Cobb [DVD]

In besmirching the memory of Ty Cobb, whether intentionally or not, the producers of the cable TV movie COBB (1994) as proxies for sportswriter Al Stump, have actually added to the Georgia Peach's legend. It happens early in the story.Right after Al Stump (played wonderfully by Robert Wuhl) meets with Cobb (Tommy Lee Jones in one of his finest performances) at the ex-ballplayer's Nevada manse, there's a scene where the old man takes one shot with a long barreled revolver at a buck that has wandered onto his property. He does so from a second floor window and fires into a pitch dark night. The deer bolts away as Ty announces proudly that he's shot the animal's throat out. Of course Stump scoffs at this, but later he finds the dead buck on Cobb's snow-covered lawn, bloody fur near its throat.By inference, Cobb's keen eye and hand coordination are undiminished, even at age 72. I've read in several biographies that Ty quit baseball at age 42 because his knees were wrecked and his reflexes had slowed. So this story is apocryphal, but it helps to cue us that what's ahead is a piece of fiction about the arguably greatest player to ever set foot on a diamond.So, I enjoy this movie for what it is: sports-related entertainment. It's a personal favorite.Ty, "Stumpy" and Cobb's baseball cronies are all presented here as very flawed human beings. The other players publicly honor his career at a Cooperstown dinner but in private they tell Tyrus to go to hell. Even Mickey Cochrane, whom Cobb supported for years, gives his benefactor the thumb when Ty attempts to crash a hotel room party being attended by other Hall of Famers.Comic relief kudos go to Lou Myers as Willie, the great man's outspoken ex-servant. In a hilarious moment while Cobb, Stump and Willie are careening down a snow-clogged twisty mountain road on their way to Reno, Will sits in the car's back seat and trashes Cobb's ballplaying, naming --his-- choices for the best in every category that Ty excelled in. Not surprising, none of Willie's preferences are white. His story of Cool Papa Bell is the movie's funniest moment.Louis Prima and Keely Smith lookalikes, entertaining a late-night Reno audience, are another highlight. Ty manages to co-opt their show, and brings it to a screeching halt with his racism and vulgarities.Lolita Davidovich also gets a nod as casino cigarette girl Ramona. Her encounter with Stump and Cobb has a general ring of truth to it. Trying to bed an attractive but shy fellow (Stump), Ramona gets too drunk. Just as they're becoming friendly in Al's room, Cobb comes crashing in, totally out of control. He knocks the sportswriter unconscious and drags "his girl" back to his own room. It's the sort of dangerous situation that has probably occurred untold times. This actress handles a very tough scene like a pro. Our sympathies are with Ramona as she flees half-naked from Ty and Al, cursing them both, clearly sobered and perhaps wisened up.At story's end, we don't like Al Stump nearly as much as we did at its beginning. Ty Cobb is dead, in his own words, "misunderstood in his genius, as genius always is." He died rich in money yet destitute for lack of friends. The great tragedy is, on-field acheivements, and they are considerable, were all that mattered to the universally despised Tyrus Raymond Cobb. As he stated in the autobiography ghosted by Stump: "Baseball was everything to me."It's too bad people didn't matter, even a tiny bit, to this man.

Make no mistake: this is Tommy Lee Jones' vehicle. Cobb was a larger than life icon both on and off the field, the first superstar in American sports, and Jones plays him larger than life.This movie, based on Al Stump's second biography of Tiger great Tyrus Raymond Cobb, is the biography Stump didn't release after Cobb's death in 1961 - that was the cleaned up version, the version Cobb wanted published, that talked of the nuts and bolts of baseball: how to steal second base, how to hit to the opposite field - all the things Cobb felt the public wanted to read about from one of the game's "immortals."It wasn't until the 1990s, shortly before Stump's own death, that his second biography of Cobb was released, the one that painted the darkest depths of Cobb's very complex character. He was a man driven by inner demons who, only in the end, revealed to Stump, the highest paid sports writer of that era, some of what haunted him. Stump spent several months with Cobb shortly before his death to write the story as Cobb wanted it written, but late at night he wrote the other version.Cobb was a monster, but the viewer is unable to look away, which only serves to peel away another layer of this movie: our fascination with greatness, our inability to look away, to deny ugliness in an effort to glimpse or brush up against greatness. When Stump threatens to quit before the book is finished, the result of Cobb's constant abuse and manipulation, Cobb tells him: "You won't quit. You've never been this close to greatness."Jones' performance in Cobb is nothing short of brilliant: some of his expressions reveal more about Cobb's character than many other, less accomplished actors, could reveal even with a page of dialogue. When Cobb pulls up in front of his daughter's home (he hasn't seen her in 15 years), she looks out the window, recognizes her father, and pulls down the shade and closes the curtains, and the viewer aches for the pain Jones reveals in his simple expression.We see Cobb as the consummate showman: "Do you know what it's like to have 50,000 fans boo and throw things at you?" he asks Stump. "It's the greatest feeling in the world." We see him at his worst: at a Reno nightclub, where he walks onstage to a cheering crowd enamored with seeing a living legend of the game, only to, within minutes, clear the room with racist slurs. We see him beat his wife and pistol whip to death in an alley a man he would later claim tried to rob him (he was later acquitted, largely in part because of his celebrity status - shades of O.J. and Kolbe Bryant). We watch him jump into the stands to beat up a fan who had no hands.And still we are unable to look away. What causes a man to act in such a way?We get a glimpse of some of Cobb's goodness: he left the largest portion of his fortune - yes, he was immensely wealthy, not so much from his playing days but from his investments in General Motors (ground floor) and Coca Cola ("Invest in Coke, Stumpy, it's coming out in cans.") - to be used to build a children's hospital, and for years he supported Mickey Cochrane, one of the game's all-time greatest catchers, and many other destitute players - "You won't put that in the book," he tells Stump. "But why not?" Stump asks. "Because it would embarrass Mickey."Yet the good cannot justify the many monstrous acts; but Jones' riveting performance brings to mind another well-known monster, this one fictional, and the viewer realizes that monsters are not so much born but created, as was the Frankenstein monster, who, like Cobb, only sought to be loved and accepted. Yes, Cobb's monstrous behavior was due in part to our acceptance of that behavior, our willingness to look the other way in the presence of greatness. A telling moment in Cobb has him confessing to Stump: "You're the best friend I have."Only in the end do we get a glimpse of what fueled Cobb's demons, a glimpse into a childhood that left him marked for a lifetime, that both drove him to greatness on the ball field while at the same time prevented him from achieving intimacy with anyone - wife, lover, team mate: "But a man must defend his mother at all times, shouldn't he, Al?"Cobb was a pathetic man, worse than a curmudgeon, unable to give up his past achievements on the field, a feared and hated competitor, unable, even in his 70s, to allow another man to best him, loathed even by his own children; yet thanks to Jones' portrayal, Stump's book and Ron Shelton's brilliant screenplay, we find that he is also pitiable.Robert Wuhl is cast as Al Stump and his performance is good, while Lolita Davidovich is the Reno cigarette girl to whom the impotent Cobb, on medication for high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer and half a dozen other ailments, gives $1,000 to tell everyone that she slept with "the great Ty Cobb." Roger Clemens, the real-life pitcher, makes a cameo appearance as an opposing pitcher in a flashback to a game played during Cobb's prime, and Ernie Harwell, Hall of Fame announcer for the Detroit Tigers, also makes a cameo appearance in a scene at a Hall of Fame banquet.If you're looking for a baseball movie, a how to steal second base or hit to the opposite field movie, look elsewhere, but for the human drama of a real life monster and a glimpse into the dark side of the human psyche, both the monster's as well as our own, Cobb is highly recommended.

To me, this movie is a dark comedy. Ty Cobb is obviously a racist, abusive mean spirited human being who also happens to be a baseball legend. This movie is about Cobb off the field during his last days as he plans an autobiography on his baseball career. Throughout the movie, he is verbally and physically abusive to those around him. Tommy Lee Jones manages to make his character, at times, sympathetic towards the end of the film as he gets sicker and sicker from one of his many illnesses. This does not change the fact that Ty Cobb was a vicious human being and writer/director Ron Shelton writes the character in a way that makes him funny in some ways. I can't imagine this movie being what it is without Tommy Lee Jones. Jones tends to play arogant know-it-all characters in movies and this one tops them all. This movie was not a hit because of limited release(40 theaters instead of the planned 400 according to Shelton's commentary) but it is easily one of the best movies made about baseball and the people who play the game. Without a doubt Tommy Lee Jones' best performance. Worth taking the time to watch despite the wretched character he portrays in the movie.