by Al Stump
Spring-training time for the big leagues had arrived, and we were ensconced in a deluxe suite at the Ramada Inn at Scottsdale, Arizona, close by the practice parks of the Red Sox, Indians, Giants, and Cubs. Here, each year, Cobb held court. He didn’t go to see anybody. Ford Frick, Joe Cronin, Ted Williams, and other diamond notables came to him. While explaining to sportswriters why modern stars couldn’t compare to the Wagners, Lajoies, Speakers, Jacksons, Johnsons, Mathewsons, and Planks of his day, Ty did other things.
For one, he commissioned a well-known Arizona artist to paint him in oils. He was emaciated, having dropped from 208 pounds to 176. The preliminary sketches showed up his sagging cheeks and thin neck. “I wouldn’t let you kalsomine my toilet,” ripped out Ty as he fired the artist.
But he was anything but eccentric when analyzing the Dow-Jones averages and playing the stock market. Twice a week he phoned experts around the country, determined good buys, and bought in blocks of five hundred to fifteen hundred shares. He made money consistently, even when bedridden, with a mind that read behind the fluctuations of a dozen different issues. “The State of Georgia,” Ty remarked, “will realize about one million dollars from inheritance taxes when I’m dead. But there isn’t a man alive who knows what I’m worth.” According to the Sporting News, there was evidence upon Cobb’s death that his worth approximated $12 million. Whatever the true figure, he did not confide the precise amount to me—or, most probably, to anyone except the attorneys who drafted his last will and testament. And Cobb fought off making his will until the last moment.
His fortune began accumulating in 1909, when he bought cotton futures and United (later General) Motors stock and did well in copper-mining investments. As of 1961 he was also “Mr. Coca-Cola,” holding more than twenty thousand shares of that stock, valued at eighty-five dollars per share. Wherever he traveled, he carried with him, stuffed into an old brown leather bag, more than $1 million in stock certificates and negotiable government bonds. The bag was never locked up. Cobb assumed nobody would dare rob him. He tossed the bag into any handy corner of a room, inviting theft. Finally, in Scottsdale, it turned up missing.
Playing Sherlock, he narrowed the suspects to a room maid and a man he’d hired to cook meals. When questioned, the maid broke into tears and the cook quit—fired, said Cobb. Hours later, I discovered the bag under a pile of dirty laundry.
Major-league owners and league officials hated to see Cobb coming, for he thought their product was putrid and said so, incessantly. “Today they hit for ridiculous averages, can’t bunt, can’t steal, can’t hit-and-run, can’t place-hit to the opposite field, and you can’t call them ballplayers.” He told sportswriters, “I blame Ford Frick, Joe Cronin, Bill Harridge, Horace Stoneham, Dan Topping, and others for trading in crazy style and wrecking baseball’s traditional league lines. These days, any tax-dodging mugwump with a bankroll can buy a franchise, field some semipros, and get away with it. Where’s our integrity? Where’s baseball?”
No one could quiet Cobb. Who else had a record lifetime batting average of .367, made 4,191 hits, scored 2,244 runs, won 12 batting titles, stole 892 bases, repeatedly beat whole teams by his own efforts alone? Who was first into the Hall of Fame? Not Babe Ruth—but Cobb, by a landslide vote. And whose records still mostly stood, more than thirty years later? Say it again—thirty years.
By early April, he could barely make it up the ramp of the Scottsdale stadium, even with my help. He had to stop, gulping for breath, because of his failing ticker. But he kept coming to games, loving the indelible sounds of a ballpark. His courage was tremendous. “Always be ready to catch me if I start to fall,” he said. “I’d hate to go down in front of the fans.”
People of all ages were overcome with emotion upon meeting him; no sports celebrity I’ve known produced such an effect upon the public. At a 1959 stop in Las Vegas, Clark Gable himself had stood in a line to shake the gnarly Cobb hand.
We went to buy a cane. At a surgical supply house, Cobb inspected a dozen twenty-five-dollar malacca sticks, then bought the cheapest white-ash cane they had—four dollars. “I’m a plain man,” he informed the clerk, the ten-thousand-dollar diamond ring on his finger glittering.
But pride kept the old tiger from ever using the cane, any more than he’d wear the six-hundred-dollar hearing aid built into the bow of his glasses other than away from the crowd.
One day a Mexican taxi driver aggravated Cobb with his driving. Throwing the fare on the ground, Cobb waited until the cabbie had bent to retrieve it, then tried to punt him like a football.
“What’s your sideline,” he inquired, “selling opium?”
It was all I could do to keep the driver from swinging at him. Later, a lawyer called on Cobb, threatening a damage suit. “Get in line, there’s five hundred ahead of you,” said Tyrus, waving him away.
Every day was a new adventure. He was fighting back against the pain that engulfed him—cobalt treatments no longer helped—and anywhere we went I could count on trouble. He threw a salt shaker at a Phoenix waiter, narrowly missing. One of his most treasured friendships—with Ted Williams, peerless batsman of the 1930s to 1950s—came to an end.
From the early 1940s, Williams had sat at Ty Cobb’s feet. They met often, and exchanged long letters on the science of batting. At Scottsdale one day, Williams dropped by Ty’s rooms. He hugged Ty, fondly rumpled his hair, and accepted a drink. Presently the two fell into an argument over which players should make up the all-time, all-star team. Williams declared, “I want DiMaggio and Hornsby over anybody you can mention.”
Cobb’s face grew dark. “Don’t give me that! Hornsby couldn’t go back for a pop fly and he lacked smartness. DiMaggio couldn’t hit with Tris Speaker or Joe Jackson.”
“The hell you say!” came back Williams jauntily. “Hornsby out-hit you a couple of years.”
Almost leaping from his chair, Cobb shook a fist. He’d been given the insult supreme—for Cobb always resented, and finally hated, Rogers Hornsby. Not until Cobb was in his sixteenth season did the ten-years-younger Hornsby top him in the batting averages. “Get———away from me!” choked Cobb. “Don’t come back!”
Williams left with a quizzical expression, not sure how much Cobb meant it. The old man meant it all the way. He never invited Williams back, or talked to him, or spoke his name again. “I cross him off,” he told me.
We left Arizona shortly thereafter for my home in Santa Barbara, California. Now failing fast, Ty had accepted an invitation to be my guest. Two doctors inspected him at the beach house by the Pacific and gave their opinions: he had a few months of life left, no more. The cancer had invaded the tissue and bones of his skull. His pain was unrelenting—requiring steady sedation—yet with teeth bared, sweat streaking his face, he fought off medical science. “They’ll never get me on their f——hypnotics,” he swore. “I’ll never die an addict … an idiot . . .”
He shouted, “Where’s anybody who cares about me? Where are they? The world’s lousy … no good.”
One night later, on May 1, the Georgian sat propped up in bed, overlooking a starlit ocean. He had a habit, each night, of rolling up his trousers and placing them under his pillow—an early-century ballplayer’s trick, dating from the time when Ty slept in strange places and might be robbed. I knew that his ever-present Luger was tucked into that pants roll.
I’d never seen him so sunk in despair. At last the fire was going out. “Do we die a little at a time, or all at once?” he wondered aloud. “I think Max had the right idea.”
The reference was to his one-time friend, multimillionaire Max Fleischmann, who’d cheated lingering death by cancer some years earlier by putting a bullet through his brain. Ty spoke of Babe Ruth and Rogers Hornsby, other carcinoma victims. “If Babe had been told what he had in time, he could’ve got it over with.”
Cobb was well read in poetry. One night he quoted a passage he’d always liked by Don Marquis: “There I stood at the gate of God, drunk but unafraid.”
But we talked, and prayed, until dawn, and slight sleep came. In the morning, aided by friends, we put him into a car and drove him home, to the big, gloomy house up north in Atherton. Ty spoke only twice during the six-hour drive.
“Have you got enough to finish the book?” he asked.
“More than enough.”
“Give ’em the word then. I had to fight all my life to survive. They all were against me … tried every dirty trick to cut me down. But I beat the bastards and left them in the ditch. Make sure the book says that . . .”
I was leaving him now, permanently, and had to ask one question I’d never put to him before.
“Why did you fight so hard in baseball, Ty?”
He’d never looked fiercer than then, when he answered. “I did it for my father, who was an exalted man. They killed him when he was still young. They blew his head off the same week I became a major-leaguer. He never got to see me play. Not one game, not an inning. But I knew he was watching me … and I never let him down. Never.”
You can make what you want of that. Keep in mind that Casey Stengel said, later: “I never saw anyone like Cobb. No one even close to him as the greatest ballplayer. Ruth was sensational. Cobb went beyond that. When he wiggled those wild eyes at a pitcher, you knew you were looking at the one bird no one could beat. It was like he was superhuman.”
To me it seems that the violent death of a dominating father whom a sensitive, highly talented boy loved and feared deeply, engendered, through some strangely supreme desire to vindicate that “saintly” father, the most violent, successful, thoroughly maladjusted personality ever to pass across American sports. The shock ticked the eighteenyear-old’s mind, making him capable of incredible feats.
Off the field and on, he remained at war with the world. To reinforce the pattern, he was viciously hazed by Detroit Tiger veterans when he was a rookie. He was bullied, ostracized, and beaten up—in one instance, a 210-pound catcher named Charlie Schmidt broke the 165-pound Ty Cobb’s nose and closed both of his eyes. It was persecution, immediately heaped upon one of the deepest desolations a young man can experience.
There can be no doubt about it: Ty Cobb was a badly disturbed personality. It is not hard to understand why he spent his entire adult life in deep conflict. Nor why a member of his family, in the winter of 1960, told me, “I’ve spent a lot of time terrified of him … and I think he was psychotic from the time that he left Georgia to play in the big league.”
I believe that he was far more than the fiercest of all competitors. He was a vindicator, a man who believed that “father was watching” and who could not put that father’s terrible death out of his mind. The memory of it menaced his sanity.
The fact that he recognized and feared mental illness is revealed in a tape recording he made, in which he describes his own view of himself: “I was like a steel spring with a growing and dangerous flaw in it. If it is wound too tight or has the slightest weak point, the spring will fly apart and then it is done for . . .”
The last time I saw him, he was sitting in his armchair in the Atherton mansion. The place was still without lights or heat. I shook his hand in farewell—a degree of closeness had developed between us, if short of friendship—and he held it a moment longer.
“What about it? Do you think they’ll remember me?” He tried to say it as if it weren’t important.
“They’ll always remember you,” I replied.
On July 8, I received in the mail a photograph of Ty’s mausoleum on the hillside in the Royston cemetery with the words scribbled on the back: “Any time now.” Nine days later, at age seventy-four, he died in an Atlanta hospital. Before going, he opened the brown bag, piled $1 million in negotiable securities beside his bed, and placed the Luger atop them.
From all of major-league baseball, three men, and three men only, attended his funeral.
SO ENDED the battle. “He was the greatest and most amazing ballplayer I ever saw,” attested Hall of Famer George Sisler, himself a candidate for best-ever honors. “There will never be another like him, he was a genius,” said baseball sage Connie Mack in his old age. To Babe Ruth he was “the hardest to beat SOB of them all.” So ended the struggle of the most feared, castigated, and acclaimed figure ever to plant his spikes in a batter’s box. It was final innings on a personal tragedy. Ty Cobb had himself entombed in a chamber directly across from that of his father, Professor William Herschel Cobb, in dusty little Royston-town where it had all begun.
CHAPTER TWO
“FIRE IN MY BELLY”
Hagenback’s Hippodrome and Wild Beast Show was camped near the town, with a calliope’s caterwauling and the smell of tanbark setting the kids of the place to kicking up their heels. Royston, Georgia, needed a spell of fun.
An upland cotton, corn, and hog-raising dot on the map in the state’s northeast outback, Royston (population eight hundred) and surrounding Franklin County had survived a ruinous Civil War. Thirty-five years after the shooting stopped, the region remained at hazard. As of 1899, with hard times persisting in the Reconstruction South, pecans and peaches had been introduced as supplementary cash crops, a boost to the economy. “We try to let no neighbor go hungry,” stated the weekly, upbeat Royston Record.
Strung across the main street by Hagenback’s circus was an acrobat’s high wire. Twice a day a daring, bespangled performer walked the twenty-foot-high tightrope, with no net below to save him from splattering over the brick-clay roadway if he fell. It was an eye-popping act to the town’s youngsters. To one of them it was a challenge.
“I can do that,” said Tyrus Cobb, thirteen-year-old son of the local schoolmaster.
“You’d get killed,” jeered his mates.
“No, I wouldn’t,” insisted Tyrus.
“Then do it!”
Long afterward in Royston it was retold by old-timers how Professor William Herschel Cobb’s boy mounted to a dry-goods store’s second story and climbed out onto the wire. Wearing a homespun shirt and farm boots, he imitated the acrobat by using a long pole for balance. The walk went well for a dozen or so feet—then Tyrus swayed. To cries of alarm he quickly recovered and moved along with catty little steps. Nearly across he stopped and lifted one hand off the pole to wave at onlookers. They cheered his cockiness. He finished the passage and became known around the settlement as a “good ’un.”
The Record mentioned his stunt—the first time the name of Tyrus Cobb appeared in print. Enjoying the attention, at fourteen he jumped into a pond to help save a companion from drowning, although he was not much good at swimming. In 1901, at fifteen, he was back in the news, this time embarrassed by shooting himself. While butchering hogs on his father’s farm, he left his loaded .22 Winchester leaning against a fence. A tree branch sprung and a shot knocked him kicking. Tyrus was hit near the heart in the lower left shoulder. He was moved by slow train eighty miles to Atlanta, where doctors were unable to locate the bullet. The probes they used had him yelling down the hospital, so he was put to sleep. When he awakened the bullet was still in him. The technology of the period was insufficient to find it, and he was sent home stitched and bandaged. Tyrus carried the metal in his body for the rest of his life, complaining of a burning sensation on cold days.
The young Cobb was slight, small for his age, notably pigeon-toed, and hyperactive. He was a devilish prankster, addicted to schoolyard fights and fast on his feet. He liked taking risks; jumping off barn roofs was a specialty. Asa Conroy, the local dry-goodsman, once said, “He was well raised. Polite to the ladies. His father was a big man, very strong and strict.” Conroy recalled that, like almost everybody in Royston, the boy disliked Yankees and detested the North for having ravaged the South while defeating it. Although Franklin County had escaped the havoc wrought by She
rman’s army as it looted and pillaged its way from Atlanta to the sea, in much of Georgia the destruction of barely three decades earlier had left wounds that would be generations healing. Reading books selected by his scholarly father, Tyrus gloried in accounts of various Confederate battle victories. As far as he was concerned, the South had not been beaten, only worn down by superior numbers and supplies. Among his prized keepsakes was an old Confederate garrison cap.
HE WAS born December 18, 1886, in a three-room pine-and-clay cabin. Baseball’s future giant—in the vernacular of Ring Lardner, “a bozo so great that he makes the toughest of games look like a tea party”—was not a Royston native, but from an even more backwater Georgia valley called the Narrows, adjacent to Franklin County in Banks County. The Narrows was the most broodingly silent of places—a shout from one thick-forested spot across the Tugaloo River might be heard by nobody. Some ten dozen scattered farm families lived in an outpost where no railway reached, where no town hall or sheriff’s office stood.
In the 1870s a handful of busted-out Civil War veterans and natives of a land shadowed by the Great Smoky Mountains loosely joined to chop out a living from the staples of corn, cotton, vetch, other hays, and peanuts. The Narrows, omitted from most maps, was a butt of jokes, as in: “Count to seventy-five and you’ve got about all of the humans in that country … Nobody can count all the coons, possum, skunks, and whiskey stills.”
Tyrus Raymond Cobb’s own account of his earliest days, told years later to this writer, in part went: “I was born the hard way. It was a close call. Some people around the Narrows didn’t think I’d make it.” It was a tight squeeze. Amanda Chitwood Cobb, his mother, had been a child bride of only twelve years of age in 1883 when she married his father. A postwedding photo of the pair showed a giant beside a midget. Three years later, when she bore Tyrus, Amanda was a thin, slightly breasted fifteen-year-old. The first of her three children, he was a good-sized seven-pounder. “She had a tough time getting me delivered,” Cobb related. “There was no hacksaw [doctor] around there. They only had a midwife. Mother bled a lot … suffered.”