Cobb (42 page)

When meeting a stranger Cobb would bark, “How
you
?” and thereafter dominate the conversation. Tris Speaker recalled that Cobb kept his hands in his pockets when a banker, doctor, Wall Streeter, club owner, or whoever approached him, as if not to pick up germs. George Stallings, ex-big-league manager and associate of Cobb, said, “Players spoke of him as ‘Mr. More.' Meaning he had more hits, more runs, more steals, more records, and more money than any of them. There wasn't one of them who wasn't jealous.”

Oddly-named Luzerne Atwell “Lu” Blue, a .300-hitting rookie with the Tigers in postwar years, contributed, “You should have seen other teams before a game … They'd circle around to cross his path, to
give him the ‘How are you, Ty? How's the Peach?' Oh, how they sucked around! The idea was to keep him friendly and in no mood to go on one of his wild sprees and beat the hell out of you.”

For Cobb, the seasons of 1917 and 1918, against a setting of fourth- and fifth-place finishes by Tiger teams that again failed to jell and on which only one other man hit .300 or more, were a whirlwind tour. Before long his face would appear on billboards of many of the country's thirty-thousand-odd movie houses as an actor. He addressed several state legislatures, putting in a word for modification of the game's octopuslike reserve clause; he sold war bonds here and there. His absence from home and family in Augusta brought on talk of marital discord.

Baseball Magazine
's Frank Lane, on one of his periodic visits to the Cobb homestead, heard whispering that Charlie Cobb was more than miffed when “Mr. Cobb”—as she called him—did not appear for the birth of their third child, Roswell Herschel, in late 1916, because he was at a movie company's stages in St. Louis, taking a screen test. While awaiting the result of that, he collected eight hundred dollars for playing in a prohibited winter game in Connecticut, which was blacklisted because the Detroit club did not share in the receipts. That cost him one more league fine. He bylined press copy on the 1917 Chicago White Sox–New York Giants World Series, adding a tribute to Hans Wagner, who was retiring from a wonderful twenty-one-year career at age forty-three.

Killing game was the most fun for Cobb. Sources reported that in a week he bagged three deer, two wild pigs, a bobcat, a few turkeys, and some one thousand squirrels for the pot with his new five-hundred-dollar shotgun and benchmade rifles. In between, he played golf at Augusta Country Club. Hooked on the game since 1913, he began at the club by shooting a 69; a few days after the splendid 69, he blew up to an 89. Poor putting by the master of the accurate ballpark bunt annoyed him so much that he had a putter blade fastened to the end of the baseball bat and went at it with this weirdest of implements.

At home, 2425 William Street in Augusta, as Lane discovered, his host had a second-floor “secret room,” always kept under lock and key. Allowed a brief look into the sanctum, Lane found it a jumble of silver-and gold-plated trophies won by the Peach, racks of guns, contract and bank-dividend paper, portraits of Cobb's father but not of his mother,
the first bat he'd owned, autographed photos of U.S. presidents, a library of books about Napoleon, boxes of Havana cigars, baskets of unanswered fan mail, and a supply of whiskey. “Moonshine whiskey—I always patronize home products,” remarked Cobb. Napoleon? “I have all the books on his life that I ever heard of. He knew how to win against the odds.” With Bonaparte he felt a rapport.

In his kennels he kept some of the finest bird dogs—pointers and setters—in the South. Cobb's Honor was a field trials champion. It had stung him that earlier, in one of the rare instances of a Dixie journalist criticizing him, he had been accused of viciously kicking and whipping one of his dogs. The accuser was Ralph McGill of the
Atlanta Constitution
. McGill wrote that T.C. lost his temper when the animal broke on point and lost a trial that his owner had expected him to win. Cobb denied every “foul” word of it. McGill, later publisher of the
Constitution
and a Pulitzer Prize–winning editorial writer, allegedly never retracted the story, but stood by it.

New York writer Fred Lieb, who followed T.C. closely for years and was a tough but fair critic, investigated and wrote as follows: “A number of hunting dogs were stabled around the Dover Hall lodge and everyone had been told not to pet them. Newspaper guests told me how while Cobb sat on the porch, one of the dogs started up to the porch … Cobb sprang from his chair and kicked him so hard that the squealing hound landed some 15 feet away. ‘That damned dog is a hunter and knows he doesn't belong here!' he explained to my newspaper friends.” Oh, yes, assured Lieb, Ty Cobb had a cruel streak, one he never bothered to conceal.

Another off-season hangout for the first citizen of Augusta was a dentist's office. Located on a back street, the place was a front for a private group of merrymakers. Behind drawn drapes the boys held “smokers”—drinking, joking, enjoying female companionship. Scandalous stuff, said insiders, but since the Georgia Peach was a member, not to be mentioned on the outside. Supposedly wives didn't know of it. Whether Charlie Cobb was aware of its existence was unknown. While he golfed, hunted, played exhibition ball, tried his hand at polo, drove race cars, fished, and “visited the dentist,” she sat at home with three small children.

Even while asserting his need for peace, quiet, and physical recovery time, he was off in all directions. In 1917, the Sunbeam
Motion Picture Company offered him the star turn in a film titled
Somewhere in Georgia
. The melodrama's script was by Grantland Rice, his longtime admirer, and Rice pressed him to accept the offer to turn film actor. His acting in the 1912 play
The College Widow
was either a “stinker” or not too bad, depending upon which reviewer was believed.
Widow
had returned a fair profit. Said Rice, “You'll be seen all over the country and the money's very good. Ask for twenty-five thousand dollars and I think Sunbeam will pay.”

By signing he would score another “first”—first pro athlete of any type to star in a Hollywood feature. John McGraw was coming out in something called
One Touch of Nature. Somewhere in Georgia
would beat McGraw to the screen and would overshadow all baseball threereelers made to date.

In Los Angeles and in the East, where the movie was shot in under a month, and where he did well with the fast-action sequences, he met Douglas Fairbanks. Film idol Fairbanks came by the set to meet his favorite sport star. When shooting, Fairbanks earned fifteen thousand dollars per week. Cobb said, “I gulped when I heard that figure.” The two partied, became friends, and Fairbanks suggested that he direct a first-class movie on Cobb's
real
life. Nothing ever came of it.

By early 1918 Cobb regretted the
Somewhere in Georgia
venture. He should have known better, he decided, than to lend his name to a potboiler that was in part biographical of himself. He played an ambitious young bank clerk of Atlanta who is signed by the Detroit Tigers, is hazed by the players, and miserably slinks toward home a failure … along the way to his hometown lady love, he is kidnapped by desperados, roped up, and left in a barn to die … he escapes, commandeers a mule train … dashes home just in time to hit a home run that wins the big game for his town's team … in glory marries his sweetheart … curtain. Playing the girl of the clerk's fancy was Elsie MacLeod, a blond ingenue.

Somewhere in Georgia
struck out like Casey in “Casey at the Bat.” Ward Morehouse, a Broadway critic, called it “absolutely the worst flicker I ever saw, pure hokum.” One difficulty was that director George Ridgewell could not get his leading man to kiss Elsie MacLeod any more passionately than he had kissed his co-star in
College Widow
—he just pecked at MacLeod and that was it. But the $25,000 fee and
expenses he received from Sunbeam exceeded his Detroit season's salary and was compensation enough for the knocks. Many years afterward, in a conversation at his California home, Tyrus lit a cigar, sat back, and with a smile related, “Out in L.A. I got to know a girl who became a great movie star. Spent two nights with her. Most beautiful woman I ever bedded.” He offered few details. “Did you know,” he went on, “that they smoked opium all over Hollywood back then? Some damnfools offered it to me.”

IN 1917
the Tigers trained in cotton-growing Waxahachie, Texas. Navin and Jennings were not much surprised when Cobb did not report. He was in South Carolina, working out alone and with no intent of showing up in “Waxy,” particularly after he learned it was raining so hard there that cows were swimming in from pasture. When he did appear, the Tigers and New York Giants were scheduled in an exhibition at Dallas. “Immediately, brother,” reported one of two dozen sportswriters on hand, “the fur began to fly!”

Hostilities got under way when Cobb delayed the game—he'd golfed that morning and was cleaning mud off his spikes in the clubhouse—and Charley “Buck” Herzog, second baseman for the Giants, made an issue of it. “Well, well, the big shot finally got here!” shouted Herzog to the crowd. “The big redneck from Georgia doesn't want any part of us.”

“Go get yourself a banana, you ape,” returned Cobb.

Herzog kept it going and the Peach notified rival manager John McGraw that he had better quiet Herzog—“or I'll send him back to you on a stretcher.” McGraw said something like, “Hurt Buck and you'll need that gun of yours to get out of here.”

Herzog was a tough individual. He'd scrapped his way through stints with the Giants, Boston Braves, back to the Giants, at Cincinnati, and yet again back to the Giants in a dozen years. Claiming not to have lost a fight, he was fierce in executing the double play.

Leaving his bat at the plate before the first inning, Cobb strolled out to Herzog and his double-play partner, shortstop Art Fletcher, to notify them, “Sometime in this game I expect to get on base. And I'll be down to see you two baboons, never fear.” McGraw ran onto the field to yell back.

Singling to right field, Cobb called down from first base to Herzog,
“Now I'm coming, you whore's son.” Herzog, taking catcher Lew McCarty's throw, advanced up the line to tag him. Cobb went for the baseman rather than the bag, ripping Herzog's pants from thigh to ankle and drawing blood. Herzog threw punches. T.C. reciprocated, then both teams got into it. Dallas fans saw a fine scrap wherein Indian Jim Thorpe, the Olympic Games celebrity playing outfield for the Giants, was knocked on his backside. McGraw and Fletcher tried to pin Cobb's arms behind him and were flattened. It concluded with umpire Bill Brennan ejecting the Peach, but not Herzog or any other Giant.

“The fight made me hungry and I ordered a big dinner at the Oriental Hotel that evening,” recounted T.C. “I was eating a fine meal when Herzog suddenly showed up. He growled at me ‘I want to see you—in your room, alone.'” Cobb was agreeable, “Would thirty minutes from now suit you?” he asked.

“In his room he moved the rugs and furniture back and sprinkled the floor with water for good footing with his leather shoes,” said Herzog. The hallway outside soon became crowded with Giants and Tigers, eager to witness the rematch. A referee ruled everybody out except for two seconds. Herzog asked that the room “be swept of guns and swords,” and it all built dramatically. One Texan offered one hundred dollars for a ringside seat and was refused. For Waxahachie the fight was rated the most interesting thereabouts since General John J. Pershing had arrived in 1916 en route to search for border guerrilla leader Pancho Villa.

Although Buck Herzog had once been an Army boxing coach, it ended quickly. Given a choice of style by Cobb, he elected for a rough-and-tumble match, with Marquis of Queensberry rules ignored. “That's where he made his biggest mistake,” T.C. said later. “I had no training in boxing science.”

Numerous versions of what happened were told, until eventually it began to sound like a James J. Corbett versus Bob Fitzsimmons match for the world heavyweight title. The most widely accepted account was that of Oswin K. “Jake” King, publisher of
Uncle Jake's Sport News
, who was standing in the doorway of room 404. King recreated it this way: “They exchanged a few blows, Cobb knocked Herzog against the foot of the bed and had him bending backward over the footboard at his mercy. Then it was stopped to save Buck a beating.”

That was accurate in abbreviated form. The victor told Grantland Rice, who had not been a witness, “First I used some psychology on Herzog. Told him, ‘You're going to get good and licked.' He showed nervousness. That was what I wanted. The fact is that I backhanded him to the floor after missing a right hook … then I tore a handful out of his shirt, clipped him on the chin and he flew backward … got to his knees and said he'd had enough. I called to the Giants in the hall that if any of them felt ambitious to step right in. Nobody did.”

McGraw, in the hotel lobby next morning, cursed Cobb and threatened to have him suspended. What followed is a story that was wildly exaggerated, but was confirmed by Bugs Baer, to the effect that Cobb bent over the pudgy, forty-four-year-old, five-foot, seven-inch McGraw and pinched his nose until McGraw howled. Cobb said, “Go back to those crooked New York betting shops you run! If you were a younger man, I'd kill you!”

McGraw was a man of position and power, and he was humiliated. The producer of four World Series teams and with five more coming up, he was a manager-politician with close ties to the ruling National Commission. His Giants established New York City as the nation's sporting capital, and the “Little Napoleon” operated pretty much as he pleased. He owned stock in a Havana gambling casino, was seen in the company of big-time gambler Arnold Rothstein, and was a partner in betting shops near Herald Square. “McGraw gets away with anything he wants”—so it was said. And Cobb had twisted his nose and threatened him with homicide.