My Life in Baseball: The True Record
by Ty Cobb, Al Stump
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Book Summary Information
Author: Al Stump, Ty CobbIntroduction: Charles C. Alexander
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1993-01-01
ISBN: 0803263597
Number of pages: 315
Publisher: Bison Books
Book Reviews of My Life in Baseball: The True Record
Book Review: Fascinating introspection
Summary: 5 Stars
It is well-known that Cobb used this autobiography as a means to shape his public image in a manner consistent in which he viewed himself, a noble honorable gentleman of the wrongfully subjugated South striving to be the greatest ballplayer ever. He takes liberties with the truth frequently attempting to justify his behavior from a victim's position, wrongfully accused and persecuted. On the surface this may seem to be an ordinary human response. However, in Cobb's case, the noble heights to which he attempts to project his intentions are fascinating. He tries to impress upon the reader that he was a success in everything he did--as an entrepreneur, a ballplayer, a war hero, golfer, celebrity, and man of politics, sophistication and aristrocracy. He even attempts to make the reader believe that he would be remarkable in any venture that he tried.
Read together with Stump's later companion biography entitled Cobb, a more complete picture of his life is formed. Cobb was a man maniacally driven to success by a deep fear of failure and being ordinary. He was rancorous and often hostile, intolerant of those he considered his inferior and likely very self-absorbed. What makes his story so fascinating is the perfect storm effect of it. Cobb was born in the heart of Dixie to a relatively well-regarded family a decade after the end of Reconstruction. He excelled in a game that was barely past its infancy and had not yet reached maturity or any sense of social respectability. The game was a regional sport focused in the Northeast, the southern and western most city was St. Louis. His rise to athletic fame occurred in a city (Detroit) where one of America's most important industries was just beginning to take rise. His alienation from his teammates, many of whom he shared a mutual dislike for due to religious and regional differences, allowed him to network with an auto entrepreneurial crowd as his athletic fame grew. Later, similar man meets moment opportunities arose in his life during WWI and when a Georgia pharmacist invented Coca-Cola. From a macro standpoint, he represented the New South and its engagement of the new 20th century.
As alluded to with Stump's later companion book, Cobb takes liberties with the truth casting himself in a more positive light. The same liberties may have been taken in the opposite direction with Stump's second book, as Stump himself was recognized as a somewhat self-serving promoter of his own work and may have accentuated the truth for his own benefit. Regardless, the actual truth probably lies somewhere between the two and each in their own right are fascinating looks at a deeply complex man.
Summary of My Life in Baseball: The True Record
"Highly successful in knitting together this story of the life of a most remarkable and dedicated player - perhaps the most spirited baseball player ever to have graced the diamond." - "Library Journal". "I find little comfort in the popular picture of Cobb as a spike-slashing demon of the diamond with a wide streak of cruelty in his nature. The fights and feuds I was in have been steadily slanted to put me in the wrong...My critics have had their innings. I will have mine now." - Ty Cobb. "Frank, bitter, trend-setting autobiography." - "USA Today Baseball Weekly". "One of the most remarkable sports books ever written." - "Los Angeles Daily News". "The old Tiger still spits and snarls off the pages." - "Cooperstown Review". "Of Ty Cobb let it be said simply that he was the world's greatest ballplayer." - "New York Herald Tribune" (1961 editorial on Cobb's death). This Bison Book edition of "My Life in Baseball" is introduced by Charles C. Alexander, a professor of history at Ohio University, Athens, and the author of a "Biography of Ty Cobb".One of sports literature's great whitewashes and cover-ups, Ty Cobb's autobiography is anything but the "true record" of its titular claim. Cobb was as haunted and complex a man as has ever sharpened a pair of spikes, and, in his 70s, when he sat down to tell his story, he simply didn't want the whole of his truth revealed; he preferred to perpetuate his legend. What results, then, is a flawed fairy tale filled with colorful anecdotes and reminiscences that duck the demons that fueled Cobb's inspired play like a pitcher trying to hide from a line drive smashed in the direction of his eyeballs.
Interestingly, the story behind the book is far more raucous and compelling than the book itself. Cobb, as violent and demanding at the end of his life as he was in his playing heyday, virtually kidnapped Stump (one of the most honored sports writers of the late '50s and early '60s), subjecting almost every word and observation to Cobb's approval. Stump finally exacted his literary pound of flesh years later when he slid spikes high into Cobb's ghost with the publication of his marvelously rich--and real--accounting of Cobb's life in Cobb: A Biography. Stump not only nicked the fuzz off the Georgia Peach in that second effort, he recounted the harrowing circumstances behind the first. Together, the two books provide a fascinating prism into a man's life and legacy, the first volume bending the light to diffuse the truth, the second straightening it out to preserve it. --Jeff Silverman
Cobb, Ty Books
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