A Baseball Legend’s Violent Truth : What made Ty Cobb the demon overachiever? : COBB: A Biography, <i> By Al Stump (Algonquin: $24.95; 464 pp.)</i>

In my house is a framed photograph of me standing beside the great Ty Cobb. Actually, there are four of us teen-age hopefuls flanking Cobb--we in ragged baseball garb, the balding Cobb in slacks and a bowtie and a shirt rolled up to the elbows--and we are holding bats on our shoulders as he demonstrates his trademark batting grip: hands apart, squeezing tightly, making the bat seem like a truncheon. Beneath the picture there is scrawl, “To Paul Hemphill, From His Friend, Ty Cobb, 7/15/52.” Therein lies a tale, one that my friends are tired of hearing, but one that bears repeating upon publication of this chilling biography.

There were 90 of us at the Ozark Baseball Camp in Missouri. For a month we had drilled and played games on fields in a serene mountain valley, all the while anticipating the arrival of Cobb as a guest instructor. “Remember, boys,” we were warned the night before, “he’s sensitive about the charges that he was a dirty player.” Of course, that was the first question asked--”Mister Cobb, is it true that you used to spike other players?”--and Cobb slammed his palm on a Ping-Pong table in the recreation room and blurted, “You’re damned right I did, and I’d do it again.” He proceeded to cite perpetrators, dates and how he “got the bastard.”

And that, apparently, was Cobb on his best behavior. Behind him lay a path of destruction, both on the field and off, that would send psychiatrists scrambling for new definitions of psychotic behavior and would have given even an Adolf Hitler pause. All in one violent package, Cobb was a sociopath of the first rank. Paranoid, racist, belligerent, mean beyond our wildest nightmares, he delivered thrashings to umpires, opposing players, teammates, fans, his wives and children, clubhouse attendants, policemen, bartenders, cab drivers, hotel desk clerks, even dogs and horses. It is quite likely that he killed at least one man. And yet the fleas come with the dog, for Cobb also became, arguably, the greatest baseball player who ever lived, setting 123 records in his career and becoming a charter member of the Baseball Hall of Fame on a near-unanimous vote.

This is the definitive book on Cobb, the primary source for the recently released movie of the same title starring Tommy Lee Jones, and there is a fascinating story behind it. In the winter of 1960, a veteran sportswriter named Al Stump felt “distinctly honored” to be asked by the great man to collaborate on his memoirs. He had heard all of the “locker-room stories” about Cobb but regarded them as “the usual scandalmongering you get in sports.” Almost immediately, though, he was warned by Cobb’s family and ex-teammates not to accept the task. “You’ll never finish (the book) and you might get hurt,” said one, telling of the time Cobb broke the nose of a female in-law with a baseball bat when she crossed him. Cobb was more dangerous than ever now: old, drunk, dying, armed with a Luger pistol, hiding behind electrified fences in an isolated hunting lodge above Lake Tahoe. “Look out he doesn’t blow up some night and clip you with a bottle,” said an old Detroit Tiger from the ‘20s. “He specializes in throwing bottles.”

The warnings came to pass from the moment Stump moved in with Cobb. “To get along with me, don’t increase my tension,” Cobb told him, so Stump “slept with one eye open, ready to move fast if necessary.” Stump doubled as Cobb’s biographer and nursemaid in a chaotic year that included wild midnight rides to the gambling tables of Reno in Cobb’s black limousine, gunshots, booze, shouting matches and, yes, bottle-throwing. They also traveled to Cobb’s second mansion, in Atherton, Calif., and to his boyhood home in a little town north of Atlanta called Royston; and somehow they got enough work done to complete “My Life in Baseball: The True Record,” a whitewash, published in 1961, that wasn’t the true record at all.

The true story would come a year later, after Cobb’s death, when Stump wrote an award-winning piece for True magazine about his time with Cobb--”Ty Cobb’s Wild 10-Month Fight to Live”--which led him to finish this book nearly three decades later. That piece serves as the opening chapter of “Cobb,” showing us the lion in winter, and what follows is a superb chronicle of Cobb’s life and times. It is, at once, a frightening ride to the heights of baseball splendor and to the edge of madness.

The central question is, of course, why? What made Ty Cobb the demon and the overachiever that he became? He had exhibited a violent nature during his teen-age years at the turn of the century--idolizing Napoleon, despising black people in the post-Civil War South, picking fights over nothing--but there is little doubt that the pivotal event of his life came when his beloved father was shotgunned to death by his mother. William Herschel Cobb, a respected farmer and schoolmaster, suspected his wife of fooling around and was spying through her bedroom window when Amanda Cobb let go with both barrels. Young Ty was playing for Augusta of the Sally League when it happened, the very week he was to be called up by the Detroit Tigers after less than 200 games in the minors, and it hardened him forever. “To me,” writes Stump, “it seems that the violent death of a dominating father whom a sensitive, highly talented boy loved and feared deeply, engendered, through some strangely supreme desire to vindicate that ‘saintly’ father, the most violent, successful, thoroughly maladjusted personality ever to pass across American sports. The shock ticked the eighteen-year-old’s mind, making him capable of incredible feats.”

Those feats are enumerated in full here, from his debut with the Tigers in 1905 through his final year as player-manager with the Philadelphia Athletics in ‘28, interwoven with an off-the-field life of mythical proportions. Hated and feared by everyone, even his teammates, he began sleeping with a pistol and hectoring anyone who got in his way. He led the American League in batting 12 times, gave new meaning to the phrase, “a threat on the basepaths,” and probably single-handedly affected the outcome of more games than any player in history. Fearful of being poor, like his schoolteacher father, he invested wisely and became a millionaire at age 40. When Tyrus Jr. began to founder at Princeton, Cobb took a train to New Jersey and thrashed him with a bullwhip. He played poker at the White House, dined alone at Toots Shor’s in New York, bullied his way out of charges that he had gambled on baseball games, was cut off from his two wives and five children for his cruelty to them; and toward the end of his long and fretful life, around the time of his visit to the Ozark Baseball Camp, he was trying to make some sort of peace by funding an educational program for poor kids and endowing a hospital in his hometown.

At the very end, though, he died alone. When he checked into a hospital in Atlanta for the last time, in June of 1961, he “undressed under his own power, placed a brown paper bag full of stocks, bonds, and other securities worth some $1 million on a bedside table, and atop that his Luger pistol.” He died six weeks later, at 74, and when his coffin was borne to the family mausoleum in Royston only three old big-league players and a band of Little Leaguers were present. In contrast with the outpouring over the death of his bitter rival, the fun-loving Babe Ruth, when a quarter of a million people filed past his casket at Yankee Stadium, “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.” One wonders whether he would have preferred it that way; for, to Cobb, paying homage to any man was a sign of weakness.