Cobb (6 page)

The last time I saw him, he was sitting in his armchair in the Atherton mansion. The place was still without lights or heat. I shook his hand in farewell—a degree of closeness had developed between us, if short of friendship—and he held it a moment longer.

“What about it? Do you think they'll remember me?” He tried to say it as if it weren't important.

“They'll always remember you,” I replied.

On July 8, I received in the mail a photograph of Ty's mausoleum on the hillside in the Royston cemetery with the words scribbled on the back: “Any time now.” Nine days later, at age seventy-four, he died in an Atlanta hospital. Before going, he opened the brown bag, piled $1 million in negotiable securities beside his bed, and placed the Luger atop them.

From all of major-league baseball, three men, and three men only, attended his funeral.

SO ENDED
the battle. “He was the greatest and most amazing ballplayer I ever saw,” attested Hall of Famer George Sisler, himself a candidate for best-ever honors. “There will never be another like him, he was a genius,” said baseball sage Connie Mack in his old age. To Babe Ruth he was “the hardest to beat SOB of them all.” So ended the struggle of the most feared, castigated, and acclaimed figure ever to plant his spikes in a batter's box. It was final innings on a personal tragedy. Ty Cobb had himself entombed in a chamber directly across from that of his father, Professor William Herschel Cobb, in dusty little Royston-town where it had all begun.

Hagenback's Hippodrome and Wild Beast Show was camped near the town, with a calliope's caterwauling and the smell of tanbark setting the kids of the place to kicking up their heels. Royston, Georgia, needed a spell of fun.

An upland cotton, corn, and hog-raising dot on the map in the state's northeast outback, Royston (population eight hundred) and surrounding Franklin County had survived a ruinous Civil War. Thirty-five years after the shooting stopped, the region remained at hazard. As of 1899, with hard times persisting in the Reconstruction South, pecans and peaches had been introduced as supplementary cash crops, a boost to the economy. “We try to let no neighbor go hungry,” stated the weekly, upbeat Royston
Record.

Strung across the main street by Hagenback's circus was an acrobat's high wire. Twice a day a daring, bespangled performer walked the twenty-foot-high tightrope, with no net below to save him from splattering over the brick-clay roadway if he fell. It was an eye-popping act to the town's youngsters. To one of them it was a challenge.

“I can do that,” said Tyrus Cobb, thirteen-year-old son of the local schoolmaster.

“You'd get killed,” jeered his mates.

“No, I wouldn't,” insisted Tyrus.

“Then do it!”

Long afterward in Royston it was retold by old-timers how Professor William Herschel Cobb's boy mounted to a dry-goods store's second story and climbed out onto the wire. Wearing a homespun shirt and farm boots, he imitated the acrobat by using a long pole for balance. The walk went well for a dozen or so feet—then Tyrus swayed. To cries of alarm he quickly recovered and moved along with catty little steps. Nearly across he stopped and lifted one hand off the pole to wave at onlookers. They cheered his cockiness. He finished the passage and became known around the settlement as a “good 'un.”

The
Record
mentioned his stunt—the first time the name of Tyrus Cobb appeared in print. Enjoying the attention, at fourteen he jumped into a pond to help save a companion from drowning, although he was not much good at swimming. In 1901, at fifteen, he was back in the news, this time embarrassed by shooting himself. While butchering hogs on his father's farm, he left his loaded .22 Winchester leaning against a fence. A tree branch sprung and a shot knocked him kicking. Tyrus was hit near the heart in the lower left shoulder. He was moved by slow train eighty miles to Atlanta, where doctors were unable to locate the bullet. The probes they used had him yelling down the hospital, so he was put to sleep. When he awakened the bullet was still in him. The technology of the period was insufficient to find it, and he was sent home stitched and bandaged. Tyrus carried the metal in his body for the rest of his life, complaining of a burning sensation on cold days.

The young Cobb was slight, small for his age, notably pigeon-toed, and hyperactive. He was a devilish prankster, addicted to schoolyard fights and fast on his feet. He liked taking risks; jumping off barn roofs was a specialty. Asa Conroy, the local dry-goodsman, once said, “He was well raised. Polite to the ladies. His father was a big man, very strong and strict.” Conroy recalled that, like almost everybody in Royston, the boy disliked Yankees and detested the North for having ravaged the South while defeating it. Although Franklin County had escaped the havoc wrought by Sherman's army as it looted and pillaged its way from Atlanta to the sea, in much of Georgia the destruction of barely three decades earlier had left wounds that would be generations
healing. Reading books selected by his scholarly father, Tyrus gloried in accounts of various Confederate battle victories. As far as he was concerned, the South had not been beaten, only worn down by superior numbers and supplies. Among his prized keepsakes was an old Confederate garrison cap.

HE WAS
born December 18, 1886, in a three-room pine-and-clay cabin. Baseball's future giant—in the vernacular of Ring Lardner, “a bozo so great that he makes the toughest of games look like a tea party”—was not a Royston native, but from an even more backwater Georgia valley called the Narrows, adjacent to Franklin County in Banks County. The Narrows was the most broodingly silent of places—a shout from one thick-forested spot across the Tugaloo River might be heard by nobody. Some ten dozen scattered farm families lived in an outpost where no railway reached, where no town hall or sheriff's office stood.

In the 1870s a handful of busted-out Civil War veterans and natives of a land shadowed by the Great Smoky Mountains loosely joined to chop out a living from the staples of corn, cotton, vetch, other hays, and peanuts. The Narrows, omitted from most maps, was a butt of jokes, as in: “Count to seventy-five and you've got about all of the humans in that country … Nobody can count all the coons, possum, skunks, and whiskey stills.”

Tyrus Raymond Cobb's own account of his earliest days, told years later to this writer, in part went: “I was born the hard way. It was a close call. Some people around the Narrows didn't think I'd make it.” It was a tight squeeze. Amanda Chitwood Cobb, his mother, had been a child bride of only twelve years of age in 1883 when she married his father. A postwedding photo of the pair showed a giant beside a midget. Three years later, when she bore Tyrus, Amanda was a thin, slightly breasted fifteen-year-old. The first of her three children, he was a good-sized seven-pounder. “She had a tough time getting me delivered,” Cobb related. “There was no hacksaw [doctor] around there. They only had a midwife. Mother bled a lot … suffered.”

No evidence indicates that anyone in the Narrows was especially shocked when the twenty-year-old resident schoolteacher, William Herschel Cobb, wedded a girl of twelve. That had happened before, and not infrequently. It remained ordinary practice in the 1880s for a bachelor farmer with five or ten stake-claimed acres and a few share-croppers
under him to pick, through expediency and loneliness, a hard worker from among the females nearing puberty and make himself a household. Gossip had it that Amanda still played with toys when she married, and read grammar books upon becoming a mother. “She was a damned good cook,” reported Ty Cobb.

In 1960, as a curious researcher, I queried Banks County pioneers about the three-year lapse between Amanda's marriage and her production of Ty. “Who knows?” replied one Royston old-timer. “Her father, Caleb Chitwood, was the biggest landowner around here, and word got out that he didn't at all like his kid's getting spliced so young. He was supposed to have raised the roof. Don't forget that Chitwood also was the main support of the Narrows' only school back then. And Ty's father was the teacher at that school.” Maybe, it was intimated, W. H. Cobb agreed to refrain from sex until Caleb's daughter was a little older. Since in the end she proved fertile, what else could explain it?

Another curiosity: why was W. H. Cobb, a mustached six-footer with a no-nonsense air, a graduate of North Carolina Agricultural College, such a roamer? Apparently he had better academic credentials than the average backcountry educator of his day. Yet, steadily on the horse-and-buggy trot, “Professor” Cobb moved around through two local counties, teaching classes in the towns of Commerce, Lavonia, Harmony Grove, Homer, Carnesville, and eventually in Royston. He was a pedagogical version of a traveling salesman. One of Ty's first memories was of sitting barefoot at age four—“maybe five”—on the tailgate of a horse-hack bucketing along a rough clay trail to one more village, where W. H. Cobb had landed an instructor's job. By then Tyrus had a younger brother, Paul. “We used to wrestle in the wagon all the way to whatever burg came next,” he chuckled. “When little old Paul got sore, he'd bite me.”

In naming the first son, the senior Cobb dipped into his interest in war and warriors. Tyrus was not named for Tyr, a Norse god of arms-bearing, as would later be claimed by members of the sports press. In 332
B.C.
, sweeping across Asia Minor, Alexander the Great was halted by defenders of the ancient Phoenician city of Tyre. Through seven months of carnage, the Tyrians kept Alexander's army at bay. Thence came the newborn's name. The child's middle name of Raymond, which he much disliked, came from a distant relative, a gambler by profession, but friendly with the Professor.

So much traveling, living in rented, poorly heated roadside boardinghouses and drafty tent camps, seemed to harm Tyrus's health. From birth to almost age six, he suffered from “the pip” and undiagnosed fevers. Yet he never doubted his roving father. From the beginning he loved, revered, and was dominated by the austere Professor Cobb. His sire was one of those authoritative men who also are sympathetic to a boy's needs—tough but fair.

The second-strongest character in the boy-child's life was tough, gingery, tobacco-spitting John “Squire” Cobb, his woods-wise grandfather. After the Professor and family finally became permanently settled in Royston in 1895, Tyrus often visited the home of his grandpa in the summertime. With close to one square mile in holdings across the state line near Murphy, North Carolina, the Squire was a fairly prosperous farmer, set apart by owning trotting horses and eating steak for breakfast. Although a limping and semicrippled veteran of the Civil War, Squire Cobb led nine-year-old Ty into the hills to hunt rabbits, squirrels, and wildfowl, meanwhile spinning skin-prickling tales. Some, Cobb recalled, went like this:

Squire Cobb: Do you own a knife, boy?”

Tyrus: “No, but I got a slingshot.”

Squire: “Well, I've been thinking that before this day is out, I'd meet a boy who needed a knife. And here's one for you I can spare.”

Tyrus (accepting a brand-new pearl-handled pig-sticker with a shiny silver shield embedded in it, a knife he would keep for all of his life): “Golly, can I take it with me on a hunt?”

Squire: “By all means. But be careful with it. It's sharper than a bobcat's paws.”

It was all the greater gift because, as Squire Cobb explained, from a knife Tyrus would graduate to a long rifle, like the gun that had saved Grandpa's life when he tangled with a huge bear. “A slavering monster twelve feet tall, teeth as long as a corncob … and me with just a rifle,” he told him. Ty couldn't wait to hear the outcome.

After a chilling delay, the lighting of his pipe, the Squire would drawl, “If I'd missed with that rifle, Tyrus—
you wouldn't be here today
.” A bearskin rug carpeted the plank floor. “That's not
him
,” the Squire would continue. “The one I fought was even bigger.”

ONE SCORCHING-HOT
summer day, in or around 1897, word reached Squire Cobb that he was needed in Asheville, North Carolina, seventy-five miles away. His wisdom and stature in the area had led to his election as foreman of the county grand jury. The jury adjudicated everything from boundary disputes to pig thefts before they became a shooting matter. Tyrus was allowed to ride along to Asheville. At a meeting hall there, the Squire handed down the verdict. In rage, the loser grabbed the Squire's shirt and yelled threats. “Get behind my desk,” said the Squire to Tyrus.

At eleven Tyrus had never seen grown men in a serious fight. Instead of hiding, as he remembered it, he jumped in to kick the attacker's knee. A slap from the man knocked him dizzy. Someone then punched the disturber of the peace. Tyrus got off the deck to see his grandfather whip out a pocket pistol. “Get on your way,” he coldly ordered. Backing down, the man left. The Squire, on his way home by buggy, told Tyrus that he'd done something foolish, but the kicks had been appreciated.

Things could get thrilling in North Carolina—at least the way a latter-day Cobb liked to tell it.

In the next few years he hit the schoolbooks harder in Royston, so as to qualify for visits to the Squire's homestead. He owned a bench-legged squirrel dog, Old Bob. The well-trained hound accompanied his master on train trips to Murphy. In his ballplaying heyday, one of the swift-striking Georgian's greatest talents was tricking opponents. Doubtless some of this cunning had its roots planted when he rode the rails from Royston to Murphy, reading his hometown
Record,
the
Police Gazette,
and other newspapers. Dogs were not allowed in the coaches of the Southern Railway. Concealed on the floor of Tyrus's seat under a jumble of newsprint rode the smuggled Old Bob. The camouflaging worked almost all of the time.