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Title: Cobb: A Biography by Al Stump ISBN: 1-56512-144-9 Publisher: Algonquin Books Pub. Date: March, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.73 (26 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A not-so-sweet Peach
Comment: A "natural" with a Napoleonic complex ("He knew how to win against the odds"), Tyrus R Cobb was, in the words of his biographer Al Stump, "the most chilling, the eeriest of all American sport figures". In fact, Mr Stump's impressed if sometimes impatient "Cobb" (1994) is subtitled "The Life and Times of the Meanest Man Who Ever Played Baseball"; and Mr Stump, who has contributed to Esquire and Sports Illustrated, has the anecdotes to prove it -- some from the Georgia Peach himself. Mr Stump helped Cobb write his memoirs in 1960, and it seems their collaboration was wary, to put it mildly. One thing Mr Stump never had any doubt about: Cobb was a great player. With a career batting average of .367 (compared to Honus Wagner's .329, for instance) and 6,294 put-outs, he was formidable both at bat or in the outfield. Then there was the draconian side: the bullying of team mates (even worse when he became player/manager of the Detroit Tigers) and using his spikes as stilettoes against opponents. Cobb had a reputation as a virulent racist, his hatred of Negroes causing him on one occasion to even beat up a black woman. During his rivalry with Babe Ruth Cobb's ethnic prejudice went so haywire he accused Ruth of being the product of miscegenation and applied all the common slurs. He also attacked fans (as did Ruth), sending at least one to the hospital. Of course, the "cranks" often asked for it, the stands filled with a rudeness and disrespect mainly confined today to a stadium which shall remain unnamed. Cobb's personal life and the reasons for his problems are sketchy. The razzing he received as a rookie, added to a bizarre family tragedy, caused him to have a nervous breakdown at the age of twenty. Some of Cobb's contemporaries thought he was truly insane, but the explanation for his behavior could be less drastic. Emotionally selfish (though financially generous) and subject to tantrums, it could be he simply never grew up; but Mr Stump doesn't explore the complexities that thoroughly. Of the 20 photographic illustrations in the book only one shows one of his five children. The wives are not pictured at all. Cobb was married twice and divorced twice. The second wife is barely mentioned; the first wife was strictly kinder Kirche Küche. As Cobb grew older, the Game grew away from him. His despotic attitude (Mr Stump calls him "the Torquemada of the ballpark") became unacceptable to a new breed of better-educated ballplayer, and his rejection of the Ruthian home run meant that many of his tactics didn't work anymore. He died in 1961, an alcoholic alienated millionaire, admired by Mr Stump though he felt distanced from Cobb. (Just three of Cobb's fellow players attended his funeral.) The fact that Mr Stump wrote this lengthy biography is proof that he thought Ty Cobb was an athlete worthy of respect and remembrance for his professional intelligence. As Connie Mack said: "His secret is that he thinks two plays ahead of everybody else."
Rating: 5
Summary: Riveting
Comment: Al Stump was chosen to ghostwrite the memoirs of Ty Cobb in 1960. After almost a year of research and harrowing experiences, "My Life in Baseball: The True Record" was published. The final product, which bore the name of Ty Cobb, was, in the words of Stump, self-serving. So much of the Cobb story either remained untold or was sanitized that Stump decided to write a corrective article for True Magazine. This article brought accolades and eventually "Cobb" published some 30 years after the original Cobb autobiography.
Ty Cobb was the first player inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame and from a purely baseball perspective, he was most certainly deserving. Many of baseball's pioneers are given short shrift today and even devoted fans are ignorant of their accomplishments and the conditions under which they played. Low pay, abuse by owners, no helmets, beanballs, doctored balls and dim lighting were all circumstances that ball players from the early part of the 20th century had to endure. To then realize that some of the personages in the book (Cobb, Mathewson, etc.) excelled in this environment is staggering. I could list Cobb's accomplishments....homeplate steals, his lifetime batting average or any of the other statistics that imbue baseball with its unique charm, but suffice it to say that Tyrus Cobb is arguably the greatest player to ever don a cap. It is of course the case that this is not the whole story. If it were, Cobb would be remembered much more fondly; however, this biography may not have been necessary and even if it were written, it would likely be less interesting.
The dark side of Cobb make him a decidedly unsympathetic human being. Here was a man possessed of great intelligence, business acumen, persistence. A fierce competitor with a certain sense of honor who, for example, was instrumental in forming baseball's first union (the Baseball Players Fraternity) to protect the rights of all players. He also set up a charitable foundation (the Cobb Educational Fund) to aid bright but poor students from Georgia. This normally taciturn man was reported to have cried when some of the students helped by his endowment tearfully thanked him. Yet within this same man existed a person who was bigoted, foul-mouthed, humorless and prone to violent outbursts when he felt wronged.
In the preface, the author writes "During the long stretches of time we spent together, my feelings for Ty Cobb were often in flux." Every chapter in this page-turner of a book provoked the same sense of ambivalence in me. While some of his on-field antics, and especially his bigotry, are painful to read and well-nigh impossible to forgive, his talents and the tragedies which he experienced make him a figure not easy to dismiss or forget. The untimely death of his beloved father and the subsequent murder charges levied against his mother seem to have set the stage for an adulthood destined to be memorialized in print or perhaps even the silver screen.
At the time of his death, Cobb was estranged from his surviving children. The book concludes with Al Stump telling us "....the funeral of the most shrewd, inventive, lurid, detested, mysterious, and superb of all baseball players went unattended by any official representative of the game at which he excelled." Whether you are a baseball fan or not, this book is an informative and compelling read.
Rating: 4
Summary: Perhaps Baseball's Most Disliked Player
Comment: This book documents the life and times of one of the most complex, violent, angry, and racist men to ever play the game of baseball. It takes the reader from his growing up in rural Georgia to going to Detroit to play for the Tigers and finally to his later years in California and his death of prostate cancer in 1959. But along with these personality defects, Cobb had incredible talent to go with his competitiveness----and he was competitive both on and off the field. Anyone interested in baseball's history would undoubtedly enjoy reading this biography of one of the game's most colorful characters.
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Title: My Life in Baseball: The True Record by Ty Cobb, Al Stump, Charles C. Alexander ISBN: 0803263597 Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr Pub. Date: March, 1993 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title:Cobb ASIN: B0000A02YH Publisher: Warner Home Video Pub. Date: 02 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.98 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $17.98 |
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Title: Ty Cobb by Charles C. Alexander ISBN: 0195035984 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: May, 1985 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: BABE: THE LEGEND COMES TO LIFE by Robert Creamer ISBN: 067176070X Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 15 April, 1992 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn ISBN: 0060956348 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 June, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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