Biographer of Baseball Legend Gives Devil His Due : Sports: Scribe Al Stump, a Huntington Beach resident, saw the good, bad and ugly of early century diamond star Ty Cobb. Their enigmatic relationship is the focus of film opening today in O.C.

As a chilling dusk settled over a snowy Georgia graveyard on Christmas Eve, 1960, sportswriter Al Stump knelt in a marble mausoleum and watched as an aging Ty Cobb, probably the most acclaimed and despised baseball player of all time, confronted the ghosts of his past.

“He put his hand on his father’s crypt, began to weep and said, ‘Do you want to pray?’ ” Stump, a Huntington Beach resident, remembered. “Well what could I do? So I got down on my knees and prayed. That was the closest I ever got to him. Afterward he became all business again.”

Few people saw anything resembling tenderness or vulnerability in Cobb, who was notorious for his hyper-aggressive ball-playing and abusive personality. Stump’s rare vantage point gave him the insight to pen two books about the legendary “Georgia Peach.”

The second book, a harrowing account of Cobb’s final year, is the basis of a new motion picture titled “Cobb,” which opens today in Orange County and stars Tommy Lee Jones.

The journalism career of the 70-something Stump (he only gives his age, with a wink, as “2 over par”) has seen him interview the likes of Hemingway and Bogart, Bugsy Siegel, Jim Thorpe and John Wayne, but Cobb remains the subject with which he is most closely associated. Stump lived with the raging, unpredictable Cobb for 14 months while he ghost-wrote Cobb’s 1961 autobiography, and their relationship is the subject of the new film.

Tyrus Raymond Cobb, the first man inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame, dominated his sport as few athletes have. His lifetime batting average of .367 still stands as the best mark, and three times he hit better than .400. More than that, Cobb brought new strategies and an intensity to the diamond that altered the way the previously pastoral game was played.

He worked obsessively during his 23-year career to master bunting. Cobb took base-stealing to a higher level, setting a mark that would last decades. Stump points to Cobb’s famous cleats-high slides, his sharpened spikes used as tools of intimidation, as a perfect example of Cobb’s take-no-prisoners attitude. One season that approach put a dozen opponents in the hospital.

“That’s why I wanted to call the second book ‘Blood on His Spikes,’ ” Stump said, chuckling.

“I think he wouldn’t have been the great star if he hadn’t had that extra something,” Stump said recently while sipping coffee at the Shark Island Yacht Club in Newport Beach. “That extra something was an absolute need to win. He was inhabited by devils. He did things that were just about impossible for anyone else because he was obsessed with winning, more so than anybody you could think of.”

The devils did not leave Cobb when he walked off the diamond. He was known as a gun-toting drunk, a bigot and a misogynist. He once allegedly pistol-whipped a man to death in a street fight, and another time he knocked out a disabled fan who dared heckle him. Two marriages ended in divorce, his wives driven away by his extreme cruelty.

Stump entered Cobb’s life in 1960, when the irascible Southerner, dying from cancer, began looking for a chronicler to tell his story. Several writers had taken on the project only to be driven away by the acerbic Cobb, who was by then gobbling pills and chugging whiskey to keep his various aches and pains at bay.

*

Stump, already a noted sportswriter and a feature writer published in Esquire, the Saturday Evening Post and Sports Illustrated, accepted the challenge.

The two became uneasy friends. Stump endured the 74-year-old Cobb’s tantrums and excesses. The writer, who more than once had to duck a whiskey bottle thrown by Cobb, quit several times and was fired once, but returned again and again.

Holed up in the millionaire Cobb’s mountain retreat--the wily ballplayer had made a fortune in the stock market--the duo cobbled together a sanitized version of Cobb’s life that was published as “My Life in Baseball” in 1961 shortly after Cobb’s death.

“And that was the end of it for me,” Stump recalled. “I thought I had seen the last of Cobb’s story. I didn’t attend his funeral, and few other people did. I was fed up with him, I thought he was a monster who had no love for his fellow man.”

But Stump found it difficult to walk away. The book he had written, at Cobb’s command, was a whitewash. There was no mention of the brawling or the rattlesnake personality, and no allusion to a dark chapter in Cobb’s youth that soured his world view: A few weeks before a teen-age Cobb would first join the Detroit Tigers, his father was accidentally killed by his mother.

“Cobb’s father was the most important thing in his life,” Stump said. “Cobb’s mother had done it, she had blown off his head with a double-barreled shotgun. She thought there was a prowler trying to get in her second-story window, and she shot him with the gun she kept next to her bed.”

The truth about Cobb gnawed at the journalist, who felt he had shortchanged history by allowing his story to be only half-told. He eased his mind in late 1961 when he wrote a revealing first-person account of the cabin months for True magazine. Thirty-three years later, he used that same piece as the first chapter of a second book on the ballplayer, this one titled “Cobb: A Biography.”

The first printing of the unflinching biography, published by Algonquin Books, has sold out and, while early reviews of the new film are mixed, Stump is delighted with the wider audience that is learning about the underbelly of Cobb’s towering legend. “And parts of the film,” he said slyly, “are even accurate.”

Actor Robert Wuhl (“Bull Durham,” “Batman”) portrays Stump in the film, while Academy Award-winner Jones portrays the aging, dying Cobb. Flashbacks show Cobb in his baseball heyday, but the lion’s share of the film focuses on the writer and his ailing subject as they wrestle over the biography.

The film’s director and screenwriter, Ron Shelton (“Bull Durham,” “White Men Can’t Jump”), said Stump’s character gives the movie its humanistic, sympathetic platform, while Cobb is the “dramatic, operatic, mythic monster.”

The film also allowed Shelton to work with Stump, a man the director viewed as a role model while growing up in Santa Barbara. “Growing up, I had only heard of one sportswriter, there was only one I could name on the planet, and it was Al Stump,” Shelton said.

*

Stump’s recognizable byline was well-known across the country by the time he collaborated with Cobb. His eclectic career included a stint as a Navy correspondent during World War II and scores of features published throughout the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s in publications as varied as TV Guide, American Heritage and Esquire. Twice he won the Best American Sports Story Award, and he has written seven books.

Although Stump is recovering from a variety of health problems and has had recent open-heart surgery, the father of five is hard at work on another book, this one about horse racing. Most days, though, he enjoys his semi-retirement.

“I hit a golf ball around the neighborhood a lot,” he said. “Got all kinds of hazards built in. A lot of trees and dogs attack you and things like that. Then I go out on the course and I can’t hit anything.”

On weekends, he and his wife, former Los Angeles journalist Jo Mosher, stop by the American Legion Hall to watch sports on television, although Stump says he has little love for the modern-day athlete.

“If I told you what I really think, you couldn’t print it,” he said in a reference to a sports scene full of strikes and court cases. “I’m completely disgusted with the American athlete today. Oh, as far as ability, there’s no comparison with the old boys. I think Ty Cobb would be one of the few old-timers who could compete with the great ones today on even terms.

“You know that joke about Cobb?” the crusty sportswriter said, cocking his trademark hat to one side. “What would he hit if he was batting today? He’d hit about .320. How could that be? Well, you got to remember he’d be about 100 years old.”