Cobb: A Biography

by Al Stump

Book Overview

As a boy in the 1890s he went looking for thrills, jumping off barn roofs and walking tightropes in a rural Georgia that still burned with humiliation from the Civil War. As an old man in the 1960s he dared death, careening drunk along icy roads late at night; he picked fights, refused to take his medicine, and drove off all his friends and admirers. He went to his deathbed alone, clutching a loaded pistol and a bag containing millions of dollars...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0945575645
• ISBN13: 9780945575641
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
• Length: 436 Pages
• Weight: 1.77 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Full of Lies about Ty Cobb

This is the worst book on Ty Cobb ever written. It is full of myth and lies. There are a number of books on Ty Cobb that provide the truth. They provide a fair account of Cobb including his negative side. Read Richard Bak or Charles Leerhsen. Each of these authors actually did their research. You will be surprised with how many of the negative portrayals are untrue. However, they do not whitewash the unpleasant, surly of his personality.

Riveting

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 t

A fascinating human being!

Baseball aside, this book is more about one of the most compelling public figures in U.S. History. Nothing is boring with Cobb, everything is interesting, everything is stimulating. Clearly one of the most dynamic individuals in all of U.S. History and Stump magnificantly retells the life and events of the greatest baseball player of all time.

This is the best sports biography I have ever read.

Whether you love or hate Ty Cobb, you will love this book. It tells the whole Cobb story, from his humble beginnings to his pathetic last days. I am a lifelong baseball fan but learned a great deal of new information about Cobb. Stump confirms that Cobb was possibly the greatest and definitely the nastiest ballplayer of them all. Even if you are not a huge baseball fan, you will be entertained and amazed by one Cobb anecdote after another. Cobb truly transcended the game.

Al Stump does injustice to his subject matter.

This book does the same as the magazine article, Stump wrote too many years ago after Cobb's death and the completion of the book he wrote with Cobb.This book does the same as the magazine article, Stump wrote too many years ago after Cobb's death and the completion of the book he wrote with Cobb. In Charles Alexander's recent introduction of Cobb's autobiography, he wrote this of Al Stump:"Stump recounted his experiences with Cobb in an article "Ty Cobb's Wild Ten-Month Fight to Live," published in True, a male-oriented monthly magazine specializing in risqué adventure...Much of the article reads like a gothic horror story...For those who preferred to remember Cobb's good qualities and let his faults be buried with his physical remains, Stump's article was at best an exercise in poor taste, and at worst a severe injustice to a man who had done much for his hometown and substantial good otherwise. (Stump mislead readers in implying that he had been Cobb's companion nearly all the time, when in fact he had seen him only a few times during that "wild" ten-month period.")...Stump...made no efforts to check facts. Thus the book included a number of mistaken dates, places, people, and situations...Unable to do much sustained work with Cobb, Stump relied considerably on a seven-part biographical sketch published in 1950 in the Sporting News by H.G. Salsinger, longtime Detroit Baseball writer and one of Cobb's few real friends, as well as Cobb's 1952 Life articles and a book put together three years later by Cobb and John D. McCallum, combining reminiscences with tips on how to play the game."