By
Manimal Lector
Dead Rebel Of The Week
~ Ty Cobb ~
Three words come to mind when I hear the name “Ty Cobb”.
Mean.
Competitor.
Driven.
The man symbolized the drive for perfection. Compared to Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth was just another walking fat fuck who had gotten so out of playing shape that he couldn’t even tie his shoes because of the girth of his waistline.
Ty Cobb would have none of that. He was the son of a Georgia schoolteacher who later became a Georgia state Senator. The elder Cobb never wanted Ty to play baseball, but seeing the streak of stubbornness that ran deep in the Cobb family within his son, Father Cobb spoke these immortal words the day that Ty left for Anniston: “Don’t come home a failure.”
And he didn’t.
He left home, going to the Anniston Steelers. Within three months he moved back to the Augusta Tourists, the first team for which he had ever played. Cobb hit for shit the rest of the year, a measly .237, but asked for a raise immediately after the season ended. He got his raise. He would even go so far as to send telegrams to the Atlanta Journal newspaper, under alias names, to drum up support for himself. The self-propaganda paid off, as the next year he was sold to the Detroit Tigers for the staggering sum of 750 bucks.
Twenty-one days before he was to start in center field for the Detroit Tigers, at the age of 19, his mother killed his father. There have been numerous reports of her motive, but the one piece of evidence is fact: Mrs. Cobb was caught with another man and Mr. Cobb had his suspicions. He waited until a night he said he was to be working late and parked his car a mile from their house. Slowly he walked up and peaked through the glass. He sat and watched his wife get fucked by another man and walked in. There was never a shred of evidence that the man shot him, because Mrs. Cobb said that the two shots that hit the elder Cobb’s chest were from her shotgun. She would later be acquitted of manslaughter due to her testimony that she thought an intruder was walking in the house; a house in which she was alone, by herself.
A man driven.
On August 30, 1905, Ty Cobb made his pro debut. There were only 41 games in the season. He still couldn’t hit, and served a weak .240 batting average. It only took one winter to get Cobb out of his batting funk. The next year he would end up hitting .320. It would be the last time he would ever hit that low – an average low that, in the present day, earns Alex Rodriquez 25 million dollars PER YEAR.The one black mark that Cobb did have that year happened during spring training. He and a black groundskeeper argued, ending up with Cobb choking the groundskeeper’s wife, who had gotten into the middle of the scuffle. Cobb came from the Deep South and a state that had only been free of slaves not even 30 years before he was born. The racist sentiments would haunt Cobb on more than one occasion.
Cobb continued to wreak havoc on the American League with his bats and with his cocky, arrogant ways.
In 1911, he hit an amazing .420, a stat that will never be touched. By 1912, the record was tarnished, however, when at New York he jumped into the crowd, beating a man so badly that he barely escaped dying. If people had not pulled Ty off of him surely he would have ended up in the same position as his Mother. The movie “Cobb,” dramatized the incident as Cobb walking in front of the guy and the guy telling him that he sucked. The true story was that the guy stood up, yelled out, “Your Mother fucks niggers,” and then Cobb jumped into the stands. The worst part was the man only had one arm.
Cobb would continue his mean streaks, even going so far as to take a file and grind his spikes to the point of being as sharp as a fresh razor. Count six spikes on each shoe and I dare you to be the one to try and tag him out. His mean streak would follow him around every base path and every bar from Detroit to New York.
In 1921, with only 16 years in the Majors, Ty Cobb hit for his 3,000th hit. With all the records that he had, or broke, he could still never shake the mystique of Babe Ruth. With Ruth in his prime in 1920, Cobb wondered how anyone who drank, fucked, and ate as much as Ruth did could ever see a ball, much less hit one. Ruth was notorious for eating 12 hot dogs at a time, drinking gallons of beer in one sitting and waking up with two or more cheap whores in his bed. And that was with a game the same day.
As the years dwindled down, Cobb finally put to rest the rumor of retirement when, in 1928, he finally called it quits. During his career he made more money than any pro athlete could have dreamed of, and he invested wisely. He was one of the first people to buy stock in a small soda company called Coca-Cola. Cobb ended up owning three bottling plants and 20,000 shares of the company. But all the money in the world would not begrudge Cobb any friends or keep his marriages intact. He was the grumpy bastard that everyone hated, but not as much as the grumpy bastard hated himself.
Ty Cobb was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame with the largest amount of votes ever, a 98.2 percent validation rate. Until Tom Seaver was inducted in 1992, no other player had gotten more. Even through the years, when Cobb would go back to the Hall everyone cringed at the thought of Cobb being there. His game was never to be tarnished, but the minute he turned his back, the knives in his back were thrown by the dozens. Other retired players simply could never forget the way Cobb treated them while playing. It’s hard to shake a man’s hand when his spikes tried to mame the hand with which you shook, for life.
By the late 1950’s, Cobb would be diagnosed with prostate cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, and degenerative kidneys. By 1961, he was spending all of his time at the hospital, taking cobalt treatments to slow the spread of cancer, which was eating his spine away along with his brain. When he made his last check in to the Emory Hospital in June of 1961, he carried a million dollars and his Luger pistol.
On July 17, 1961 Cobb finally passed away. Maybe the saddest part of his life was not the living part, but the actual death. Once loved, and hated, by millions of people only three actual baseball players showed up to his funeral. Only nine of his family members showed up, including his first wife, Charlie. Even in death Babe Ruth would have the last laugh, as his funeral, 1948, brought millions of people to his showing. Cobb had alienated everyone he knew, including his own sons and daughters, to the point that they would claim they never had a father.
There are plenty of ways, if you read all of this, to take in Ty Cobb.
Mean, arrogant, deceitful, and cocky.
Winner, hard worker, never gives up, never give in; beat the bastards at any cost.
Take your pick.
Manimal Lector
