Three Actors, One Legend : Playwright Lee Blessing takes a contemporary look at Ty Cobb, one of our misunderstood sports heroes

“Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?/A nation turns its lonely eyes to you,” sang Simon & Garfunkel in the 1967 movie, “The Graduate.” The nation has always turned its lonely eyes on sports figures, finding in their strength and grace and record-setting effort a metaphor for a kind of miraculous human transcendence, of momentary, improbable perfection and renewed possibility.

The triumph of sports heroes is greeted with a gut adulation once reserved for homecoming war veterans or liberating troops. We confer on them a mythic status in renaming them. Joe Louis was called The Brown Bomber. DiMaggio was The Yankee Clipper. Of all the Johnsons who play in the NBA, there’s only one Magic.

We occasionally go so far as to call them immortal. But sometimes even immortals become encrusted with the despoliation of our neglect, like a statue in the park. Playwright Lee Blessing has polished off one such figure in his new play “Cobb,” an examination of the baseball great of early 20th-Century America, Ty Cobb. The play, directed by Lloyd Richards, has its West Coast premiere at the Old Globe Theatre Thursday.

“Ty Cobb did for baseball what Sherman did for the popular conception of war,” Blessing said. “He turned it into a game played for keeps and created a definition that prevailed. Cobb set 123 baseball records in his career. Of these, 15 still stand. Yet, he’s most famous for his spiking incidents. When he played in Philadelphia, he needed police protection. One of the reasons I wanted to write about him was that most people sentimentalize baseball, and he wasn’t sentimental at all.

“He was a multidimensional human being, one of the most successful baseball players who ever lived,” Blessing continued. “Yet he was not what you’d call an integrated personality. He played for the Detroit Tigers from 1905 to 1926, and finished out his last year in 1928 with the Philadelphia Athletics, where he batted .323. He invested in Georgia cotton and in Coca-Cola, all before 1920, and was a multimillionaire when he died in 1961. He played poker with Presidents. He raced sports cars. He acted in vaudeville and in a movie. Before Babe Ruth came along, Cobb dominated the game, but he brought it a different image. He was the meanest man in baseball.”

Blessing, who is one of our more gifted playwrights (he’s best known for “A Walk in the Woods”), has his work cut out for him. For one thing, the theater, which traditionally deals with a key attribute of heroism--the stratagems of conflicting desire--hasn’t had much to do with the world of sport. You would think otherwise, particularly in an age in which most authority is ritually discredited and the glow of empty celebrity outshines the arduous struggle towards authentic greatness (as opposed to fame).

Yet they’re amazingly similar. Both involve spectacle and performance. Both play. Both involve character having to improvise its way through duress. On stage, Hamlet falls in an eternal flash of self-illumination. In sport, Kirk Gibson limps to the plate, two out, bottom of the ninth in a crucial World Series game and knocks one out of here into history’s everlastingly watchful night.

Was it Pat Riley or Arthur Ashe who observed: “Your career moves through categories. The first is when you’re unknown and have to prove yourself. The second is when you’re there, performing consistently, being recognized. The third is when people put their memory on your head; they expect you to win. You’ve lost the element of surprise. It’s you and them all the time. You’re seen from the top of your head to the bottom of you. You’ve got to work all the time to find your rhythm”?

Guess again. It was Derek Jacobi, when he came to the Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival in 1984 with the Royal Shakespeare Company and discussed his life as an actor.

Aside from the obvious difference in intent (the theater allegorizes, the contest offers a discrete physical proof) there is the problem of setting and scale. George M. Cohan’s 1904 “Little Johnny Jones” gave us the songs “Give My Regards to Broadway” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” but what is little Johnny’s vindication compared to the demonic sight of Secretariat thundering down the stretch at the 1977 Belmont Stakes with such purposeful, solitary fury that the mind shivers in recollection? This after his pedigree suggested he’d finish out of the money.

What’s Joe Bonaparte’s conflict over whether to box or play the violin in Clifford Odets’ 1937 “Golden Boy” compared to the figure of Muhammad Ali sitting night after night by the Kwango River 40 miles outside of Kinshasa, Zaire, and drawing the ancestral spirits of Africa out of its mists to protect him against the fearsome power of undefeated heavyweight champion George Foreman? (Ali, miraculously, not only won the fight but knocked Foreman out).

Ali in fistic exile made a charmingly good account of himself as an actor in the 1969 Broadway production, “Big Time Buck White.” It was a good play. But Ali in the ring was great theater.

James Earl Jones was a stylish, impassioned and powerfully bitter Jack Jefferson (the Jack Johnson surrogate) in Howard Sackler’s 1968 “The Great White Hope,” but sight of the younger Mike Tyson climbing into the ring was so menacingly primeval that he could pump his bad intentions through 10 million TV sets into the viscera of anyone who watched.

Blessing has mixed feelings about it all. He remembers a certain resentment he felt when he wanted people to come see one of his plays in Minneapolis and instead they went to hang on the fate of the Twins in the ’87 World Series. Nonetheless, “Cobb” generates both out of an early interest (one of his first plays was called “The Old Timers Game”) and a more mature dexterity at expressing himself on stage.

“I wanted to be able to deal with Cobb in a panoramic sense. You’ll see him at ages 19, 41 and 75, when he’s suffering from terminal cancer. All three characters are on stage at the same time and even argue with each other. It’s a one-man play for four men--there’s also the character of Oscar Charleston, a black player from the ‘20s who, in the opinion of some, was the best baseball player who ever lived. Cobb didn’t like blacks. He avoided them, even in exhibition games. This was a reality of sports at the time, and I think we’re still the heirs of that old racism.”

Blessing knows as well as anyone that there there was a time in history when the theater was an arena of propitiation; what happened on stage as a meditation on destiny, morality and conscience held meaning just as suspenseful and infinitely more resonant than a tie-breaking shot at the buzzer. The fate of nations spooled out of the inner machinations of their kings, laid out on stage like the workings of a watch.

It’s sport now that holds the intensity of our interest, perhaps because we’ve come to conclude that there’s nothing out there in the darkness that surrounds us after all, and conversely, the 20th-Century human heart doesn’t bear looking into either.

Too, if the general porousness of theater doesn’t absorb the athlete as cynosure, a lot of that is owed to the athlete himself, or herself. Oscar Wilde said he put his genius into his life and his talent into his work. Most great athletes put their genius into their game and a rudimentary, functional residue into whatever is left. The majority of them never grow up, even if they want to (isn’t that what “That Championship Season” was all about?). There are relatively few Jack Kemps and Bill Bradleys out there. F. Scott Fitzgerald said it well in his essay on Ring Lardner when he talked about the coming-of-age mind-set of the athlete:

“Imagine life conceived as a business of beautiful muscular organization--an arising, an effort, a good break, a sweat, a bath, a meal, a love, a sleep--imagine it achieved; then imagine trying to apply that standard to the horribly complicated mess of living, where nothing, even the greatest conceptions and workings and achievements, is else but messy, spotty, tortuous--and then one can imagine the confusion that Ring faced on coming out of the ball park.”

Still, if sport is a kind of courtroom of effort, the theater remains one of our best arenas of inquiry in teasing out universals.

“I was fascinated with Cobb’s all-or-nothing attitude towards winning,” Blessing said. “After I read Charles Alexander’s biography of Cobb in ‘85, I realized there were a lot more complex patterns in him than we normally see in baseball. His marriages ended bitterly. He wound up estranged from his son (he had five children). I think he felt a great anger over the form of baseball becoming decadent. He came along at a time before the the power game became popular.

“Why he was the way he was I don’t know. Coming from Royston, Ga., he was a young Southerner--19 years old--breaking into a game dominated by Irishmen from the Northeast. Nobody there wanted to see a new face, and it didn’t help that he had absolutely no interpersonal skills. Also, a terrible thing happened three weeks before he went to Detroit--his mother killed his father under highly mysterious circumstances.

“Cobb is a different kind of legend, and we see how it hits him that the audience is trying to forget him. We tend to repress what we don’t like, even the memory of someone’s achievements. The play is about his struggle to be remembered. It asks, ‘What’s the meaning of the life of a human being?’ He was almost a prototype of someone who could do nothing wrong, yet when he lost his temper, he was a dangerous man.”

Perhaps that’s a clue. In our own spiritually dislocated time, the best we can usually do in the theater is manage a semi-abstract empathy with characters, and maybe learn from them. In sports, we wince when people get hurt. In both, we witness pain (even in comedy; especially in comedy). It has become our nature now to hover around immediacy. Into the breach between the darkness of individual character and the light of collective observance steps the artist. In retrospect, and in the right hands, Ty Cobb’s flashing spikes and Henry V’s flashing sword are one and the same after all.