“How do you mean, Ty?” Rice asked.
“Baseball to me was more work than play—in fact it was all work,” Cobb said. (He had a surprisingly high-pitched voice, and in his north Georgia accent “all” comes out sounding like a cross between “awe” and “oil.”) “I was lucky enough to lead the league [in batting] when I was twenty years old, and after that I wanted to lead it every year. I never thought I was any genius, so I gave my life to the game for twenty-five years. It was a constant battle, and it wore me out.”
That he was far from being a natural talent, like, say, Shoeless Joe Jackson, and thus had to work diligently at being successful is a constant theme over the years in Cobb’s public discourse. To maintain what he considered his ideal weight of 190, he ate only two meals a day, which meant he was hungry most of the time. To protect his surprisingly finicky eyes, he avoided coffee, milk, chewing gum, and movies. The off-season was no vacation for Cobb. On winter days he wore heavy boots and tried to stand and walk as much as possible; when spring training started he put lead weights in his shoes—all in the name of building up his legs for the championship season. Many of his contemporaries agreed that he was never very fast on his feet, just always in shape and brilliantly opportunistic.
The strategizing alone was exhausting, “I must have been in about 30,000 plays and I tried to think about every play and how it should be made,” he told Rice. “I believed in putting up a mental hazard for the other fellow. Every play was a problem of some sort. That’s what I mean by the strain and grind of twenty-five years.”
In another radio interview done a few years later, he sounded even more burnt out (and even less like a prisoner “set free”). The unidentified questioner starts off by referring to Cobb as “the roughest and toughest” ballplayer ever, then rambles on for what feels like minutes before finally arriving at a surpassingly dumb question, something about how he and Cobb both live in Augusta, isn’t that right, Mr. Cobb? The first time I listened to this old recording, I wondered if Cobb would brush off the inane icebreaker and go right back to the “roughest and toughest” reference. As much as he liked his opponents to believe that he was half crazy and capable of almost anything on the base paths, he was also, I knew, terribly sensitive about being described as an uncouth, violent person, and he might punch you in the nose if you even hinted at such a thing.
Cobb didn’t let me down. His first words back to the radio guy, who had just asked him where he lived, were, “Now, I appreciate what you say about me being the roughest and toughest . . .”
I thought: Okay, here we go! It sounded like Cobb was fixing to set this poor man straight, to explain to him and to the listening audience that to call him the roughest and the toughest is like describing Hamlet as “upset”—that is, to oversimplify matters to the point of misrepresentation.
But then he changed direction. Why, I of course can’t begin to say. Maybe he realized he had arrived very quickly at a crossroads in the conversation. Either he poured his whole life into this microphone by way of explanation, and tried to convey the nuances and subtleties of what it meant to be the Georgia Peach—or he took an easier path through what was essentially just another stupid interview (and since the advent of radio, fairly late in his career, the questions had gotten increasingly similar and stupider). In any case, he stopped objecting before he really got started, and went with the flow.
“The Good Book says, ‘Turn the other cheek,’ ” he said, trying to sound chipper, “but you know I never believed in that much. It doesn’t prove out. I happen to have believed more in ‘An eye for an eye’ when I played baseball,” he said with a forced chuckle.
He was playing a role, just like he’d played Billy Bolton. I could forgive him for this. The truth was complicated and he was a very tired man. Truth wasn’t necessarily what people really wanted, anyway. Cobb didn’t live long enough to see The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, but he understood the most famous line from it: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
• • •
Cobb never ran for president or became an actor or anything more than an occasional race car driver. His post-baseball life went, in most ways, pretty much the way you might expect. When the Hall of Fame came along in 1936, he was the first man selected for enshrinement. He did a lot of charity work, such as starting an education fund for Georgia boys and girls who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford college and founding a hospital in his hometown of Royston. And he became a go-to guy for quotes when the game of baseball changed in some way. In 1952, when the Texas League was finally getting around to realizing that Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier five years earlier, and let in a black player, he told a reporter who asked him about it that the integration of mainstream baseball had been long overdue. “I see no reason in the world why we shouldn’t compete with colored athletes as long as they conduct themselves with politeness and gentility. Let me say also that no white man has the right to be less of a gentleman than a colored man. In my book, that goes not just for baseball but for all walks of life.”
He lived out his life, in other words, doing what retired baseball stars do: accepting awards and acting like the wise and sometimes cranky old oracle. But what set Cobb apart from so many others was that myth of roughness and toughness. It didn’t just endure, it picked up momentum at a certain point after his death and started to grow and change. However much truth it did or didn’t contain at any point in its evolution, it took on a life of its own. Ty Cobb was replaced—overshadowed might be a better word—by “Ty Cobb,” a fully posable figure. Consider the issue of race. In making his statement about the Texas League, and in praising the play of Willie Mays and Roy Campanella on other occasions (the Dodger catcher, he said, was “the player who reminds me the most of myself”), Cobb didn’t just “clout a verbal home run for the Negro player,” as the Associated Press said in 1952; he set himself apart from fellow Southerners like Dixie Walker and Enos Slaughter, who had nothing good to say about the black men in their game, and openly resented their arrival. Two of the many men with whom he engaged in physical combat were black, it is true, but in his lifetime Cobb was not known as a bigot (few people not dressed in bedsheets were). He had black friends and fans, and on at least one occasion threw out the first ball of the season at a Negro League park.
And yet . . .
Try this: Go into a bar that has at least one working television. Sidle up to some beer sipper and, after a decent interval, say, “Ty Cobb, right?” The most common response, I’ve found in my several years of research, will be, “Oh my God! Tell me about it,” delivered with the obligatory eye roll. The second most common response is “Worst racist ever”—said with varying degrees of disapproval.
It is hardly just barflies who hold this opinion. “The mere sight of black people so filled Cobb with rage,” wrote Timothy M. Gay in his biography of Tris Speaker, “that on several occasions he brutally pistol-whipped African American men whose only offense was to share a sidewalk with him.” In the 1994 Ken Burns series Baseball, the respected writer and historian Dan Okrent called Cobb “an embarrassment to the game” because of his racism, and Burns treats Cobb as a dangerous miscreant: the anti–Jackie Robinson. Indeed, to the authors of the 2004 book American Monsters, Cobb fits squarely alongside Charles Manson, John Wilkes Booth, and the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory (considered responsible for the deaths of 146 garment workers in 1911) in the pantheon of America’s most despicable villains.
American Monsters is not by any definition an important or influential work, yet it accurately reflects the conventional wisdom. More than fifty years after Cobb’s death, it is not difficult to find people who, though they might describe themselves as casual baseball fans, have never heard of him. Of those who recognize the name, though, most think of Cobb as a singularly horrible man, a murderer, even, of one or more black people.
“Are you going to tell the story of how he stabbed the black waiter in Cleveland?” some
one asked me about halfway through my research on this book.
The answer is, Yes, well, sort of.
The book you hold in your hands is not meant to change your mind about “Ty Cobb.” For the most part, it is not about him; sorry.
This is, rather, the story of Ty Cobb.
— CHAPTER TWO —
EVERY STORY MUST BEGIN SOMEPLACE, and the story of the actual Ty Cobb began in Banks County, Georgia, on December 18, 1886. Many people assume (or assert) that Cobb grew up in a shotgun shack on the wrong side of the tracks from Dogpatch; that is hardly the case. He was born in a nicely appointed thirteen-room house—built low to minimize storm damage—on the property of his maternal grandfather, a fairly well-to-do former Confederate Army captain named Caleb Chitwood. Cobb’s parents lived elsewhere in the county but “I was taken there to be born,” he said, possibly because the unoccupied house, set apart from nearby towns, provided privacy and peace. Local people, for a reason now lost to history, called the area “the Narrows.” It looks today like any ill-defined, nondescript portion of semi-woods along the side of a highway. I tramped around in the brush there for about an hour one fine spring morning and could find no evidence of the Chitwood house, though there is a modest sign off what is now the Ty Cobb Parkway telling the traveler that he is in the vicinity of the ballplayer’s birthplace.
Cobb’s mother was the very pretty Amanda Chitwood, his father a tall, thin, North Carolinian named William Herschel Cobb, who had first met her when he was a farmhand, working his way through school, on the Chitwood plantation. In some books and articles, Amanda is said to have been twelve years old when she married the twenty-two-year-old W.H., but those tend to be the same sources that try to put a sordid, Southern Gothic spin on the tale. Their marriage license clearly shows that she was fifteen when they wed in February of 1886, a very young but still respectable age for a bride back then, even in the North. What is possibly true is the rumor that Amanda had for a while been one of her husband’s students (he also taught school on his way to getting a bachelor’s degree). That certainly would have raised a few eyebrows, but then so, in nineteenth-century rural Georgia, would the very act of providing a daughter with a formal education, something only “progressive” parents like the Chitwoods did.
Tyrus Raymond Cobb was the baby’s full name. Where his parents got “Raymond” from is anyone’s guess. “Tyrus,” though it doesn’t sound so strange now (thanks largely to Tyrus Raymond Cobb), may well have been a name of their own invention. (It was only after he started hitting above .300 that people stopped calling him “Cyrus.”) W.H. apparently fashioned it from “Tyre,” the ancient Phoenician city that in 332 BC gallantly held out for seven months before finally falling to Alexander the Great. The Narrows may have put the history maven in mind of that episode for it was there, twenty-two years earlier, that a small but passionate militia had dealt General Sherman an annoying but ultimately meaningless setback on his march to the sea. Though there are significant gaps in our knowledge of “Professor” Cobb, as the locals called him, he clearly placed pluck among the virtues. He would name his other son after John Paul Jones and his daughter after Florence Nightingale.
The window when Tyrus Raymond could honestly say “I have not yet begun to fight” was small indeed. By the time the family had moved to Royston, Georgia (pop. 550), in about 1895—after stops in Lavonia, Harmony Grove, and Carnesville, as W. H. Cobb climbed the ladder of pedagogical success, progressing from general instructor to high school principal in a handful of semesters—the skinny lad who always seemed to be tossing up stones and whacking them with sticks had become known as a bare-knuckled battler. “You saw it the minute you set eyes on him,” said a childhood friend of young Ty’s hair-trigger temperament. For decades afterward, Cobb’s former neighbors, today his neighbors once again at Royston’s Rose Hill Cemetery, loved to tell visiting journalists how they had fought with him at various locations around town, and with varying degrees of seriousness. In 1950, Cobb’s friend Joe Cunningham recalled that “we had no sooner met than we were having playful scraps in the office of the local newspaper, The Sentinel—and a destructive time we had, too, doing far more damage to the defenseless printers’ tables than we did to ourselves. The door would be locked from the inside, leaving those on the outside in fear and trembling lest we kill each other.”
A local legend had it that Cobb once beat up a fat classmate whose mistake had caused their team to lose a spelling bee to the fifth-grade girls. In a testy little town such as fin de siècle Royston, where, according to the History of Franklin County Georgia, “peace officers were selected for brawn as it was quite common to have them challenged by community ‘bullies’ for wrestling, etc.,” the townsfolk thought that story reflected well on young Tyrus. To them, it meant that he combined a classically Southern penchant for swift justice with the admirable if somewhat anal Yankee habit of spelling words exactly the same way every time. It may even have been true. Cobb in later years denied the most outrageous yarns about his youth, like the one advanced by the noted dressing room interloper Howell Foreman in the March 1912 issue of Baseball Digest, saying that Ty as a child “used to vent his spleen on ebony ‘pickaninnies’ when he was too thoughtful of the Caucasian race to pummel the countenance of a white boy.” (“Just made up,” the elderly Cobb would say about such yarns. “Just. Made. Up.”) But even Cobb admitted in one interview to having “a vying nature.” And in a seemingly heartfelt memoir, serialized in newspapers in 1914, he allowed that he had “a terrible temper in my younger days, and it got me into a lot of trouble.”
There is no denying that Cobb was a born battler, just as some people seem to come into the world as jokesters, wimps, loners, or bores. This quality was striking to those who knew and liked him. As his friend Grantland Rice wrote in his memoir The Tumult and the Shouting, “When I first met Cobb I found him to be an extremely peculiar soul, brooding and bubbling with violence, combative all the way, a streak, incidentally, he never lost.”
• • •
It wasn’t easy to get a reputation as a fighter in a time when people used to fight so damn much. (By “fight” I mean swing and poke their fists at each other, like you see in the movies. By “people” I mean men.) Violence was the lingua franca of the day. The president of the United States from 1901 until 1909, Theodore Roosevelt, “invited new acquaintances to wrestle and box with him, or to fight with wooden swords” wrote the journalist Nicholas Lemann. “His rhetorical flourishes often included invocations of violence, including jocular threats to have his opponents killed.”
Reliable statistics about spontaneous violence are impossible to come by; prior to Nat Fleischer’s Ring Record Book, first published in 1942, no one bothered to keep official records of even formal matches. Still, the anecdotal evidence—references in newspapers and popular literature—suggest that fisticuffs were once an everyday way to settle disputes or assert one’s alpha male status. (In Ring Lardner’s classic epistolary novel of 1916, You Know Me Al, the narrator, a pitcher named Jack Keefe, continually threatens to bust various people in the jaw.) Fights were apt to erupt at any time or anywhere human beings interacted. Boys were supposed to start fighting young, the way Cobb did. J. Adams Puffer, a kind of Edwardian Age Dr. Benjamin Spock, maintained that to stay morally and mentally fit, male children should fight once a day on average, and more often during their first week at a new school. The “sensitive, retiring” lad “needs encouragement to stand his ground and fight,” Puffer wrote in his 1912 opus The Boy and His Gang, and though it may sound shocking today, in a world where a kid can fail a pre-K interview if he gently shoves a Styrofoam shape in the general direction of a fellow applicant, the self-appointed expert was backed up on this point by the founding president of the American Psychological Association, G. Stanley Hall, who believed that when it came to young boys “better even an occasional nose dented by a fist . . . than stagnation, general cynicism and censoriousness, bodily and psychic cowardice.”
Besides spontaneous tiffs, the South had semi-ritualized ones, with two aggrieved parties agreeing to retire presently to an open patch of level ground, often referred to as “over yonder,” before going at it like rutting gazelles. Getting into a fight—or a duel—down in Dixie was as simple as flipping a switch, or, more precisely, pulling a nose, for under the elaborate gentleman’s code then prevailing, that was the way a ticked-off fellow formally challenged a foe. “The nose was the part of the face that preceded a man as he moved in the world,” Kenneth S. Greenberg explains in his book Honor and Slavery. “It was the most prominent physical projection of a man’s character, and it was always exposed to the gaze of others. . . . One of the greatest insults for a man of honor, then, was to have his nose pulled or tweaked.”
Ty Cobb’s maternal great-grandfather Thomas Anderson Mize possessed quite the prominent proboscis yet he was by reputation rather less a fighter than a prototypical promoter of fights, the Don King of his day. When tempers and nostrils flared around his hometown of Flintsville, Georgia, in the mid-nineteenth century, Mize provided the space where matters could be settled—a nicely cleared quarter acre out behind his dry goods store. Men, women, and children would gather there to watch the fisticuffs, creating a kind of human ring, and when it was over find themselves feeling good about life, the spectacle being, according to a sketch of Flintsville mores that ran in the Atlanta Constitution in 1921, reliably cathartic. “When anyone got angry, a circle would be made, and the contestants would roll up their sleeves and fight with bare fists,” the article said. “After the fight they would shake hands and be friends. There were no grudges in those days between friends and neighbors.” Mize believed the communal afterglow put gawkers in the mood to shop, and as fighters toed the line in the red Georgia soil and squared off in anticipation of the referee’s nod, he assumed his stance behind the strongbox. If matters didn’t get settled so cleanly every time—if, say, the ill will caused by an ambiguous finish only festered and spread—he could, it was said, get an ugly crowd to calm down by old-fashioned physical intimidation. From the single photograph of him that survives, it is hard to gauge his physical stature and yet as the great-grandpa of arguably the greatest hitter of all time, and a somewhat more distant ancestor of Johnny “Big Cat” Mize, another Hall of Famer who batted .312 over 15 seasons for the Cardinals, Giants, and Yankees, Tom Mize was probably strapping for a storekeep.
Ty Cobb Page 3