Removing the Fangs From Ty Cobb’s Notoriety
When he began work on a new biography, “Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty”
(Simon & Schuster), Charles Leerhsen expected to uncover fresh
depictions of the player as a racist and a spikes-sharpening attacker of
opposing infielders. If Cobb was the meanest man in baseball flannels,
additional animosity would not be difficult to find.
“I
thought I’d find new examples of monstrous monstrosity,” Leerhsen said
in an interview last week. “Instead, I found a very different person
than the myth. I was a little disappointed at first. He’s more normal
than I thought.”
Leerhsen’s
research found neither a saint nor a Rabelaisian character like Babe
Ruth. Sure, Cobb could be unpleasant and overly sensitive. He had a
temper and fought with his share of people, including a fan
who heckled him mercilessly. But Leerhsen did not unearth a bigot
primed to attack black men or a brandisher of carefully filed daggers
beneath his shoes.
“It’s a warts-and-all biography,” Leerhsen said, laughing. “But they’re warts, not tumors.”
Four
years of research found that Cobb’s father, a teacher and state senator
in northeast Georgia, detested the mores of the Jim Crow South and once
stopped a lynch mob. Some of Cobb’s family members turned out to be
abolitionists. And Cobb attended Negro league games after his retirement
and supported integration in baseball.
“If
you stick to the facts, and not the myth or the assumptions about
someone born in Georgia in 1886,” Leerhsen said, “it’s very hard to make
a case for Cobb being racist.”
He
added, “Two or three times he got in fights with black people, but it
was never clear what part, if any, race played in those incidents, and
of course he got in many more fights with white people.”
As for the notion that Cobb turned his cleats into weapons, Leerhsen found no evidence.
“That
was one of the easiest things to prove,” he said. “There are so many
quotes from players that said he didn’t. Even Sam Crawford, who was
hardly Cobb’s biggest fan, said he didn’t purposely spike people.”
The
book is not purely a defense of Cobb, to clear him of alleged sins, but
a full biography of one of the early 20th century’s seminal players.
“He
was actually the most exciting player, maybe ever,” said Leerhsen, who
has held top editing positions at People magazine and Sports
Illustrated. “He was sort of crazy on the basepaths, and he was always
playing so hard. He flew in the face of 19th-century sportsmanship that
you shouldn’t be too tricky; he was about being what he called a mental
hazard on the field.”
Still, as indignant as he is about Cobb’s reputation as baseball’s cur-in-residence, Leerhsen understands its persistence.
“People
love a villain,” he said. “By saying he’s a racist and a monster,
you’re saying, ‘I’m not, so I’m a decent and nice person.’ ”
He
added: “People cherish their sports myths. Their father told them, and
there’s a sacredness to them about what you learned when you first
learned about baseball.”
Leerhsen
disdains drive-by insults, like one from Bill Bryson in the 2013 book
“One Summer: America, 1927,” in which Bryson wrote that Cobb was “only a
degree or two removed from classical psychopathology.”
“Where do you get that from?” Leerhsen said.
He
is also critical of a previous Cobb biographer, Charles Alexander, for
writing that a bellhop and a night watchman who were involved with Cobb
in a hotel fight in 1909 were black. Alexander cited contemporary
accounts for the claim, but Leerhsen said he found none. That fight,
Leerhsen said, was transformed over the years into an account of Cobb’s
stabbing to death a young black waiter.
Leerhsen
is particularly upset by Al Stump, who ghostwrote Cobb’s 1961
autobiography and, soon after Cobb died, created a portrait of the dying
Cobb as a paranoid, pill-popping, boozing, gun-wielding wreck. That
account, in True magazine, led Ron Shelton to make the 1994 movie
“Cobb,” which The New York Times described as a “blustery, fire-snorting film.”
That
same year, Stump published “Cobb: A Biography,” which he said restored
much of what had been omitted from the autobiography.
But Leerhsen said the book had become a standard reference by which to judge Cobb as a miscreant.
“Stump’s
book was almost completely fabricated,” Leerhsen said, adding that he
had found “examples of him making up quotes — Juan Marichal and Don
Drysdale complaining about interviews with him.”
Leerhsen continued, “He didn’t do the hard work of going back to newspapers clips and the letters.”
Stump died in 1995. His son, John, did not return an email request for comment.
As
for “Cobb,” the movie, Leerhsen cites an email exchange in which
Shelton said he created an attempted rape of a casino cigarette girl
“because it felt like the sort of thing that Cobb might do.”
Shelton
explained Friday by email that the scene grew out of a story Stump told
him about how Cobb “strong-armed a woman to his room where he was
unable to conclude his intentions due to impotency.”
Shelton
said that Stump was not the only source for the film — another, the
Tigers announcer Ernie Harwell, told him “chilling stories” about Cobb —
and that Cobb’s still-living contemporaries told him “he was much worse
than his reputation.”
He added: “I told my story, and Charlie’s telling his. But I stand by mine.”
2 comments:
The myth and mystery of Cobb continues.
That it does.
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