‘How I wanted to go.’ Allan Judkowitz hangs up spikes in cancer battle

UPDATE: Allan died on Sept  24 at the end of the Jewish New Year holiday, two weeks after this article was published.

The throw from the third-base hole was wide and short. Bucco first baseman Allan Judkowitz lunged to snag it while somehow keeping his foot on the bag for the out. And then he tumbled into the infield dirt. It was the last of several acrobatic plays Allan made in the Buccos 18-6 decimation of the Dodgers on June 8 in the LA County Senior Softball League. Undergoing yet another round of treatment in his six-year battle with pancreatic cancer, Allan badly hurt his ribs on the play and was done for the season.

“It’s how I wanted to go,” Allan told me in an interview last week shortly after he returned home from hospital for hospice care.

Allan was destined to end his career as a Bucco. He was born in McKeesport, a suburb of Pittsburgh on the Monongahela River. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1954 when he was two.

Allan grew up in an orthodox Jewish family that had a strict observance of the Sabbath. He was not allowed to play on weekends. Indeed, his first experience with organized sports came at the age of 15 in Senior Little League ball. He tried out wearing his Converse sneakers, instead of baseball cleats.

Allan wasted little time becoming a star after that. In his younger years, he played shortstop and was team MVP many times, his wife Joyce says.

She first met Allan when her sister and his cousin conspired at matchmaking with the wiry guy sporting a Fu Manchu mustache. “I walk in and there’s this good-looking guy in his baseball uniform. I said to my sister ‘These guys come a dime a dozen!’ Only to find out he was one in a million.” They got engaged three months later and have been married for 38 years.

Asked how he’s been able to keep playing – and at such a high level, too – despite round after round after round of chemo and immunotherapy in battling pancreatic cancer, which typically ends lives within a year of a diagnosis, Allan said: “It’s muscle memory for me.”

Asked what he enjoys most about the game, Allan said: “I just love playing…Playing with great teammates and making great friends. ”

His voice was little more than a murmur during the interview, and it was a struggle for him to speak more than a sentence.

But his sense of humor was undiminished. Asked what the secret was to his uncanny ability as a right-handed hitter to drive the ball down the right field line even during this season of his decline, he said: “Too slow to get the bat around.”

Allan was a software engineer, computer programmer, and business analyst during a career that included stints at Sony Pictures and Aramark – which also employed Bucco outfield Gene Sherman, a Jewish émigré from the Soviet union.

The graduate of Los Angeles Valley College has two daughters and three grandsons.

Not surprisingly, Allan said “making a good defensive play,” was his most enjoyable experience playing baseball.

And what will he miss the most about the game?

“The smell of the grass. The heat. My teammates.”