Should the Dodgers go on to win the World Series this season, and probably even if they don’t, the story of Clayton Kershaw’s opening day will be told over and over again. Stories will be woven about how he took matters into his own hands, willing his team nearly singlehandedly to victory over the rival Giants, putting the baseball world on-notice that this year truly was special.

Stories like this are one of the great things about baseball, and all of sports.

I was reminded of one such story on Easter Sunday, the day before Kershaw’s gem, by my Grandmother. Grandma is a huge Dodger fan who raised a family of Dodger-fan boys, my father and his four brothers. My poor Auntie (who, for us cousins, goes simply by “Auntie”) was the only girl of the bunch.  It must have been pretty overwhelming for her being the only girl in that family. But I digress.

Sandy Koufax visited a restaurant in Morro Bay and gave the Main family a thrill. By publicity still.Wikiwatcher1 at en.wikipedia [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons

The building, made of boulder-sized rock facing, was pointed out to me often by my father as we drove by. Anyone who has worked in a restaurant for any length of time knows that stories about customers and happenings flow out of these places.

One night, my grandmother was there along with my Uncle Matt, a teenager at the time, who was bussing tables. Matt came rushing up to his mother.

“I think that’s Sandy Koufax,” he said.

My Grandmother wasn’t so sure.

“Back then you didn’t have pictures of everybody all over the place,” she said. “Now, you can look up anybody and see their face, but back then, you weren’t so sure.”

So she questioned it.

“How do you know for sure,” she asked my Uncle Matt.

“When he got out of the car, he closed the door with his left hand,” said Matt.

Classic.

It turned out the restaurant patron was, in fact, Sandy Koufax — the Dodger legend who threw out the first pitch on Monday afternoon at Dodger Stadium. Koufax had a home in Templeton, CA in the 1970’s. Templeton is about 25 miles from Morro Bay and the greatest left arm in baseball history was the one that closed that door and ate at the restaurant that night. My uncle, a huge Dodger fan, was right.

Family lore is a great thing. In our family of Dodger fans, this story is one that my Grandma loves to tell. One that I really love to hear.