Cobb (2 page)

General Douglas MacArthur, 1961

“Fans and the sporting press are always trying to compare Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth. This is absurd since they are incomparable, like trying to draw a comparison between an elephant and a wolf. Beloved Babe was a man of simple makeup, savage Cobb was a mass of paradoxes with a life that reads like a Gothic horror tale.”

Paul Gallico, 1975

“Crowds jeered Cobb and stoned him, but they came in great numbers to see him. He was undoubtedly the greatest competitor any sport has ever known. For his brilliant hour, a Napoleon, he dominated his world.”

The Sporting News,
1951

“A Columbia University professor, lecturing on Ty Cobb, said that if he'd entered banking he'd have been a leading American banker; if he'd gone into politics he'd have become president … He'd have been number one at whatever field he chose.”

Harry Golden, 1959

“He threw me more curves in money negotiations than a whole tribe of Arabs. He'd hold out until hell froze over until he got what he demanded.”

Frank Navin, President, Detroit Tigers, 1926

“The great trouble with baseball today is that most players are in the game for the money that's in it—not for the love of it, the excitement and thrill of it.”

Ty Cobb, 1960

“After World War I, there were more than 20 newspapers published in New York—and not one of them knew Ty Cobb's terrible personal secret.”

Marshall Hunt, New York
Daily News
, 1973

“Cobb's first wife, a charming Augusta girl, started divorce proceedings against Cobb three times and went through with it on the fourth attempt, saying, ‘I simply can't live with the man any longer.'”

Fred Lieb, 1977

“Once, on a golf course, I was about to putt on the fifth green when I heard a voice yelling, ‘Get out of my way, I'm coming through!' Then came the demand again. So I made way and Ty Cobb played right through me without apology. I guess nobody but the great Cobb would dare to do that to a president.”

Dwight Eisenhower, 1964

“Every time I hear of this guy again—I wonder how he was possible.”

Joe DiMaggio, 1990

 

No small part of the charm of our National Game consists of the validity of its statistical record as an index of comparative performance across the years. Research by baseball statisticians in recent years has produced extensive and often valuable revision in the lifetime records compiled by Ty Cobb and other early diamond stars. Depending upon which revision one consults, the totals can vary considerably. The narrative that follows, however, is a biography centered on Cobb's own memories, and Cobb's assumptions about his career were based on records as they were posted and credited to him for more than a half-dozen decades of baseball history. It has seemed appropriate, therefore, to use those figures throughout as they were published and generally accepted by baseball fans prior to the appearance of recent revisions. The following is the remarkable lifetime record of Tyrus Raymond Cobb, as drawn from the
Baseball Register
for 1942:

“To get along with me—
don't increase my tension.”

—Ty Cobb

Ever since sundown in the Sierra range, Nevada intermountain radio had been crackling warnings: “Route 50 now highly dangerous. Motorists stay off. Repeat:
AVOID ROUTE 50
.”

By 1:00
A.M.
the twenty-one-mile, steep-pitched passage from Lake Tahoe's sixty-eight-hundred-foot altitude into Carson City, a snaky grade most of the way, was snow-struck, ice-sheeted, thick with rock slides, and declared unfit for all transport vehicles by the State Highway Patrol.

It was right down Ty Cobb's alley. Anything that smacked of the apparently impossible brought an unholy gleam to his eye. The gleam had been there in 1959 when a series of lawyers advised Cobb that he stood no chance in court against the Sovereign State of California in a dispute over income taxes, whereupon he bellowed defiance and sued the state for sixty thousand dollars plus damages. It had been there more recently when doctors warned that liquor would kill him. From a pint of whiskey per day he upped his consumption to a quart and more.

Sticking out his grizzled chin, he had told me, “I think we'll take a little run into town tonight.”

A blizzard rattled the windows of Cobb's luxurious hunting lodge on the eastern crest of Lake Tahoe, but to forbid him anything—even at the age of seventy-three—was to tell an ancient tiger not to snarl. Cobb was both the greatest of all ballplayers and a multimillionaire whose monthly income from stock dividends, rents, and interest ran to twelve thousand dollars. And he was a man contemptuous of any law other than his own.

“We'll drive in,” he announced, “and shoot some craps, see a show, and say hello to Joe DiMaggio—he's in Reno at the Riverside Hotel.”

I looked at him and felt a chill. Cobb, sitting there haggard and unshaven in his pajamas and a fuzzy old green bathrobe at one o'clock in the morning, wasn't fooling.

“Let's not,” I said. “You shouldn't be anywhere but in bed.”

“Don't argue with me!” he barked. “There are fee-simple sons of bitches all over the country who've tried it and wished they hadn't.” He glared at me, flaring the whites of his eyes the way he'd done for twenty-four years at quaking pitchers, basemen, umpires, fans, and sportswriters.

“If you and I are going to get along,” he went on ominously, “
don't increase my tension.
”

It was the winter of 1960. We were alone in his isolated, ten-room lakeside lodge—bearskin floor rugs, mounted game trophies on walls—with a lot of work to do. We'd arrived six days earlier, loaded with a large smoked ham, a twenty-pound turkey, a case of scotch, and another of champagne, for the purpose of collaborating on Ty's autobiography, a book that he'd refused to write for more than thirty years but had suddenly decided to publish before he died. In almost a week's time we hadn't accomplished thirty minutes' worth of work.

The reason: Cobb didn't need a high-risk auto trip into Reno, but immediate hospitalization, and through the emergency-room entrance. He was desperately ill, and had been so even before we left California.

We had traveled 250 miles to Tahoe in Cobb's black Imperial limousine, carrying with us a virtual drugstore of medicines. These included digoxin (for his leaky heart), Darvon (for his aching back), Tace (for a recently operated-upon malignancy of the pelvic area), Fleet's Compound (for his impacted bowels), Librium (for his “tension”—that is, his violent rages), codeine (for his pain), and an insulin
needle-and-syringe kit (for his diabetes), among a dozen other panaceas that he'd substituted for ongoing medical care. Cobb hated doctors. “When they meet an undertaker on the street,” he said, “the boys wink at each other.”

His sense of balance was precarious. He tottered about the lodge, moving from place to place by grasping the furniture. On a public street, he couldn't navigate twenty feet without clutching my shoulder, leaning most of his 208 pounds upon me and shuffling along with a spraddle-legged gait. His bowels wouldn't work, a near-total stoppage that brought groans of agony from Cobb when he sought relief. He was feverish. There was no one at the Tahoe hideaway but the two of us to treat his critical condition.

Everything that hurts had caught up with his six-foot, one-inch body at once, and he plied himself with pink, green, orange, yellow, and purple pills—often guessing at the amounts, since labels had peeled off some of the bottles. But he wouldn't hear of hospitalizing himself.

“The hacksaw artists have taken fifty thousand dollars from me,” he said, “and they'll get no more.” He spoke of a “quack” who'd treated him a few years earlier. “The joker got funny and said he found urine in my whiskey. I fired him.”

His diabetes required a precise food-insulin balance. Cobb's needle wouldn't work. He misplaced the directions for his daily insulin dosage and his hands shook uncontrollably when he went to plunge the needle into his abdominal wall. He spilled more of the stuff than he injected.

He'd been warned by experts, from Johns Hopkins to California's Scripps Clinic, that liquor was deadly for him. Tyrus snorted and began each day with several gin and orange juices, then switched to “buzzers” of Old Rarity scotch, which held him until the night hours when sleep was impossible, and he tossed down cognac, champagne, or “Cobb cocktails”—Southern Comfort stirred into hot water and honey.

A careful diet was essential. Cobb wouldn't eat. The lodge was without a cook or other help—in the previous six months, he had fired two cooks, a male nurse, and a handyman in fits of anger—and any food I prepared for him he nibbled at, then pushed away. As of the night of the blizzard, the failing, splenetic old monarch of baseball
hadn't touched solid food in three days, existing almost solely on quarts of booze and mixers.

My reluctance to prepare the car for the Reno trip burned him up. He beat his fists on the arms of his easy chair. “I'll go alone!” he threatened.

I was certain he'd try. The storm had worsened, but once Cobb set his mind on an idea, nothing could alter it. Beyond that, I'd already found that to oppose or annoy him was to risk a fierce explosion. An event of a week earlier had proved that point. It was then that I discovered he carried a loaded Luger wherever he went, looking for opportunities to use it.

En route to Lake Tahoe, we'd stopped overnight at a motel near Hangtown, California. During the night a party of drunks made a loud commotion in the parking lot. In my room adjacent to Cobb's I heard him cursing and then his voice, booming out the window.

“Get out of here, you——heads!”

The drunks replied in kind. Groping his way to the door, Cobb fired three shots into the dark that resounded like cannon claps. Screams and yells followed. Reaching my door, I saw the drunks climbing one another's backs in their rush to flee. The frightened motel manager, and others, arrived. Before anyone could think of calling the police, the manager was cut down by the most caustic tongue ever heard in a baseball clubhouse.

“What kind of pesthouse is this!” roared Cobb. “Who gave you a license, you mugwump? Get the hell out of here and see that I'm not disturbed! I'm a sick man and I want it quiet!”

“B-b-beg your pardon, Mr. Cobb,” the manager said feebly. He apparently felt so honored to have as a customer the national game's most exalted figure that no cops were called. When we drove away the next morning, a crowd gathered and stood gawking with expressions of disbelief.

Down the highway, with me driving, Cobb checked the Luger and reloaded its nine-shell clip. “Two of those shots were in the air,” he remarked. “The third kicked up gravel. I've got permits for this gun from governors of three states. I'm honorary deputy sheriff of California and a Texas Ranger. So we won't be getting any complaints.”

He saw nothing strange in his behavior. Ty Cobb's rest had been disturbed; therefore, he had every right to shoot up the neighborhood.

At about that moment I began to develop a nervous twitch, which grew worse in about the time it takes to say Grover Cleveland Alexander of the Philadelphia Phillies. I'd heard reports of Cobb's weird and violent ways without giving them much credence. Until early 1960 my own experience with the legendary Georgia Peach had been slight, amounting mainly to meetings in Scottsdale, Arizona, and New York to discuss book-writing arrangements and to sign the contract.

Locker-room stories of Ty's eccentricities, wild temper, wars with his own teammates, egotism, and miserliness sounded like the usual scandalmongering you get in sports. I'd heard that Cobb had flattened a heckler in San Francisco's Domino Club with one punch; that he had been sued by Elbie Felts, an ex–Coast League player, after assaulting him; that he boobytrapped his main home, a Spanish-mission villa at Atherton, California, with high-voltage wires; that he'd walloped his ex-wives; that he'd been jailed in Placerville, California, at the age of sixty-eight for speeding, abusing a traffic cop, and then inviting the judge to return to law school at his, Cobb's, expense.