Cobb (65 page)

“Because the others aren't major-leaguers,” Cobb said he told him. “Some are stiffs.”

“Stiffs!” exclaimed Weil. “They are veterans.”

“Veterans of the Spanish-American War,” said Cobb coldly. The deal fell through when he refused to budge above the $325,000 or buy any “stiff.”

Detroit, one of the American League's steadiest money-makers before and after Cobb's years there, was another possibility. Frank Navin, now co-owner of the Tigers in partnership with auto-chassis maker Walter O. Briggs, would lose much of his fortune in the 1929 Wall Street crash, and entertained bids for the club. However, co-owner Briggs remained angered by the Cobb-Speaker-Leonard fix scandal of a few years earlier. He suspected that Cobb had been guilty of conniving in the fix of a ball game while in Detroit uniform. A prominent citizen and churchman, Briggs privately spoke of Cobb as “Houdini” for working his way out of expulsion from the game. Taking that attitude, Briggs refused an offer of $2 million for the Tigers from a syndicate headed by Cobb and Atlanta businessmen, and he stepped in to block Navin from making a deal. Navin declined in health, dying of a heart attack in 1935.

Cobb continued his futile search for a baseball home. Repeated refusals by teams of any takeover by “the Georgia crowd” led by Cobb indicated to the public that he was
persona non grata
in both leagues in the role of owner, co-owner, or front-office executive. The assumption was entirely correct. Press critics proclaimed this the price of making enemies from New York at the top to Boston at the bottom of the leagues. How many bottles and seats had been thrown at a raving Cobb, or in his defense, during park riots? He would almost certainly be as difficult to live with as a policymaking owner as he had been as an outlaw with the bat and his filed spikes.

Another Cobb-led bid to buy a franchise, an offer for the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League, was rejected in 1930. As it worked out, not only that turndown, but equally those before it, proved a disguised blessing. In the ruinous national depression of the 1930s, with its unemployment, breadlines, and bank failures, organized baseball at every level took a beating. Total major-league attendance in the 1920s had been 92,652,885; in the 1930s depression decade it slumped to 81,013,329. Even the Yankees were badly down, from a 10.5 million draw in the 1920s to 9.1 million in the hard times. Clubs cut ticket prices, but with jobless men out begging for food, how
many could afford even a ticket costing seventy-five cents? It would have been the worst of timing for Cobb to have invested a few million in sport.

Along with many speculators playing a bull market during the Roaring Twenties, Cobb had more than doubled his wealth in the period from 1920 to 1930. When the market slumped, aside from American Can, which fell from 182 to 86 in the crash, Cobb's major holdings stood up well. “He was smart and damned lucky,” said Elmer Griffin, a Wall Street broker. “He continued buying Coca-Cola, General Motors, and Anaconda Copper, and the Depression didn't hurt him heavily in the long run.” In a crash that ruined more Americans than all previous money collapses combined, Cobb emerged in good shape.

Yet not even his kind of available cash and bank credit could buy him a seat on the inner councils of baseball. “There were crooked lawyers and Tammany Hall ginks and bootleg whiskey smugglers who held important jobs in the game, but Cobb couldn't get in,” he said later about himself in those years. “Even using my own money and not a bank's, I couldn't buy in.”

VISITING CALIFORNIA
in the spring of 1930 to scout talent for Connie Mack and to play golf, Cobb discovered the quiet little rich man's town of Atherton, twenty-three miles south of San Francisco. He had expected never to live anywhere but Georgia. Yet it had been so blazing hot there in the past summer that, in those pre-air-conditioning times, the Cobbs had kept electric fans running for two straight months, and had still sweltered. At Atherton, with cool weather year-round, he found an elegant Spanish Mission–period home priced at $110,000 in an idyllic setting—three oak-shaded acres, with a swimming pool and guest quarters. There were fifteen rooms in the main house, and space for stables to house Cobb's polo ponies. Lately, he had resumed playing polo after a long lapse. He was a first-rate horseman and scored well, but was regarded as undisciplined and too rough. Every few chukkers he would cause a collision and a rider or two would be spilled. Cobb never seemed to get hurt, only his opponents. The
San Francisco Chronicle
noted, “Tommy Hitchcock, the famous 10-goal poloist, calls Ty Cobb a wild man and menace … He also regrets to say that baseball's toughest guy has been known to whip the hide off his ponies.”

COBB'S FIVE
children were growing up in a hurry, and continued to see little of their widely invested father. Cobb admitted that he was gone from home most of the time. Ty Cobb, Jr., at eighteen, stood almost as tall as his father's six foot one. The redheaded eldest son had been raised by his mother and private-school teachers. “I blame her for the way the kid behaved,” Cobb flared in conversation with his close friend, Elmer Griffin. The girl-chasing Ty junior had been in one scrape after another while enrolled at Richmond Academy in Augusta, then at Princeton University. He drew traffic tickets for speeding, dated fast girls, and missed classes. Showing no baseball ability, Ty junior wound up as a member of the Princeton varsity tennis team. The senior Cobb, thinking tennis to be a pitty-pat sport for the white-flannels set, winced. “Here's a boy who has grown up privileged to visit big-league clubhouses and training camps,” he told Griffin. “But he would rather watch Bill Tilden than see his father win games.” (Tilden, U.S. tennis king in the 1920s, was a known homosexual.) Paternal bitterness ran deep.

In the late spring of 1929, receiving word that Ty junior had flunked out of Princeton, Cobb had caught at train to the New Jersey campus and called at his son's lodging house. He carried a black satchel. He removed from the satchel a blacksnake whip “and then I went to work on that boy pretty hard,” he told this writer. “I put him on the floor and kept it up … tears and some blood were shed … but Tyrus never again … never … failed in his grades.”

Cobb never thought of the act as repulsive. When he mentioned the horsewhipping to the few people of his inner circle he did so with an air of satisfaction. He said, “You can look at it two ways. Teaching Ty a lesson hurt both of us. On the other hand, it did some good … he grew up in a hell of a hurry. In the end he made something of himself.”

That was true—for a while. Since Princeton no longer wanted him as an undergraduate, Ty junior entered Yale University. He improved academically and became captain of Yale's tennis team, a star singles player. However, in 1930 he was arrested for drunkenness on two occasions and failed to graduate with a degree. Cobb provided lawyers to handle the police charges, then informed the twenty-year-old that there would be no further communication between them. Cobb senior was finished with Cobb junior. This was not just a threat. An unbending father meant it, to the extent that they remained alienated until
near Junior's death at the age of forty-two, in 1952, of a malignant brain tumor. It was all very sad, Griffin reported. “Ty paid for the young man's sickness and death,” said Griffin. “But that was all.”

On April 10, 1931, his plan to move his family across the continent to the wine-and-roses country of Atherton was blocked when Charlie Cobb filed a divorce suit in Augusta. It appeared that a troubled marriage had ended. She deposed that her husband had treated her cruelly, had done so repeatedly, and she could take no more.

Under Georgia law, Charlie would become a very wealthy woman of thirty-nine if a divorce was granted. Cobb, who was playing golf on the California circuit when her charges were announced, expressed shock at his wife's action and predicted that there would be no divorce once he returned to Georgia and they reconciled their problem. Asked if their differences over how Ty junior had been raised was a factor, Cobb had no comment.

He must have been persuasive, for before the month was out, Charlie withdrew her suit. Comment was withheld by both sides. The move to California was on again, and after delays, by May of 1932, the Cobbs were in residence at their fine new establishment. He named it “Cobb's Hall.”

While Charlie and the young children were attempting to adjust to new neighbors and the California way of life, Cobb was off and running again to distant parts. He added to his big-game hunting territory the Alaskan island of Kodiak, where he shot a bear, and the Snake River country of Idaho, for salmon fishing. Cobb was back on the golf circuit that summer.

If ever a sport had been created for which he was wholly unsuited, it was golf. He had fooled around with the game earlier. Now, in the 1930s, he entered into it seriously. Hitting a small ball into a small hole is so frustrating that it drives normally calm men into blowing their fuses. As might be expected, the fiery Georgian, in pursuit of par or better, was in a class by himself for temper explosions.

What with his perfected bat swing and ability to concentrate, he should have been a natural at golf and won senior tournaments. However, consistently and inexplicably he lost to ordinary 80-shooters. He played in the mid-80s and low 90s. Although he consulted the best teachers—Bobby Jones, the number-one amateur in the world, was one—and used the most expensive handmade clubs, he was beaten at
Pebble Beach, California, in 1930, 8 and 7, by the women's champion, Babe Didrikson. With a roar, Cobb threw his driver to an adjoining fairway, almost beaning people playing there.

Within a few years' time he had become unwanted at some of the nation's most prestigious country clubs. It was not more Cobb apocrypha but fact that he was forced to resign from three clubs for offensive behavior. As of the late 1930s, he had been a member of eight clubs, from Georgia's Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters, to San Francisco's Olympic Club.

He
needed
to win at a surrogate game, but could not. His most humiliating moment came in 1939 at the Olympic Club, when in the club championship event he was paired with a twelve-year-old boy, Bob Rosburg, a local prodigy. “I wiped him out, beat him badly,” said Rosburg in 1992, when, as a noted professional, he was asked to comment. “Cobb didn't say a word at the horselaughs he drew. He cleaned out his locker and never returned to Olympic.”

Ballyhooed matches with Babe Ruth were another matter. In June 1941, Fred Corcoran, the Professional Golfers' Association manager, challenged Cobb to meet Babe over fifty-four holes in a charity series that would draw galleries of thousands. Cobb at first declined. He saw it as a sucker trap. Ruth was a six to eight handicap and hit balls three hundred yards when serious and sober. Corcoran kept the pressure on. Ty received a telegram from his former ballpark rival: “
IF YOU WANT TO COME HERE AND GET YOUR BRAINS KNOCKED OUT, COME AHEAD. SIGNED, RUTH.
” Rather than appear to be ducking the issue, he agreed.

Newspaper buildup centered on the forty-six-year-old Bambino's power versus the fifty-four-year-old Peach's “craftiness.” Cobb found himself a popular underdog. “I don't have much of a chance,” he moaned to the press in a persuasive way. “I just had a lucky eighty-six back home at Lakeside.”

Ruth was all confidence—until he lost the first match at Boston's Commonwealth Country Club, 3 and 2. That night Cobb revealed, “Not once did I jockey him, as he expected. Just mentioned that the Fat Man was getting fatter and looked off-balance. Like an egg standing on toothpicks.”

Ruth won the second match in a one-hole playoff after both shot 43-42-85 at Fresh Meadows in New York. The rubber match was held at Detroit's Grosse Ile, a mass of traps. Cobb the schemer now did
three things: he hired Grosse Ile's assistant pro as his caddie, he brought in the veteran international champion Walter Hagen as his coach and, en route to the course by boat, he saw to it that the Bambino had plenty of Scotch to drink.

At tee time, Ruth, with a jeweled bobby pin holding back his hair, was feeling just fine. At the turn, underdog Cobb was five strokes ahead. He distracted his opponent with such questions as, “Do you think Japan wants war with us?” After earlier refusing a wager, Cobb suggested a bet “for any amount—fifty thousand, you name it.” The size of the bet—Babe was a big gambler, but not that big—and the smoke from Cobb's cigar on the tees bothered Ruth. He lost the deciding match, 3 and 2. Cobb walked off to gallery cheers.

Until his death, the trophy he won shared close to equal space on Cobb's mantle with his Baseball Hall of Fame plaque. He might not have mastered golf, but there was consolation in owning the “Ruth Cup.”

COBB'S SCHEDULE
appeared overfilled, but it was artificially contrived. Beyond golf, polo, shooting game, and reading extensively on world history, he had not enough action to occupy him, and in times of idleness he was bored with life. He was far from ready for the pipe and slippers, although he had a collection of some two hundred briar pipes and smoked them. Time grew so heavy on his hands that he wadded up newspaper and tossed it from a distance into a wastebasket—by the hour.

Players he had competed with and against did not visit him at Atherton in any number. Fred Haney, who had played for the Tigers, told of leaving a Detroit game with Cobb one evening in the mid-1940s and encountering players waiting for taxis. The boys were play-wrestling and laughing. “I wish I could have done that,” said Cobb wistfully. “Had some pals on the team and kept them. But I didn't.”

His most influential fans, the baseball reporters, in general opposed what amounted to a blackballing by a majority of owners. The Baseball Writers Association of America called attention to this in 1935–36 when they devised a formula to nominate, vote upon, and elect to a Hall of Fame the greatest players that the game had known since its modern-era inception in 1901. Candidates selected by the BWAA to the Hall at Cooperstown, New York, had to be named on 75
percent of the ballots. The maximum number of votes available was 226. Ty Cobb received 222, or close to 100 percent. Babe Ruth and Honus Wagner were tied for second place, each with 215 votes. Pitchers Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson filled out the First Five, with 205 votes for Matty, 189 for Johnson. The balloting probably was as accurate and honest as any such rating could be.