball rhetoric.) It's the Jim Kaat of gay-athlete gossip.

They haven't exactly retracted their allegations, either. Here is the text of their Feb. 22 apology:

"A two-sentence blind item we ran here Dec. 19 about a 'Hall of Fame baseball hero' has sparked a series of unfortunate consequences for which we are very sorry. The item said the sports hero 'cooperated with a best-selling biography only because the author promised to keep secret that he is gay.' Two weeks later, the Daily News' Michael Gross, after finding 'Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy' by Jane Leavy on the best-seller list, named Koufax as the player and ran a photo of him. Koufax himself, an intensely private man, was deeply offended by our item. The author has denied making any deal with Koufax and called our item 'erroneous.' We apologize to both Koufax and Leavy for getting it wrong."

Read it as often as you like, but you'll never get to the part where they say he's not gay, or the part where they deny having sources in the publishing house. Instead, the Post suggests that the Daily News outed Koufax; they acknowledge that Koufax took offense and that Leavy refuted their piece. They do not specify what the "it" is that they got wrong. Syntactically, it appears to be the "item," but which part, and how?

Presumably, the "unfortunate consequences" referred to are the tarnishing of Leavy's reputation as a journalist and Koufax' reputation as a heterosexual. We'll also assume the Post was led to the apology by persons atop the News Corp. hierarchy, at whatever level baseball and publishing are financially intertwined. Ultimately, the most unfortunate consequences of the saga have been Koufax's childish outrage and his stubborn silence.

Salon.com's Keith Olbermann was among the first national sports commentators to confront the controversy. He managed to insert himself into the story, writing, "I signed a contract with the News Corp.'s publishers, HarperCollins, to write a sports book. Its production was tabled after the terrorist attacks. Now I will not write the book. I'm sending the money back." Earlier in the piece, Olbermann argued that the real issue in the Koufax-News Corp. saga was the corporation's unscrupulous behavior: "The not-so-blind Post item may as well have been about his actually having been a gentile all these years (Koufax was an observant Jew who refused to pitch on Yom Kippur). The point is the News Corp.'s journalistic and ethical malfeasance, and this time around, reporters seem to get that."

Well, no. The point is that Sandy Koufax was deeply offended by rumors that he's a homosexual. So offended, in fact, that he is willing to sacrifice his relationship with the Dodgers.

Only two noteworthy national sports columnists seem to get that. Salon's King Kaufman and Sports Illustrated's Phil Taylor both published pieces on Feb. 24 that expressed regret over Koufax's act of defiance. Kaufman also recognized the strange direction in which the sports media had drifted, writing, "I can't help thinking that it matters very much whether Sandy Koufax is gay. Forgive me for not quite believing that journalistic integrity is more important to the American public than whether or not a major sports figure is gay."

Koufax is certainly an enigma. He is inarguably among the greatest pitchers in baseball history. To some, he is a twice-married heterosexual who cherishes his privacy; to others, Koufax is a secretive, unmarried, impeccably groomed man who once studied architecture at Columbia University. Hmm. Gay? Who cares?

You do. It's not the easiest way to come out, but it's a way. If Koufax is heterosexual, then he has reinforced the gay-is-bad logic of male professional athletes; if he's gay, his reaction is doubly sad. Either way, his response to the Post's gossip item is regrettable and confusing, but not principled. As SI's Taylor wrote, "The moment that athletes begin to treat rumors of homosexuality with less outrage is the moment that papers like the Post will stop printing them."

Few American athletes could make so large an impact on the public (and the sports world's) perception of gay men than could Koufax. He led his team — the all-American Dodgers, no less — to World Series victories; he was the rarest combination of determination and talent. And that fastball, that curve. Few revelations could diminish Koufax in the minds of baseball fans, and certainly not a thing so completely inoffensive as homosexuality. But this doesn't make it unimportant.

Hall of Famer Willie Stargell once said of Koufax, "Trying to hit him was like trying to drink coffee with a fork." Trying to understand him is much the same.

E-mail Andy Behrens at abehrens53 at hotmail dot com.