Cobb: a Biography

As a boy in the 1890s he went looking for thrills, jumping off barn roofs and walking tightropes in a rural Georgia that still burned with humiliation from the Civil War. As an old man in the 1960s he dared death, careening drunk along icy roads late at night; he picked fights, refused to take his medicine, and drove off all his friends and admirers. He went to his deathbed alone, clutching a loaded pistol and a bag containing millions of dollars worth of cash and securities.
During the years in between, he became, according to the author of this new biography, "the most shrewd, inventive, lurid, detested, mysterious, and superb of all baseball players." He was Ty Cobb.
In Cobb, author Al Stump tells how he was given a fascinating window into the Georgia Peach's life and times when the dying Cobb hired him in 1960 to ghost-write his autobiography.
From those months with Cobb came Cobb's 1961 My Life in Baseball, a carefully sanitized justification of Cobb's life and career that was published shortly after the Hall-of-Famer's death. But much of what Cobb told him, and the darker side of Cobb's life, went unreported and untold. Until now.

Stump, Ty Cobb's ghostwriter for the 1961 autobiography My Life in Baseball, fleshes out the story in this bare-knuckle, shocking biography. Born in Georgia in 1886, Cobb began his baseball career with the Detroit Tigers in 1905 and stayed in the big leagues until 1928-all the time hated by his rivals and teammates alike because of his meanness and combativeness. The author portrays the highlights of Cobb's career: his first batting championship in 1907; his 96 stolen bases in 1915; and his three .400 seasons in 1911, 1912 and 1922. Stump also looks at Cobb's involvement in game-fixing in 1919, his time as a manager and his activities after retiring. He died in 1961. The most sensational aspects of the book deal with Cobb's personal life: his mother's murder of his father, millionaire Cobb's cheapness (no electricity or telephone in his house), wife beating, alcoholism and racial bigotry. Stump has written a biography of the "Georgia Peach" that will stun readers with its brutal candor. Photos. 25,000 first printing.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Drawing on the harrowing year he spent with Ty Cobb as ghostwriter of his autobiography, Stump pens an astounding portrait that leaves little doubt the Hall of Famer was ``psychotic throughout his baseball career.'' When they ``collaborated'' on My Life in Baseball in 1960, the Georgia Peach was a bitter, unreasonable, gun-toting, 73-year-old cancer-ridden drunk. Cobb's spectacular career (190528) was marked by ugliness and violence from the beginning. Just days before Cobb was called up to the big leagues, his father was shotgunned to death by his mother, apparently while trying to climb or spy through their bedroom window. She was acquitted of manslaughter, but rumors plagued her and her famous son the rest of their lives. As an 18-year-old rookie, Cobb faced such unbearable hazing from his Detroit Tigers teammates that he bought a gun to protect himself. He suffered a nervous breakdown in his second year and spent part of the season in a sanitarium. When he returned, his welcome was a hotel lobby brawl with his hated teammates that left a couple of them hospitalized--but Cobb led the team in hitting. The controversies, fights, and incidents so vividly recounted by Stump make today's ``troubled'' athletes look like choirboys. Cobb once beat up a black groundskeeper--and his wife--for touching him. Umpires, managers, teammates, opposing players, his wife and children--all who ``increased his tension''--were subject to fierce attack. But his baseball talent was such that many consider him the greatest ever to play the game. His records for hits and stolen bases stood until Pete Rose and Rickey Henderson, respectively, broke them. He won 12 batting titles. His most remarkable--and untouchable--feats were hitting over .300 for 23 consecutive seasons and his .367 lifetime batting average. (A movie about Cobb will be released this fall.) Stump's wonderfully descriptive writing, yeoman historical research, and personal knowledge of Cobb make this an extraordinary achievement in sports biography. (24 photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Baseball great Ty Cobb was considered a borderline psychopath, both on the field and off. Noted sportswriter Stump collaborated with Cobb in his 1961 autobiography, My Life in Baseball. Here, Stump succeeds in producing the definitive biography of this mercurial man. Most of the details of Cobb's life are familiar to baseball fans, but Stump goes beyond the basic facts and accepted truisms and delves into many areas the ordinary fan may not be aware of. The story of the killing of Cobb's father by his mother remains a mystery, but Stump recounts the incident exhaustively, along with many others. Ultimately, the reader can fathom why Cobb evolved into the most hated man in baseball. It is said that genius is often tinged with madness; in Cobb's case that is certainly true. Reading Cobb's autobiography along with this book presents an interesting contrast. Highly recommended for all libraries.
William O. Scheeren, Hempfield Area H.S. Lib., Greensburg, Pa.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

During the last year of Ty Cobb's life, 1960-61, sportswriter Al Stump lived and traveled with the legendary Georgia Peach, ghostwriting what would be a sanitized, self-serving autobiography. What Stump saw of Cobb, though, was anything but sanitized: a raging, near-psychotic, bilious man who carried $1 million in negotiable securities and a loaded gun with him at all times; a man consumed with hate, who had alienated all those close to him over 73 years of life; a man whose phenomenal, still-unmatched achievements in baseball (a .367 lifetime batting average, for example) seemed fueled by rage--at the death of his father, killed accidentally by his mother; at umpires, opponents, and teammates alike; and, especially, at blacks, toward whom Cobb spewed racist venom throughout his life. Unable to tell the real story in Cobb's own book, Stump later wrote an oft-reprinted piece for True magazine detailing the splenetic Hall of Famer's last days; he has now extended the story to Cobb's entire life. The result is an alternately chilling and oddly moving tale of athletic excellence and personal chaos. Combining the best and worst of American individualism in one ferocious package, Cobb defies our attempts to make sense of him. We resist the idea of a psychotic Huck Finn. A film based on Stump's version of Cobb's story, starring Tommy Lee Jones, will open in November, ensuring demand for what ranks as one of the best baseball biographies of recent years. Bill Ott