Stump’s Cobb reels, stumbles, and grouses. He says his doctor told him that his tests came back and “they found urine in my whiskey.” Cobb rails against the world, waves around his loaded Luger, and boasts of killing a man on the streets of Detroit in 1912, an incident that had previously gone unreported (and which Stump elects not to investigate). Stump’s Cobb can barely rise to a standing position, or walk twenty feet “without clutching my shoulder,” yet is fighting wars on any number of fronts—with the state of California over back taxes, with the Pacific Gas and Electric Company for allegedly overbilling, with doctors who want to charge too much for treating him, and with family members who seek his financial help. “Money was his idol,” writes Stump. Cobb, he says, lived for part of the year with neither electricity nor water in his Atherton home, the services having been canceled months earlier when he refused to pay the utility company a few disputed dollars. The inconvenience hardly registers, though; a semi-ghoul at this stage, he doesn’t need refrigeration because he doesn’t eat. Cobb in his dotage always wore a $7,500 diamond ring and a top-of-the-line $600 hearing aid and bought $100 chips at the casinos, Stump tells us, but whenever someone wrote to request an autograph and included the return postage, the pitiless Peach would burn the fan letter (“Saves on firewood”) and pocket the four-cent stamp.
Stump’s True piece became a national sensation, another baseball bombshell in the year of Roger Maris’s record 61 home runs. Bob Considine, the author of Thirty Seconds over Tokyo and a bad book about Babe Ruth, called it “perhaps the best sports piece I have ever read,” and the Associated Press named it Best Sports Story of the Year. People talked about it in taverns, around the dinner table, and wherever newspapers were sold. Blame it on the sheer brashness of Stump’s assertions (he called Cobb “the most violent, successful, thoroughly maladjusted personality ever to pass across American sports”) and the bracing sting of his prose. Blame it also on the sportswriters who in trying to defend Cobb and pillory Stump disseminated the contents of the story far beyond True’s normal sphere of influence.
Clearly, it was Cobb’s misfortune to have been known and liked by people who as columnists and beat writers had access to acres of newspaper space, but who were better at describing a baseball game than repairing a person’s reputation. His defenders erred in two basic ways. Some of them said that whether Stump’s depiction was accurate or not, it was wrong to disrespect the dead, especially the recently deceased, whose kith and kin should be spared the pain of seeing their loved one flayed in print. All this argument did was convince people that the article had been accurate—because if it hadn’t been, after all, Cobb’s old friends would be complaining about that and not the fact that hurtful stories were being circulated. To scold Stump for saying too much too soon only made him sound like a crusading journalist.
The other defense tactic, employed by the writers who’d had a more intimate knowledge of Cobb, was to contend that the monster stumbling through Stump’s article bore no resemblance to their departed friend. San Francisco newspaperman Jack MacDonald wrote that he and his wife had visited Cobb in his Tahoe home during the period when Stump was supposedly doing his court-plaster impersonation, yet he found no evidence of the writer, nor heard any reference to him by their genial and generous host, who served the MacDonalds breakfast in bed. When MacDonald took a rare first edition of a Confederate military history down from a shelf in the cabin, Cobb noticed his interest, and insisted that he keep the book. When the three went to a restaurant, Cobb—though never a particularly big spender, MacDonald admitted—picked up the check and left the waitress $10, the equivalent of a 30 percent tip.
The Sporting News also had plenty to say about the Ty Cobb its publisher, J. G. Taylor Spink, had known for decades (and back in the 1920s had criticized for his managerial skills). The newspaper never once mentioned True by name, yet over the course of several weeks in late 1961 and early ’62—immediately following the publication of “Ty Cobb’s Wild 10-Month Fight to Live,” in other words—it presented, by one scholar’s count, forty-seven articles reminding readers that the real Cobb was, in addition to being a revolutionary ballplayer, the kind of man who quietly provided financial help to a number of former players (Cochrane, Lu Blue, and his old mentor George Leidy, among others) and who had campaigned hard to have Sam Crawford—who still had negative feelings about Cobb—admitted into the Hall of Fame.
The problem with this line of counterattack was that its proponents didn’t know where to stop. As part of its fusillade of pro-Cobb pieces, the Sporting News ran an interview with the old comedian Joe E. Brown, an overly sentimental acquaintance of the deceased star’s who was enjoying a comeback after appearing in Some Like It Hot. Brown said that he’d had a heart-to-heart with Cobb not long before he died and that Ty said that if he had it all to do over again he would have worked harder to make new friends and keep the ones he had. The old pitcher Urban “Red” Faber testified that he’d once hit Cobb in the groin with an errant spitball, and Cobb had acted with perfect equanimity, the litmus test for character, it seemed, in Faber’s possibly too narrow universe. Clarence “Pants” Rowland swore that in all his days as an umpire he had never heard Cobb say anything worse than “I don’t believe you” when disputing a call. (“Pants on Fire” might have been a better nickname.) These character witnesses were laying it on almost as thickly as Stump had, conjuring up a Cobb who was not only unbelievably saccharine but also unbelievably dull. One could hardly blame the public for preferring Stump’s raving maniac to Cobb’s pals’ plaster saint.
How much better it would have been just to let the record speak for itself, to point out that though his several illnesses limited his appearances toward the end, Cobb in the late 1950s was a man out and about, available for inspection. Some of the things Stump saw anyone could have noticed, and they weren’t pretty. Cobb drank too much and alcohol brought out the Southern cavalier in him, the man who believes quite passionately that everyone should act and be treated according to his proper station. It made him terribly sensitive to a world in which he was not recognized, or known only as That Guy Who Sharpened His Spikes. It also of course made him just plain drunk. It was true that Cobb was arrested in 1947 for DWI in Placerville, California, and that he slugged an old ballplayer (who subsequently sued him for damages and lost), as Stump has said. He got into pitched battles with the state of California over taxes he claimed he didn’t owe, and with his utility company over a small alleged overbilling. (His power was shut off, as Stump claimed, but he appears to have been out of town when it happened.) But was cheapness at the root of his one-man rebellion? I don’t think so. Like a lot of senior citizens, he took umbrage as if it were free pens at the bank, and stood strongly on principle. He went too far sometimes because there was no one around to temper his anger, to tell him, as his daughter Beverly had, when he asked her who gave her to the right to think, to just shut up. He was lonely in those final years. “In this house I’m just a lonesome old man,” he told a Sporting News writer who visited him in Atherton in 1957. “What’s the use of seven bedrooms when six are empty?”
But there were signs of health as well, signs of hope. He wasn’t just getting stewed and stewing. When the Sporting News writer arrived, he had just returned from a four-mile hike. He was trying to keep fit. He was dating! He had a crush on an attractive middle-aged woman named Mabel Griegs back in Georgia (though he wrote her many letters, the relationship didn’t progress). When he saw Carol Loomis, a pretty twenty-something Fortune magazine editor, on the game show Tic-Tac-Dough he managed to get in touch with her and asked her out to lunch at “21” in New York. Loomis, the longest-tenured Time, Inc., employee, still worked at the magazine while I was researching this book, and when I asked her about Cobb, with whom she’d also gone on a second date to an old-timers game at Yankee Stadium, she directed me toward a memoir she’d written in which she described him as “smart and gentlemanly.” He’d been deeply impressed, she said, with her knowled
ge of baseball.
Except when cancer made him so, Cobb was never really a recluse. In the early 1950s he was a celebrity instructor at a baseball camp in the Ozarks, and he appeared at dozens of sports dinners, including one in January of 1960—the very time he was supposedly holed up with Stump in his cabin—at which he was cited as one of the “men in the age of sports” by B’nai B’rith. The reporters who covered these events often noted that he seemed in relatively good spirits as he struggled through his brief after-dinner speech.
Starting in 1950, Cobb made many trips back to Royston to oversee Cobb Memorial, a modern twenty-five-bed hospital that he built and kept going with his contributions. Stewart Brown Jr., the son of the pitcher who had accompanied Ty to his tryout with the Augusta Tourists in 1904, was the first head doctor. In 1953, Cobb announced that the W. H. Cobb Educational Fund, begun with his $100,000 endowment, would provide scholarships for Georgia residents of any race or creed who demonstrated determination and need. (As of July 2013, $15 million in scholarships had been awarded.) He still loved California, he said, but Georgia exerted a pull. In early 1957, Cobb decided he was giving up the too large house in Atherton and moving back to Royston. “I’m in the evening of my life,” he said, “I want to build a house, hunt birds and just visit.” By the end of the year, though, realizing there was no one left for him in Royston to visit anymore, he found a site he liked better, about thirty miles to the northwest, atop Chenocetah Mountain, just outside the little town of Cornelia. “It was an incredible piece of property, the highest point for miles around,” Rod Gailey, a relative of his, told me. “You could see clear to the ocean. There was an old hotel on the property. Ty planned to raze it and build a house for himself.” But he never did. His health waned and he abandoned his plan. All he ever built on the mountaintop was a kind of concrete bunker into which he put his numerous hunting trophies. Gailey remembers most vividly a giant grizzly bear standing on its hind legs—just like the one Cobb’s Grandpa Johnnie had told him about so very long ago.
Time was running short, he sensed. In his last months, Cobb shuttled between Lake Tahoe and the little apartment he’d originally rented in Cornelia as a temporary base of operations. If we believe Stump, his Nevada life and his Georgia life were strikingly different. His Nevada life, as portrayed in True magazine, was Gothic, vampiric, even, except that he subsisted on a mix of Scotch and milk instead of blood. “I was like a steel spring with a growing and dangerous flaw in it,” he supposedly told Stump. “If it is wound too tight or has the slightest weak point, the spring will fly apart and then it is done for.” But in Cornelia, Cobb was a retiree puttering around town, going to Kiwanis and Chamber of Commerce luncheons, watching Tic-Tac-Dough and, on Saturday night, The Lawrence Welk Show. “He was like a grandfather to me,” said Rod Gailey. “He watched me draw pictures, asked me about my Little League games. Never witnessed a fit of temper or heard him speak a racial slur. When he went into the hospital in Atlanta I was devastated.”
Cobb didn’t go to Emory University Hospital, though, until he visited the Hall of Fame one last time, in 1960, and then went to the Rome Olympics with Stewart Brown Jr. The following March he traveled to Scottsdale, Arizona, where a number of teams took spring training. He had no official role, but sat in the sun and players, managers, scouts, and executives came by to visit him. By then the cobalt treatments Cobb had been undergoing had run their course, and the cancer was still advancing. He was taking a combination of codeine, Darvon, and Demerol for the pain. Still, in an April 21 letter to Rex Teeslink, a first-year medical student, he insisted “doctors report good on my important organs.” He was coming to Georgia on May 1, he said, “for quite a stay.”
Indeed, he’s still there. Cobb entered Emory University Hospital in mid-May. Teeslink had a job there to help pay his tuition, and the two immediately became close. “Somehow we clicked,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1992. “I don’t know what it was. I spent 24 hours a day with him, seven days a week, from 18 May 1961 until 17 July 1961, when he died.” To a great degree this was a testament to Teeslink’s patience. Cobb wasn’t as nice with some of the nurses as he was with little Rod Gailey or the folks around town. “He was a real redhead with a hair-trigger temper,” Teeslink told me when I interviewed him in 2012. It’s not that Cobb was mean, exactly, he said; he just couldn’t tolerate incompetence, or as Teeslink called it, “the lack of that drive for excellence that was so much a part of the Cobb philosophy. He was an unusual man with a keen mind and yet he could never put up with people who didn’t, like him, strive to excel.” The Tiger players whom he managed would have understood.
The difference between the real Cobb and the Stump Cobb was often a matter of degree. Cobb could be a difficult patient, but he wasn’t a psychiatric patient. He didn’t have a gun in his hospital room or a fortune in cash and securities on his nightstand, as Stump would say in his True article a few months hence. “Those things are just lies,” Teeslink told me. “I was there, Stump wasn’t. He wanted to portray Ty in a certain way, and so that’s what he did. It wasn’t about the truth; it was about Stump.”
Just before Cobb entered Emory Hospital he asked Teeslink to accompany him to Rose Hill Cemetery. It was essentially the trip he had supposedly made with Stump, except Cobb was in a playful mood. He told the future doctor that they should work out a signal for when he came to visit him after his interment. “You knock six times,” Cobb said, with a chuckle, smack in the middle of his wild ten-month fight to live. “I’ll know it’s you.”
— EPILOGUE —
EVEN THOUGH I HAVE LEARNED much about Ty Cobb since my first visit to his grave, and no longer think of him as a monster, I would still like to have the proper authorities slip his coffin out of the niche it’s been resting in for more than fifty years and pry it open, allowing the sun to shine in.
This is not as weird an idea as it may seem. In the nineteenth century people sometimes dug up their departed loved ones in the hopes of being shocked into what we now call “acceptance,” a state that would allow the left-behind ones to, as we also say, “detach with love” and move on. Ralph Waldo Emerson arranged to have his first wife, Ellen, brought back to the surface for one last look in 1832, about a year after she died, so he could finally convince himself that she really wouldn’t be coming through their front door again.
With Cobb I see the exhumation process as useful because it would show that he had actually lived, that there had been a flesh-and-blood Ty Cobb—not a man worthy of sympathy necessarily, but a historical figure about whom not just any old thing can be said. For quite a few people, as I’ve noted in earlier chapters, Ty Cobb is a character who has long since fallen into the public domain, a Wikipedia entry that can be edited at anyone’s discretion. Some no doubt believe the Cobb stories they spin but feel that even if they aren’t strictly true, he was such an evil man it doesn’t matter. The world does not owe him accuracy, it seems. People also sense they have carte blanche about his legacy in a way they don’t have with, say, Abraham Lincoln.
What would happen if you said that Lincoln once attacked a White House groundskeeper simply because he was black and that when the man’s wife rushed to help her husband, Lincoln throttled her, too? Historians would demand to know your sources. But if you tell the exact same story about Cobb, people embrace it gleefully and do not ask for further details. The sheer oddness of Cobb’s alleged behavior—if he attacked people simply for being black he would not have had time to eat, sleep, or play baseball, and he no doubt would have met his match somewhere along the line, quite a few times—never sparked further investigation. But then myths about Cobb have always been too useful to poke and probe. The reporters of his day liked the groundskeeper story because they wanted a wild character to write about. A bad boy who was not also a sloppy drunk was as rare to them as rubies and they had no desire to fact-check him out of existence. Latter-day baseball fans loved the tale, and others similar to it, because it was fascinating to imagine a racist
psycho at large in the major leagues. This Cobb was someone they could shake their head at, denounce, and feel superior to. Spinning stories in a way that made him look immoral was a convenient way to say, “I am not a racist because I reject this man who is.” Cultures change as values change, wars are waged and the harvest waxes and wanes, but a villain who inspires self-congratulation makes for one hell of a tenacious myth.
At the time of his death, Cobb was not a very controversial figure. The newspaper tributes that came in late July of 1961 were largely predictable and bland. Nobody said anything about race except those newspapers that noted he had spoken up in support of integration after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. A few papers mentioned Claude Lucker, the handicapped heckler he had beat up in 1912, but most avoided unpleasantness and instead fell back on his numbers, which conveyed at least something of his greatness to a populace that had largely forgotten or never knew who he was. Eulogizing him on its editorial page, the New York Times said he “epitomized the flaming spirit of youth. In Ty the will to win was ever uppermost. He set more records in baseball than any man who ever lived. . . . He drove himself from day to day to live by the only code he knew. That was to play each afternoon a little harder and a little better than he had the day before.” And so on. This was the Times’s good gray way of saying to its readers, “Yes he was that famously overly aggressive fellow, but there’s no point in going into that now; he’s dead and that was long ago.” In this way, the Times spoke for the majority of journalists who preferred to say something polite and move on. Only here and there in the flood of farewell columns and features does the real Cobb shine through, allowing mid-century fans to glimpse what all the commotion was about. “Ty Cobb could cause more excitement with a base on balls than Babe Ruth could with a home run,” wrote Roger Birtwell of the Boston Globe. Another scribe from that paper, Jerry Nason, said Cobb was the first and only man he ever saw who could a) score from second on an outfield putout, b) go from first to third on a sacrifice bunt, and c) score from first on a single. A Toledo man named Carl J. Murphy wrote to the Blade to say that “As a boy I saw him bunt a ball down the first base line at a speed that was about as fast as he could run, then straddle the ball all the way so that no one could get at the ball, then slide in safely.” Tracked down in Indianapolis, seventy-three-year-old Donie Bush, a longtime teammate of Cobb’s, added a bit of much needed grit. “I can’t envision anyone in baseball ever being as great as Cobb,” he said, “but we didn’t get along too well. The source of my trouble with Cobb was simple—he expected me to do the things he did, and I just couldn’t be so perfect. Who could? I hit in front of him for 13 years and I scored lots of runs because I didn’t want him to run me down on the base lines.”
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