Cobb (15 page)

Dad Leidy was inspired to rebuild Ty both because it was his nature and because he felt sure that he had lucked into an important find, requiring only two or three more seasons of training on fundamentals and one or two of polishing. All that was needed was time. In the outfield, where Cobb too often was apt to turn a fly ball into a three-base error, Leidy hit him fifty balls almost daily. In an attempt at humor, a local sport journal wrote, “By the million they knock flies to his left, his right and short of him. And—hooray!—he catches many of them. The hardest of all is the fly hit directly at him and sinking. Oh, what trouble! But Ty Cobb—whoops!—falls on his face without the pill in his trap less often than before. In 10 years he might become expert.”

In a lasting way, Leidy built within Ty the confidence that comes with fine timing at bat. A repertoire of slides came second in importance. The teacher did not work on Cobb's violent temper, however;
form and mechanics were all that any one man could deal with where a player as combative as Cobb was concerned.

Andy Roth, deposed as manager but still a team member, one day joked about Ty's efforts to improve. “Are you Leidy's trained monkey?” asked Roth. “He whistles and you run.”

“Go to hell,” said Cobb.

“Put your mitts where your mouth is,” challenged the husky catcher.

How about right now?” said Cobb. He was a forty-pound underdog in weight, he remembered, but had been spoiling to even matters with Roth.

Their fight was anything goes. Feelings had festered so long that the Tourist players saw no reason to break it up. Cobb went berserk, punching anywhere he could reach Roth, from jaw to crotch. Roth applied a choke hold and was cutting off his wind until Ty bit Roth's ear and wrenched on it like a bulldog. Blood was lost by both. Roth tore loose to batter Cobb's eye, closing it. He head-butted Cobb to the ground. Cobb kicked Roth while he was down and a moment later had Roth on his back. It went on to a no-decision when some of the Tourists finally intervened.

Each was helped away, exhausted and needing bandaging. Cobb ranked this one as among the dozen or so dirtiest brawls he ever engaged in. It effectively eliminated Roth as a leading team factor—he was laid up for several days—while reinforcing Leidy's influence. Cobb, after all, hadn't been the favorite.

On the buggy ride home, Leidy said, “You made a dumb move. Roth had all the pull in size.”

“Didn't bother me,” said Cobb flatly. “If it had gone against me, I'd have gotten him with a bat.”

Although the Tourists lost fifteen of the next twenty games in July, an improved Cobb stood out afield and at the plate. For some reason he had stopped using the bunt. On an off day, Leidy took him to Atlanta to watch a new pitching “marvel” named Happy Harry Hale. A sixfoot, six-inch stringbean from Happy Hollow, Tennessee, Hale threw shutout balls for four innings. “Now watch what happens,” predicted Leidy. What the other side then did was to bunt, bunt, bunt. Happy Harry looked silly trying to field the well-placed taps. He spiked his own hand, fell down twice, had to be removed.

Cobb only had to be shown once. Beginning then, he practiced bunting to an old sweater laid down forty feet away. When he could accurately stop a straight bunt on or near the sweater, he moved to other types—the squeeze, drag, sacrifice, the backspin bunt. Before very long Cobb and that bastardized base hit, the bunt, would be as synonymous as Lewis and Clark, Pat and Mike.

UP NORTH
the Detroit Tigers had heard gossip about what Leidy was accomplishing with his speedy pupil, and they sent scout Heinie Youngman to take a look. It was highly improbable that a Class C newcomer could be of any use to the Tigers. Yet something moved Detroit manager Bill Armour to learn more. Youngman found “bird dogs” from the fast American Association and International League already present in Augusta. Youngman saw an ideally shaped ballplayer, long in the leg, lean, heavily muscled in places where it counted—the thighs, arms, and shoulder girdle—with pale, glittering eyes that met your gaze head-on. His southland drawl was prominent. Heinie Youngman said, “I'd like to ask you some personal questions.” Perversely, Cobb answered, “Yuh cain if yoh don't mind that ah might not answer 'em.”

According to Youngman, he informed Bill Armour in Detroit, “That was strike one on him. Here I was giving a kid down in the sticks a chance to be noticed and he's telling me that maybe, or maybe not, he'll talk.” Youngman was not the first to encounter Cobb's exasperating temperament, but he was first to testify to it for the history books.

Cobb gave brief answers to inquiries, implying that he did not discuss his private life with strangers. About all that he would say was that he was a native Georgian who didn't drink whiskey, would be nineteen in December, farmed in the winter, was unmarried, and had a high school education, with college a strong possibility. Asked about his father, he opened up a bit to brag, “He teaches and preaches and helps make laws. Ah would say he's the best-known man in Franklin County, Georgia.” Ty was noncommittal about his mother. “She cooks,” he said shortly.

Youngman gave up and watched him beat Columbia's Spartans with a diving, tumbling catch and a pair of clutch hits, and came away impressed despite himself. He told the Tigers that just maybe, in a pinch, Cobb might be useful.

By early August, hundred-degree heat blanketed Augusta. Players dunked their heads in buckets of shaved ice. Many slumped. Cobb seemed immune. In midmonth, against Macon, Georgia, he hit a single. Macon's first baseman grinned at him. “I hear you're going up.”

“Up where?” asked Ty, not understanding.

“To the big time—Cleveland or Detroit.”

“Don't fun me,” said Cobb, thinking it a joke.

“No joke,” said the baseman. “It's supposed to be true.”

Years later, at a Hall of Fame affair, Cobb confirmed the story: “It hadn't crossed my mind that any club that high up was interested in me. The Augusta owners hadn't said anything about it. Just before I talked to Youngman and some other scouts, I'd jammed my thumb sliding … it was swollen up, and hurt like hell. So it went right past me when the rumor started.”

Although he lacked the sophistication and perception to understand what was going on around him, he stayed in the news. He ran his base steals to a league-leading 40 and was hitting at a .320 figure, also near the Sally League top. Leidy's weeks of schooling had made a difference in most departments.

ON THE
night of August 8, Cobb attended a barn dance until a late hour, and slept in next day. About 10:00
A.M.
the following morning a messenger boy handed Ty a telegram—from Royston. It was signed by long-time friend Joe Cunningham, the schoolmate he once had made bats with out of leftover lumber. Joe's words leaped out, leaving him stunned:

COME AT ONCE STOP VERY SORRY STOP YOUR FATHER DEAD IN SHOOTING ACCIDENT STOP HURRY.

To Cobb's best recall, everything after that was a blur. He was dazed, speechless. When he could speak he phoned Cunningham. Everything in his hometown was in confusion. Cunningham cried, “The Professor's been shot! … We don't know how it happened … looks like someone got him with a shotgun … God, Ty, he's dead!”

Others came on the phone. In the babble Cobb thought he heard it said that somehow his mother was involved in the shooting. Ty's younger brother, Paul, came on the line to sob, confirm the death, and add a few details.

Hurrying home by train, Cobb had to face the circumstance that his father, the man he most admired and honored, who had opposed baseball and thought it a great mistake for his son, yet had bowed to Ty's wishes and made it possible for him to test himself, never would see him in a game. Now he could not repay the trust shown in him. The man he looked up to as wise and saintly was dead. And not by accident, some in Royston were saying.

When his train reached Royston, friends among a crowd at the station told Cobb that this was no ordinary gunplay. He quickly learned the facts of an affair that was rocking northeastern Georgia. For—no doubt whatever about it—it was Ty Cobb's mother, Amanda, who had pulled the triggers of the double-barreled shotgun that had blown off his father's head.

Babe Ruth's father, George Herman Ruth, Sr., died of a skull fracture suffered during a brawl outside his Baltimore saloon in 1918. By then the Babe was twenty-three, established as a combined 24-game-winning pitcher and .325-hitting long-ball slugger of the Boston Red Sox, paid seven thousand dollars per season. By contrast, when his father was gunned down in 1905, Ty Cobb was eighteen, a novice outfielder with not an inning of more than Class C experience, and seasonal earnings of six hundred to seven hundred dollars. By all reports, Ruth was not close to his male parent. He considered a reform school for boys, to which he had been confined for years, to be his home. Cobb, since childhood, had all but idolized Professor W. H. Cobb.

The sudden, gruesome death of his forty-four-year-old father struck Ty a blow from which he admittedly never recovered. During the close to one year I spent writing Cobb's autobiography with him, he sometimes broke away from baseball to speak emotionally. “I have loved only two men in my life—Jesus Christ and my father,” Cobb would say, with tears in his eyes.

On August 9, 1905, in Royston, he walked into a scene of grief and confusion. Sheriffs, doctors, news reporters, and stunned townfolk
overran the family home and the street outside. William Herschel Cobb, the deceased, had been an educator, sometime state official, and prominent Democrat mentioned as a potential Georgia governor. One of the first explanations Ty heard of events of the prior day and night came from neighbor lad Joe Cunningham and another boyhood friend, Clifford Ginn: “He was shot about midnight … He'd climbed onto the porch of his house … it happened up there … They're trying to find out how he was killed.”

Neither of them was willing to tell him that his mother, Amanda, had pulled the trigger.

Inside the two-story brick home with its heirloom furnishings, Ty found a hysterical Amanda Cobb sobbing, “I thought it was a burglar … I didn't know!” Ty's sixteen-year-old brother, Paul, and thirteen-year-old sister, Florence, were in as bad shape as their mother. When he could break away, Ty asked Dr. H. F. McCreary, the family physician, for a straight answer: who did it? McCreary said, “Amanda says someone was trying to force his way in and in the dark she used a shotgun on him. It's a terrible accident.” When Ty asked to see the remains, he was told they were too mangled for viewing. At the forty-foot distance, Amanda had used a heavy-gauge shotgun—and had fired twice.

“Incredible” was the word used around Royston to describe the sequence of occurrences that had cut down the former state senator and Franklin County school commissioner in his prime of life. Why, in the first place, had W. H. Cobb climbed to his home's second story to a position outside his wife's bedroom in the middle of the night? Was it really a case of mistaken identity, as claimed by Amanda Cobb?

There was only one eyewitness—the new widow. As she related it, W. H., on the evening of August 8, had dined with the family, after which their children, Paul and Florence, had left to stay overnight with friends. Unexpectedly, W. H. announced that he was leaving on out-of-town business “for a few days.” Hitching up his buggy he departed at about 6:00
P.M.
But did he leave Royston? Witnesses were to come forward to attest that he had been seen walking a Royston street at about 11:00
P.M.

At 10:30
P.M.
or so of what had been a ninety-degree day, Amanda retired to her bedroom. Just after midnight Mrs. Cobb said she was jolted from sleep by a scratching noise at a window; then the sound increased so loudly that she was sure it was a break-in attempt. Investigating,
Amanda could see by moonlight only a large, ominous figure wrenching at the window frame and lock. The effort grew still noisier. For moments she hesitated, but then, being alone in the home, she grabbed up a twin-barreled shotgun from a corner rack of the room and in fright fired one load.

She testified that panic overcame her, that she screamed and triggered a second blast. When she crept to the demolished window Amanda dimly saw a bloody figure sprawled over the porch roof. She could barely identify the body of her husband. From the neck up not much was left.

Nearby neighbors, hearing the gun's roar and rushing to the scene, were sickened by the sight. Professor Cobb had taken one blast in the stomach, from which his intestines spewed, another to the head, tearing off his upper skull. Doc McCreary arrived, pronounced W. H. dead as of 1:30
A.M.
, and secured for a coroner's jury a six-shot revolver stuck in the victim's side pocket.

The significance of the gun was immediately linked to gossip around town. For some months in Royston, back-of-the-hand rumor had it that thirty-four-year-old Amanda, a shapely woman, was unfaithful. Gossip grew that she had a lover who joined her when W. H. was out of town, which was frequently. Supposedly, the Professor heard the allegations and suspicion festered within him. And so he had faked leaving town, parked his buggy out of sight, doubled back by foot, and climbed his porch to catch Amanda in the act. The common law held that a man had the right to protect the sanctity of his home and, so went grapevine talk, Cobb doubtless intended to use a gun on Amanda's paramour—maybe on both of them.

Royston's social set and others branded this story as wholly untrue; Amanda was a dedicated wife, an admirable mother, now the victim of gross slander. Given her character, the slaying of W. H. Cobb was obviously purely accidental. She was entertaining no one when he came porch climbing.