THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 26, 1994 TAG: 9410260038
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E3 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: BOOK BREAK
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 79 lines
IN 1960, AL Stump, a sports reporter with a strong national reputation, agreed to ghost-write an ``autobiography'' of Ty Cobb.
The result of their collaboration was ``My Life In Baseball - The True Record.''
More than 30 years later, Stump is repenting the sins of that first book, which was anything but a ``true record'' of Cobb's career. The aging ballplayer, who was dying of cancer, held full control of the content. The result was a self-serving whitewash.
One could argue whether Tyrus Raymond Cobb, the ``Georgia Peach,'' born in 1886, was the greatest baseball player in history, but there has never been a doubt that he was the most vicious and hated man the game has ever known.
Stump, now in his 80s, has redeemed himself with ``Cobb: A Biography'' (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $24.95), which is the basis for an upcoming film starring Tommy Lee Jones. If the first book was a whitewash, this one is a frightening, dark-toned telling of the whole Cobb legend, right down to the ballplayer's arrogant and unrepentant confession that he used a pistol to beat a man to death in Detroit in 1912. The victim and two friends had mistakenly believed that Cobb would be an easy mark for a three-on-one mugging. They didn't know him. Two of them ran when Cobb fought back. He trapped the third mugger in a blind alley.
``I used that gun sight to rip and slash and tear him for about 10 minutes until he had no face left,'' Cobb told the writer. ``Left him there, not breathing, in his own rotten blood.'' Decades later, Stump was able to uncover enough evidence to show that Cobb likely was telling the truth.
Even casual fans of baseball are aware of Cobb's reputation: the way he ripped his sharpened spikes into the flesh of any player in his path; his pathological hatred of blacks; his willingness to use his fists on fans, umpires, teammates, cab drivers, waiters, wives, children and any beast or human being who caused him the slightest aggravation.
Stump does not settle for a simple rehash of these oft-told tales. He expands on them through interviews and yellowed newspaper clippings, then layers it all into a fascinating history of the game of baseball through the three decades that Cobb played.
The result is a slow ride across the river Styx in the leaky boat of Ty Cobb's psyche, where black hounds snarled on the far shore every moment of his life. Cobb truly was a haunted and hideous human being.
But, oh, what a ballplayer.
He holds the all-time batting-average record, .367, including three seasons above .400. He hit .320 in his first full season in the majors, with the Detroit Tigers, and his average never dropped below that mark over the next 22 years. He won 12 batting titles in one 13-year span and rang up 4,191 base hits, many of them in the dead-ball era when spitters and shine-balls and other mutilations were legal. He was the first player elected to the Hall of Fame.
Stump begins and ends his biography in Cobb's last months. The writer moved in with Cobb in 1960, splitting time between two luxurious hideouts, one in the mountains above Lake Tahoe and another outside San Francisco. The latter, though, was in perpetual darkness because Cobb, a multimillionaire through shrewd investments, was fighting the power company in court over a $16 discrepancy in his bill. They lived by candlelight and cooked over a Coleman stove. Stump used a backyard sprinkler as a shower.
What Stump found in Cobb was a lonely, friendless and bitter man, usually drunk, addled by painkillers, and still packing a Luger that he was not afraid to fire in public when properly agitated. He also carried with him, wherever he went, a paper sack stuffed with $1 million in negotiable securities. The gun and the bag were at his bedside when he died. Only three professional baseball players attended his funeral.
One of the last things Cobb said to Stump was, ``I had to fight all my life to survive. They were all 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.''
It did. Thirty years later, Stump's revised version says a lot more. It is lurid and fascinating, and no baseball fan should pass it by. by CNB