Summary

As a boy in the 1890s he went looking for thrills, jumping off barn roofs and walking tightropes in a rural Georgia that still burned with humiliation from the Civil War.

As a boy in the 1890s he went looking for thrills, jumping off barn roofs and walking tightropes in a rural Georgia that still burned with humiliation from the Civil War. As an old man in the 1960s he dared death, careening drunk along icy roads late at night; he picked fights, refused to take his medicine, and drove off all his friends and admirers. He went to his deathbed alone, clutching a loaded pistol and a bag containing millions of dollars worth of cash and securities. During the years in between, he became, according to the author of this new biography, "the most shrewd, inventive, lurid, detested, mysterious, and superb of all baseball players". He was Ty Cobb. In Cobb, author Al Stump tells how he was given a fascinating window into the Georgia Peach's life and times when the dying Cobb hired him in 1960 to ghost-write his autobiography. From those months with Cobb came Cobb's 1961 My Life in Baseball, a carefully sanitized justification of Cobb's life and career that was published shortly after the Hall-of-Famer's death. But much of what Cobb told him, and the darker side of Cobb's life, went unreported and untold. Until now.