Cobb (67 page)

BETWEEN THAT
, and threatening to write a book picking up where the
Life
article stopped, Cobb occupied himself with taking bows at old-timer games held coast to coast—a sure box-office feature—attending the Olympic Games at Rome, building a third retirement home at Chenoocetah Mountain, Georgia, near his boyhood home at Royston, and founding the Cobb Educational Fund for young scholars who needed help to complete their college-level education. The CEF kept dozens of boys and girls in the classroom to graduation. Qualifications were that they be needy, unusually bright, and natives of the state of Georgia. Once accepted by the CEF, students had a full ride. But to be chosen was difficult. The founder was asked what sort of young person he wanted to endow. “We want stars—stars in medicine, in law, teaching, in engineering, in life,” Cobb told the
Saturday Evening Post
. “We want the Lincolnesque characters from the mountains and the fields.” He earmarked $1 million for his foundation. He also donated $100,000 and helped establish the Cobb Memorial Hospital in Royston, Georgia.

“The only time I saw Ty lose control of himself,” said George Maines, a longtime friend, “was when some of the kids he had put through school came around to thank him. They broke into tears and Cobb cried along with them.” Maines felt that the students Cobb supported filled a void in his life after the death of his two sons.

He was seventy-three in 1960, and heavily addicted to twelve-year-old malt whiskey, when he flew east to be honored at a banquet by the New York Baseball Writers Association as “sportsman of the ages.” Through his career he had been General Douglas MacArthur's favorite ballplayer. MacArthur, indeed, gushed about Cobb. That January he invited Cobb to visit him at his retirement home in the Waldorf Towers of New York City. The visit turned into a dull occasion
for Cobb. He left the apartment not long after he arrived, claiming that he felt ill.

“Stay a little longer, Ty,” urged MacArthur.

“No, I'm not feeling well,” said Cobb shortly.

“We probably won't see each other again, Ty,” said the aged MacArthur, emotionally.

I had driven Cobb to the famed old soldier's residence, and I watched as MacArthur put his arms around Cobb in a parting embrace. Cobb did not like to be touched. He shrugged free and said, “So long, Doug.” Going down in the hotel elevator, Cobb remarked of his number-one fan, “Sentimental old bastard, isn't he?”

Claiming poor health to MacArthur was not an evasion. A year before their meeting, while hunting quail on the flats outside Reno, Nevada, Cobb was hit by sharp pains in his lower back and legs. He collapsed and wound up in the Scripps Clinic near San Diego, California. After his first thorough checkup in several years, the verdict was that he was suffering from an enlarged prostate gland, failing kidneys, dangerously high blood pressure, and diabetes. He never saw a hospital that he fully trusted. He transferred to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, where he knew the staff and where the finding differed. His prostate was not just enlarged, but partially encircled by a large, mushy growth. The substance was cancerous and spreading to nearby areas.

Aside from a routine directive that he stop drinking hard liquor and smoking, the first thing needed was a prostatectomy to remove the cancer. Emory surgeons were fairly sure that he was strong enough at seventy-three to withstand such an operation. How well he could handle the high-powered radiation treatments to follow, however, was impossible to predict.

In a lengthy operation on December 10, 1959, Cobb's diseased prostate gland had been removed. Although he withstood the surgery well, Dr. Hugh Wood of Emory Hospital was concerned with his uneven heartbeat and a degenerative kidney problem. “Mr. Ty is worn out—he has been dying for two or three years,” Wood told Cobb's cousin, Harrison Gailey. “If had come in for regular checkups, we would have found the cancer. Now it's in the runaway stage.”

Doctor Wood broke the news that was tantamount to a death sentence to Cobb. “He had no comment,” reported the surgeon. “He just insisted that cobalt treatment be started right away.”

Emory doctors tried to curtail his activities after a series of cobalt radiation treatments was completed, and failed. Although the cancer-attacking treatment was a drain upon his remaining strength, Cobb caught a plane late in December for Los Angeles to attend meetings concerning the autobiography that he had long intended to write. Flatly ordered not to take another drink, he remained friendly with bartenders from New York's Algonquin Hotel bar to Shanty Malone's groghouse in San Francisco. He traveled coast to coast three times on sheer willpower.

After I joined him at Atherton in March of 1960 to continue putting his autobiography on paper—
My Life in Baseball: The True Record
—we sifted during research through several dozen boxes of baseball records dated to the early century, including such yellowed journals as
Police Gazette, Sporting Life, Tip-Top Weekly, Reach Guide, New York Clipper
, and
Cap'n Billy's Whiz-Bang
, unboxed more than fifty of his handwritten diaries dating from 1905 through the 1920s, and located tattered scrapbooks of game clippings. We found letters to him from Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Warren Harding. And a bale or so of correspondence with such fans as Mark Twain, Thomas A. Edison, Will Rogers, Connie Mack, Damon Runyon, Douglas Fairbanks, William Randolph Hearst, Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, Bobby Jones, Toots Shor, Grantland Rice, Knute Rockne, and Al Jolson. There were oddments of many kind, including poet Ogden Nash's alphabetizing of great players, among them:

C is for Cobb
Who Grew Spikes and Not Corn
And Made All the Basemen
Wish They Weren't Born.

One of the best-preserved framed artifacts, an obvious Cobb favorite, was an excerpt from a Damon Runyon memoir for the
New York American
concerning a night with the boys at Toots Shor's celebrities' saloon:

The guys but none of the dolls were there on this night and who ups and saunters through the door but Tyrus R. Cobb. He hasn't played for a long time, but in the company of maybe a dozen Hall of Famers, what does Joe DiMaggio softly say but, ‘Here comes God.' And everybody there nods his head.

The Georgia Peach had about $12 million to dispose of—the
Sporting News
placed his wealth at $11.8 million at the least, while sources within his family estimated anywhere from $6 to $13 million, depending upon stock market fluctuations. He would not name a figure to me—“the hell with it, leave what I've got out of my book”—and a mystery existed to the end. He tore up several versions of his last will
and testament before turning over a version that satisfied him to the executors, the Trust Company of Georgia. That came on May 22, 1961, only fifty-six days before his death. According to his financial counselor, Elmer “Ticker-Tape” Griffin, three-quarters of his holdings went to his two married daughters, Shirley Beckwith, operator of a Palo Alto bookstore, and Beverly McLaren, a well-to-do Atherton resident, his remaining son, James “Jimmie” Cobb of Santa Maria, California, a successful businessman, and more than one dozen grandchildren. One-quarter of his riches was left to his Cobb Educational Fund for poor but gifted college students of Georgia.

THE PREVIOUS
September, while at the Tahoe Lodge working on the book with Cobb, I came across a 1946 press interview with the retired Charlie Gehringer, one of the great second basemen, who had endured Cobb's management at Detroit from 1924 to 1926. Gehringer described him as “a real hateful guy” and verified the story always denied by Cobb that he filed his spikes to razor sharpness. Said Gehringer, “He was a spiking fool—he'd cut you to pieces if you gave him any trouble on the bases.” Gehringer was specific, adding that in his eighteen big-league seasons, he never knew anyone so hated by so many players as “Butcher” Cobb.

“What do you want me to do with this Gehringer incident?” I asked Cobb. It was a legitimate question.

“Flush it down the crapper!” he responded, enraged at the reminder that he had been confirmed by an expert to have been a dirty ballplayer. As with a good deal of similar anti-Cobb material, Gehringer's opinion was deleted by order from
My Life in Baseball
. In the volume he came through as the wronged person, a Caesar knifed in the back, a martyr.

During his final months of life, as cancer invaded deeper, he fought death with dogged determination. But he also spoke of suicide. He ranted at society for persecuting him and showed fear that he might not be properly remembered. His last-gasp hell-raising in the spring of 1961, when we made the rounds of gambling casinos, bars, hospitals, and spring-training camps, could not be wholly attributed to illness and pain; weak as he was, Cobb was repeating himself.

Before he departed my Santa Barbara home in May of 1961, he witnessed a few innings of his last game of baseball. On April 27, I drove
him to Los Angeles for the Los Angeles (now California) Angels–Minnesota Twins season's opener. He made it with difficulty to his box seat. Players of both teams wanted to meet him; the game was delayed while such current stars as Harmon Killebrew, Albie Pearson, Ted Kluszewski, and Rocky Bridges shook his hand. Cobb was to throw out the first ball. Players crowded in close, mindful of his weak old arm, to catch it. He threw the ball over everybody's head, almost to home plate. “He crossed us all up to the very end,” said Fred Haney, general manager of the Angels.

TOWARD THE
very end he grew sullen and silent. He had little to say to the few visitors allowed to see him and returned to the pathetic time killer he had used at home in Atherton—tossing wadded-up paper balls into a wastebasket. Eventually he lacked the strength even to do that. Yet when he checked into Emory Hospital for the last time on June 5, Cobb had a surprise for the medical staff. He undressed under his own power, placed a brown paper bagful of stocks, bonds, and other securities worth some $1 million on a bedside table, and atop that placed his Luger pistol. He gave no explanation for this act. My belief is that he was telling people that a man had lived who was both the greatest in the game and the brainiest outside of it—a combination no one but Cobb had achieved. He was demonstrating with irrefutable proof that he had surpassed everyone. The black gun made his nurses nervous, and Dr. Wood persuaded him to store the documents in a hospital safe.

Nobody was with him at 1:20
P.M.
on July 17, 1961, when he died, five months short of the age of seventy-five. Emory announced that death was “peaceful.” Insiders said that he looked ghastly.

His foremost rival, Babe Ruth, had died in 1948 and an estimated quarter of a million people filed by his coffin at Yankee Stadium. The beloved Babe packed St. Patrick's Cathedral and every major-league club was represented at the two-day services. Ty Cobb drew just three men from big-league ball to his funeral. They were Mickey Cochrane, old-time catcher Ray Schalk, and Nap Rucker from his minor-league days. Other than these and several hundred Little Leaguers of the Royston area north of Atlanta who lined the path to his twelve-foot-high marble mausoleum, the funeral of the most shrewd, inventive, lurid, detested, mysterious, and superb of all baseball players went unattended by any official representative of the game at which he excelled.

(Numbers in parentheses indicate first or second games of doubleheaders.)