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Shop nowCobb
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Learn moreAs a boy in the 1890s, he went looking for thrills in a rural Georgia that still burned with the humiliation of the Civil War. As an old man in the 1960s, he dared death, 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 was, according to Al Stump, "the most shrewd, inventive, lurid, detested, mysterious, and superb of all baseball players." He was Ty Cobb.
Al Stump has redefined America's perception of one of its most famous sports heroes with this gripping look at Ty Cobb, a man who walked the line between greatness and psychosis. Based on Stump's interviews with Cobb while ghostwriting the Hall of Famer's 1961 autobiography, this account of Cobb's life and times reveals both the darkness and the brilliance of the "Georgia Peach".
Al Stump (1916–1995) was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado. During World War II, he was a war correspondent, and afterward he worked as a sportswriter for national and regional publications, including Esquire, the Saturday Evening Post, True Magazine, American Heritage, Los Angeles Magazine, and Sports Illustrated. He wrote—both independently and in collaboration with famous athletes—six books, including Ty Cobb’s My Life in Baseball, Sam Snead’s Education of a Golfer, Champions against Odds, and The Champion Breed. His article, “Ty Cobb’s Wild 10-Month Fight to Live,” written for True Magazine, won the Best American Sport Story award of 1962. It was the basis for the 1994 motion picture Cobb, directed by Ron Shelton.
Ian Esmo is an audiobook narrator who specializes in athlete and sports biographies.
Reviews
“Cobb is a big, raw, rough-cut diamond of a book and the most powerful baseball biography I have read. More than a baseball story, it is an account of life and death. Strong as the baseball scenes are, it is Cobb in his last days—defiant, angry, drunken, prayerful, brave, and desperate to be remembered—that is so haunting and so memorable and so terrifying.”
“The most revealing account we are ever likely to get of a man who is on every sports historian’s short list of baseball’s greatest players.”
“Stump has resurrected Cobb in all his terrifying malevolence…Spellbinding.”
“The most gripping, appalling biography of an athlete I have ever read.”
“Cobb was monomaniacal, and he paid the personal price. But we might say of him, ‘This was a ballplayer!’”
“Cobb: A Biography will stun readers with its brutal candor.”
“Ranks as one of the best baseball biographies of recent years.”
“The definitive biography of this mercurial man. Highly recommended.”
“An extraordinary achievement in sport biography.”
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