Cobb (3 page)

I passed these things off. The one and only Ty Cobb wished to write his memoirs, and I felt distinctly honored to be named his collaborator. As the poet Cowper reflected, “The innocents are gay.” I was eager to start. Then a few weeks before the book work began, I was taken aside and tipped off by an in-law of Cobb's and by one of Cobb's former teammates on the Detroit Tigers that I hadn't heard the half of it. “Back out of this book deal,” they urged. “You'll never finish it and you might get hurt.”

They went on: “Nobody can live with Ty. Nobody ever has. That includes two wives who left him, butlers, housekeepers, chauffeurs, nurses, and a few mistresses. He drove off all his friends long ago. Max Fleischmann, the yeast-cake heir, was a pal of Ty's until the night a house guest of Fleischmann's made a remark about Cobb spiking other players when he ran bases. The man only asked if it was true. Cobb knocked the guy into a fishpond and never spoke to him again. Another time, a member of Cobb's family crossed him—a woman, mind you. He broke her nose with a ball bat.

“Do you know about the butcher? Ty didn't like some fish he bought. In the fight, he broke up the butcher shop. Had to settle fifteen hundred dollars on the butcher out of court after going to jail. He had a gun in his possession at the time.”

“But I'm dealing with him strictly on business,” I said.

“So was the butcher,” replied my informants.

“In baseball,” the ex-teammate said, “a few of us who really knew him well realized that he was wrong in the head—unbalanced. He played like a demon and had everybody hating him because he
was
a demon. That's how he set all those records that nobody has come close to since 1928. It's why he was always in a brawl, on the field, in the clubhouse, behind the stands, in the stands, on the street. The public's never known it, but Cobb's always been off the beam where other people are concerned. Sure, he made millions in the stock market—but that's only cold dollars. He carried a gun wherever he went in the big league and scared hell out of us. He's mean, tricky, and dangerous. Look out he doesn't blow up some night and clip you with a bottle. He specializes in throwing bottles.

“Now that he's sick he's worse than ever. And you've signed up to stay with him for months. The time will come when you'll want to write in his book about the scandals and wild brannigans he was in—and he'll chop you down. Don't be a sucker.”

Taken aback, but still skeptical, I launched the job. My first task was to drive Cobb to his Lake Tahoe retreat, where, he declared, we could work uninterrupted.

Everything went wrong from the start. The Hangtown gunplay incident was an eye-opener. Next came a series of events, among them Cobb's determination to set forth in a blizzard to Reno, which were too strange to explain away. Everything had to suit his pleasure, or else he threw a tantrum. He prowled about the lodge at night with the Luger in hand, suspecting trespassers (there had once been a break-in at the place). I slept with one eye open, ready to move fast if necessary.

Well past midnight that evening, full of pain and ninety-proof, he took out the Luger, letting it casually rest between his knees. I had continued to object to a Reno excursion in such weather.

He looked at me with tight fury and said, biting out the words, “In 1912—and you can write this down—I killed a man in Detroit. He and two other hoodlums jumped me on the street early one morning with a knife. I was carrying something that came in handy in my early days—a Belgian-made pistol with a heavy raised sight at the barrel end.

“Well, the damned gun wouldn't fire and they cut me up the back.”

Making notes as fast as he talked, I asked, “Where in the back?”

“
WELL, DAMMIT ALL TO HELL, IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE ME, COME AND LOOK!
” Cobb flared, jerking up his shirt. When I protested that I believed him implicitly but only wanted a story detail, he picked up a half-full whiskey glass and smashed it against the brick fireplace. So I gingerly took a look. A faint whitish scar ran about six inches up his lower left back.

“Satisfied?” jeered Cobb.

He described how, after a battle, the men fled before his fists.

“What with you wounded and the odds three to one,” I said, “that must have been a relief.”

“Relief? Do you think they could pull that on
me
?
I WENT AFTER THEM!
”

Anyone else would have felt lucky to be out of it, but Cobb had chased one of the mugs into a dead-end alley. “I used that gun sight to rip and slash and tear him for about ten minutes until he had no face left,” related Ty with relish. “Left him there, not breathing, in his own rotten blood.”

“What was the situation—where were you going when it happened?”

“To catch a train to a ball game.”

“You saw a doctor instead?”

“
I DID NOTHING OF THE SORT, DAMMIT. I PLAYED THE NEXT DAY AND GOT THREE BASE HITS
.”

Records I later inspected bore out every word of it: on August 3, 1912, in a blood-soaked, makeshift bandage, Ty Cobb hit 2 doubles and a triple for Detroit, and only then was treated for the painful knife slash. He was that kind of ballplayer, through a record 3,033 games. No other pro athlete burned with Cobb's flame. Boze Bulger, a great old-time baseball critic, said, “He was possessed by the Furies.”

Finishing his tale, Cobb looked me straight in the eye.

“
You are driving me into Reno tonight
,” he said softly. The Luger in his hand was dangling floorward.

Even before I opened my mouth, Cobb knew he'd won. He had an extra sense about the emotions he produced in others—in this case, fear. As far as I could see (lacking expert diagnosis and as a layman understands the symptoms), he wasn't merely erratic and trigger tempered,
but suffering from megalomania, or acute self-worship, delusions of persecution, and more than a touch of dipsomania.

Although I'm not proud of it, he scared hell out of me most of the time I was around him.

And now Cobb gave me the first smile of our association. “To get along with me,” he repeated softly, “
don't increase my tension
”.

Before describing the Reno expedition, I would like to say, in this frank view of a mighty man, that the most spectacular, enigmatic, and troubled of all American sport figures had his good side, which he tried his best to conceal. During the final ten months of his life I was his constant companion. Eventually I put him to bed, prepared his insulin, picked him up when he fell down, warded off irate taxi drivers, bill collectors, bartenders, waiters, clerks, and private citizens whom Cobb was inclined to punch, cooked what food he could digest, drew his bath, got drunk with him, and knelt with him in prayer on black nights when he knew death was near. I ducked a few bottles he threw, too.

I think, because he forced upon me a confession of his most private thoughts, along with details of his life, that I know the answer to the central, overriding secret of his life. Was Ty Cobb psychotic throughout his baseball career? The answer is yes.

KIDS, DOGS
, and sick people flocked to him and he returned their instinctive liking. Money was his idol, but from his approximate $12 million fortune he assigned large sums to create the Cobb Educational Fund, which financed hundreds of needy youngsters through college. He built and endowed a first-class hospital for the poor of his backwater hometown, Royston, Georgia. When Ty's spinster sister, Florence, was crippled, he tenderly cared for her until her last days. The widow of a one-time American League batting champion would have lived in want but for Ty's steady financial support. A Hall of Fame catcher, beaned by a pitched ball and enfeebled, came under Cobb's wing for years. Regularly he mailed dozens of anonymous checks to indigent old ballplayers (relayed by a third party)—a rare act among retired tycoons in other lines of business.

If you believe such acts didn't come hard for Cobb, table the thought. He was the world's champion pinchpenny.

Some 150 fan letters reached him monthly, requesting his autograph.
Many letters enclosed return-mail stamps. Cobb used the stamps for his own outgoing mail. The fan letters he burned. “Saves on firewood,” he muttered.

In December of 1960, Ty hired a one-armed “gentleman's gentleman” named E. Anthony Brown. Although steadily criticized, poor Brownie worked hard as cook and butler. But when he mixed up a grocery order one day, he was fired, given a check for the week's pay—forty-five dollars—and sent packing.

Came the middle of that night and Cobb awakened me.

“We're driving into town
right now
,” he stated, “to stop payment on Brownie's check. The bastard talked back to me when I discharged him. He'll get no more of my money.”

All remonstrations were futile. There was no phone, so we had to drive from Cobb's Tahoe lodge into Carson City, where he woke up the president of the First National Bank of Nevada and arranged for a stop-pay on a piddling check. The president tried to conceal his irritation; Cobb was a big depositor in his bank.

“Yes, sir, Ty,” he said. “I'll take care of it first thing in the morning.”

“You goddamn well better,” snorted Cobb. And then we drove through the 3:00
A.M.
darkness back to the lake.

But this jaunt was a light workout compared to the treacherous Reno trip he now directed we make.

Two cars were available at the lodge. Cobb's 1956 Imperial had no tire chains; the other buggy was equipped for snow driving.

“We'll need both cars for this operation,” he ordered. “One car might break down. I'll drive mine, you take the one with chains. You go first. I'll follow your chain marks.”

For Cobb to tackle precipitous Route 50 was unthinkable. The Tahoe road, with its two-hundred-foot drop-offs, had killed a record eighty motorists. Along with his illness, drunkenness, and no chains, he had weak eyes and was without a driver's license. California had turned him down at his last test; he hadn't bothered to apply in Nevada.

Urging him to ride with me was a waste of breath, however.

A howling wind hit my Buick a solid blow as we shoved off. Sleet stuck to the windshield faster than the wipers could clear it. For the first three miles, snowplows had been active, and at fifteen miles per hour, in second gear, I managed to hold the road. But then came
Spooner's Summit, 6,900 feet high, and beyond it a steep descent of nine miles. Behind me, headlamps blinking, Cobb honked his horn, demanding more speed. Chainless, he wasn't getting traction.
The hell with him,
I thought. Slowing to low gear, fighting to hold a roadbed I couldn't see even with my head stuck out the window, I skidded along. No other traffic was on the road that night as we did our crazy tandem around icy curves, at times brushing the guardrails. Cobb was blaring his horn steadily now.

And then here came Cobb.

Tiring of my creeping pace, he gunned the Imperial around me in one big skid. I caught a glimpse of an angry face under a big Stetson hat and a waving fist. He was doing a good thirty miles per hour when he'd gained twenty-five yards on me, fishtailing right and left, but straightening as he slid out of sight in the thick sleet.

I let him go. Suicide wasn't in my contract.

The next six miles was a matter of feeling the way and praying. Near a curve I saw taillights to the left. Pulling up, I found Ty's car swung sideways and buried, nose down, in a snowbank, the hind wheels two feet in the air. Twenty yards away was a sheer drop-off into a canyon.

“You hurt?” I asked.

“Bumped my———head,” he muttered. He lit a cigar and gave four-letter regards to the highway department for not illuminating the “danger” spot. His forehead was bruised and he'd broken his glasses.

In my car, we groped our way down-mountain, a nightmare ride, with Cobb alternately taking in scotch from a thermos jug and telling me to step on it. At 4:00
A.M.
in Carson City, an all-night garageman used a broom to clean the car of snow and agreed to pick up the Imperial—“when the road's passable.”

“It's passable,” said Ty. “I just opened it.”

With dawn breaking, we reached Reno. All I wanted was a bed, and all Cobb wanted was a craps table.

He was rolling now, pretending he wasn't ill; with the scotch bracing him, Ty was able to walk into the Riverside Hotel casino with a hand on my shoulder and without staggering as obviously as usual. Everybody present wanted to meet him. Starlets from a film unit on location in Reno flocked around, and comedian Joe E. Lewis had the band play “
Sweet Georgia Brown
”—Ty's favorite tune.

“Hope your dice are still honest,” he told Riverside co-owner Bill Miller. “Last time I was here I won twelve thousand dollars in three hours.”

“How I remember, Ty,” said Miller. “How I remember.”

A scientific craps player who'd won and lost hefty sums in Nevada in the past, Cobb bet hundred-dollar chips, his eyes alert, not missing a play around the board. He soon decided that the table was cold and we moved to another casino, then a third. At the last stop, Cobb's legs grew shaky. Holding himself up by leaning on the table edge with his forearms, he dropped three hundred dollars, then had a hot streak in which he won eight hundred. His voice was a croak as he told the other players, “Watch 'em and weep.”

But then suddenly his voice came back. When the stickman raked the dice his way, Cobb loudly said, “You touched the dice with your hand.”

“No, sir,” said the stickman. “I did not.”

“I don't lie!” snarled Cobb.

“I don't lie, either,” insisted the stickman.

“Nobody touches my dice!” Cobb, swaying on his feet, eyes blazing, worked his way around the table toward the croupier. It was a weird tableau. In his crumpled Stetson and expensive camel's-hair coat, stained and charred with cigarette burns, a three-day beard grizzling his face, the fuming old giant of baseball towered over the dapper gambler.