Cobb: A Biography

Sporting News, The, Nov 28, 1994 by Steve Gietschier

In 1960, sportswriter Al Stump contracted with Ty Cobb to help the dying legend write his autobiography, a project begun several times before but always abandoned. This time it got done. "My Life in Baseball: The True Record," finished before Cobb died in July 1961 and published posthumously, has long been regarded as one of the most revealing sports memoirs.

Stump went on to pen a memorable magazine article about his months with the disease-ridden, drug-dependent Cobb, and now, more than 30 years later, he has written a full-scale biography. It is being published to coincide with the release of a feature film based on Stump's experiences and starring Tommy Lee Jones as the Georgia Peach.

The aphorism used to mitigate the behavior of even the meanest of men is to say that they loved dogs and children. Well, Ty Cobb pretty mach ignored his children and stood accused more than once of kicking his champion hunting dogs. So it shouldn't surprise anyone to learn that Stump's portrait of baseball's most relentless competitor and its most detested star is unremitting. Hardly a page goes by without the tale of some venomous incident or other to drive home the point that Cobb was a grotesque monster of a man who twisted his competitive urges beyond any pretense of normality and lived his private life with equal overdoses of outrage.

Readers who doubt this should recall one incident: When his son Ty Jr. flunked out of Princeton in 1929, Cobb caught a train to New Jersey and horsewhipped him.

There have been tons of words written about Cobb, including Charles Alexander's fine scholarly biography, but Stump outpaces previous authors in the totality of his bloodand-guts details. The trouble with his work, though, is that the careful reader has no way to judge its accuracy.

There are to footnotes, and so the question must be asked: Where did all this material come from? Stump's notes and memories are now more than three dusty decades old, and there is precious little evidence that he has done very much new research. Cobb kept notebooks throughout his life, but it is unclear where they are now or when Stump last saw them, if at all.

Indeed, when certain confusions creep into the text (as, for example, when Stump has Casey Stengel complaining to Cobb about the ineptitude of the New York Mets, who began play in 1962 after Cobb's death) or when conversations held 70 years ago or more are recounted seemingly verbatim, a certain doubt is cast over the book's compelling picture.

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On 149th and Gerard Avenue in the South Bronx, down a deserted side street and across a fenced-off, barbed-wired lot of rotting wild grass and mangled weeds, there stands like a fortress in the middle of a war zone a warehouse-turned-community-center-gymnasium -- all brick and painted over in a dreary, washed-out yellow and retouched to hide the graffiti and peeling everywhere.

Above a set of double doors, a huge drawing hovers like an ominous family crest: the black head of an angry bull breathing orange smoke from both nostrils; above that, squeezed between the horns, the word "Gauchos" in orange and black and with the "O" made to look like a basketball.

This is the Gauchos Gym, and in this neck of the 'hood, it's as powerful as any church, and inside, almost surreally, there's the most wondrously pristine full-sized basketball court, fiberglass backboards and all, and the best young inner-city talent from all over the boroughs come here to play.

John Salley came here, and Kenny Anderson, and Lloyd Daniels. And Jamal Mashburn, too. And a dozen more in the NBA now.

Five years ago, fresh from the Dominican Republic and speaking not a word of English, Felipe Lopez, only 14, came here from an apartment building less than a mile away, from the dangerous, crack-infested Mott Haven section, on the arm of his older brother, Anthony; from that point on, Felipe all but needed to be dragged out. He would play the days away, mesmerized instantly by the steady rhythm of his dribbling and the weird echoes bouncing off the walls. He would practice for hours on end and play tournaments year round, and he'd "always shoot for the moon," he says. Which, like a magic carpet, would lift him into the haze of the most glorious basketabll dreams, where life was beautiful and perfect and safe, and where, soon slam dunking, he imagined himself on top of the world.

"This was his comfort zone," says Gauchos Coach Dave Jones, a thick-bodied black man with a perpetually stern look. "It kept the streets far away from him. He could do what he wanted to here and not worry about anything distracting him."

And it's all happening so fast now. As Felipe Lopez readies himself to play his first season with St. John's, they're already calling him the Hispanic Michael Jordan. Many predict in two years he'll sign a zillion-dollar NBA contract, and, from there, straight to superstardom without passing Go, the first great Latino in the NBA.

That fast.