Cobb (5 page)

“Good-bye, Mr. Cobb,” snapped the medical men.

Soon after this Ty caught a plane to Georgia and I went along. “I want to see some of the old places again before I die,” he declared.

It now was Christmas Eve of 1960 and I'd been with him for a lot of months and completed only four chapters. The project had begun to look hopeless. In Royston, his birthplace, a town of twenty-five hundred, Cobb wanted to head for the local cemetery. I drove him there and helped him climb a windswept hill through the growing dusk. Light snow fell. Faintly, Yule chimes could be heard.

Amongst the many headstones, Ty looked for the plot he'd reserved for himself while in California; he couldn't find it. His temper began to boil: “Dammit, I ordered the biggest mausoleum in the graveyard! I know it's around here somewhere.” On the next hill, we found it: a large marble walk-in-size structure with
COBB
engraved over the entrance.

“You want to pray with me?” he said, gruffly. We knelt and tears came to his eyes.

Within the tomb, he pointed to crypts occupied by the bodies of his father, Professor William Herschel Cobb, his mother, Amanda Chitwood Cobb, and his sister, Florence, whom he'd had disinterred and placed there. “My father,” he said reverently, “was the greatest man I ever knew. He was a scholar, state senator, editor, and philosopher—a saintly man. I worshiped him. So did all the people around here. He was the only man who ever made me do his bidding.”

Rising painfully, Ty braced himself against the marble crypt that soon would hold his body. There was an eerie silence in the tomb. He said deliberately, “My father had his head blown off with a shotgun when I was eighteen years old—
by a member of my own family.
I didn't get over that. I've never gotten over it.”

We went back down the hill to the car. I asked no questions that day. Later, from family sources and old Georgian friends of the diamond idol, I learned details of the killing. News of it reached Ty in Augusta, where he was playing minor-league ball, on August 9, 1905. A few days later he was told that he'd been purchased by the Detroit Tigers and was to report immediately. “In my grief,” Cobb later said, “going up didn't matter much … it felt like the end of me.”

CAME MARCH
of 1961 and I remained stuck to the Georgia Peach like court plaster. He'd decided we were born pals, meant for each other,
that we'd complete a baseball book that would beat everything ever published. He had astonished doctors by rallying from the spreading cancer, and between bouts of transmitting his life and times to a tape recorder, he was raising more whoopee than he had at Lake Tahoe and Reno.

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.”

Had I left Ty alone that night, I believe he would have pulled the trigger. His three living children—two sons were dead—had withdrawn from him. In the wide world that had sung his fame, he had not one intimate friend remaining.

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 . . .”