THE SINGLE MOST difficult thing about being a sports writer is the psychoanalysis that many link inexorably with the profession. The style of journalism brought to art form level by Frank Deford, and lowered to a notch somewhere below that by Dave Kindred, that delves into the human psyche, defines behavior, and attaches labels, has always left me confused. Confused because no one is the same two days in a row, let alone two seasons in a row.
As a sports writer you get asked all the time questions such as, "What's Karl Malone like? Is he a nice guy or is he a jerk?" "Is John Stockton a good guy?" "What's Rick Majerus really like?" And so on. Difficult questions unless you've walked in their moccasins. I don't even know how Karl Malone manages to always have a two-day's growth of beard, let alone anything definitive about his personality profile. Although I can say this: In the locker room after a game, he is generally in a better mood after a win than after a loss.I bring all this up because I went to the movies the other night and saw "Cobb," the story about baseball legend Ty Cobb that portrays the lifetime .367 hitter as a person with two sides: one dark, the other darker. Tommy Lee Jones does a terrific job playing Cobb as he abuses virtually everyone and everything in his path, including, but not limited to, cars, buildings, deer, night clubs, women, minorities, alcohol, sports writers, his family, and last but not least Mickey Cochrane himself.
First, Pete Rose breaks Cobb's all-time hits record, and now this.
The credibility for "Cobb" comes from Al Stump, the real life sports writer who accompanied Cobb on a 10-month journey in 1960 while writing his biography. At the end of that journey Cobb died and Stump dutifully wrote the "authorized" Ty Cobb biography, "My Life in Baseball," which was published in 1961.
It wasn't until later that Stump wrote another, more personal view of Ty Cobb, first in a magazine article for True and Sport magazine, and, just lately, in a 434-page revised version of the original entitled "Cobb: A Biography."
It is this book that inspired the movie.
Even if he did make him a pile of money in royalties, twice, Al Stump does not think Ty Cobb was a nice guy.
If they had adhered to the tenet that if you can't say something good about someone then don't say anything at all, the movie would be three seconds long.
Certainly Stump's isn't the only evidence that Cobb was a bad boy who went through life with spikes high, and sharpened. Cobb-bashing has been in vogue for decades, and got mainstream movie air time most recently in Field of Dreams, when Shoeless Joe Jackson said Cobb wasn't welcome in Kevin Costner's Iowa ballfield because "we couldn't stand the (expletive) when he was alive, so we told him to stick it."
Cameo tweaks are one thing, but the part that bothers me about a full length movie like "Cobb" is its definitiveness. Its lack of equal time. Its tendency to characterize a person as bad, not just the things he did.
That also obviously bothered a man named Harold Schefski of Long Beach, Calif., who wrote a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times not long after the movie premier of "Cobb."
"In August of 1956, when I was a nine-year-old boy in the San Francisco Bay Area, my friends found Ty Cobb's phone number listed in the Atherton phone book," writes Schefski. "We dialed the number and found the voice on the line kind and receptive. Mr. Cobb invited us to his house, greeted us at the door and gave us a tour. He then wrote out detailed autographs for all four of us and presented them, along with miniature bats with his name inscribed. As he said goodbye to us two hours after our arrival, he kissed the little girl and gave the boys a handshake.
"While the recent film and Al Stump's biography may be well researched and the rumors about Mr. Cobb's racism, misogyny and repressed anger over his mother's shooting of his father may have merit, wouldn't it be better to adhere to Leo Tolstoy's maxim about all men, namely that they are like rivers, deep in some areas, shallow in others. Undoubtedly, I met Ty Cobb on one of his deeper days."
Echoing a similar sentiment, and even more credibility, was Jim Cobb, Ty Cobb's son, who was interviewed this week on National Public Radio and said he wouldn't see the movie because it "distorted" his father's life. An enduring memory of Jim Cobb's is when he returned from World War II and his father met him at the pier with a box of donuts and a cold bottle of milk - "because he knew that's what I liked."
Al Stump's enduring memories are darker than that - memories collected while spending 10 months with a man who had stomach cancer, was going blind, and who was looking at a light at the end of the tunnel that really was a train. When the egocentric Cobb told Stump in 1960 that he would "only hit .290 against today's pitchers. Why? Because I'm 74 years old, that's why," he could have added that he was far from his prime in more ways than that.
Was Ty Cobb a nice guy? Was Ty Cobb a jerk? As with most of us, I'm sure it depended on what day you met him, and where.