Baseball's Evil Genius

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Toward the end of Cobb, the hero suddenly starts coughing up blood. Death, which until now has been a second baseman to be charged, spiked and upended, is not going to drop the ball this time. It is a new experience for Ty Cobb. He has never encountered anything his psychopathic aggressiveness couldn't overwhelm. Tommy Lee Jones's utterly incautious performance -- he's pure attack dog -- permits his character a moment of naked panic. Then he looks in the mirror and accepts his fate, and calmly calls the hospital.

No one will ever confuse writer-director Ron Shelton's new film with The Pride of the Yankees. It is not really a baseball movie or a biopic at all. It is a meditation on the nature of genius, which is not a word we usually apply to ballplayers, even great ones. But that's how Ty Cobb saw himself, and that's how he wanted to be remembered. To that end, in the last year of his life, he hired a sportswriter named Al Stump to help him write his autobiography. Cobb's orders were to ignore anything in his life that did not directly relate to his career. A few flashbacks aside, Shelton's film records the battle of wills between this mad old man and an amanuensis (a wonderfully befuddled Robert Wuhl), whose motives (he needs the money but wants to write the truth) and emotions toward his subject are exquisitely mixed.

Cobb once held some 40 major-league hitting and base-running records, and his lifetime batting average (.367) remains unsurpassed. Aside from that, he had everything to hide: unquestionably a womanizer, a wife beater and a venomous racist, he was possibly a murderer and a fixer of ball games. But if he did not want all that written down for posterity, he did not otherwise deny who and what he was. He flaunted his nature in the same way he flaunted his talent on the playing field -- with vicious abandon. His only virtue was his total lack of hypocrisy. His isolation when the cheering stopped was the price he proudly paid for greatness, and he would mouth no pieties to assuage his loneliness.

In this, perhaps, he had no choice. The man either had a genetic screw loose or was irreparably damaged by the fact that his mother (or maybe her lover) killed his revered father with a shotgun when he was 17. In telling this story, Shelton (creator as well of quite a different baseball tale, Bull Durham) had no choice either. To cop some psychological plea for Cobb, to sentimentalize him would have been impossible. You have to allow him his monstrousness, and hope that honest people will find something of their worst selves in his manic cynicism and endless misanthropy.

Many won't be able to. They can justify their fastidiousness by observing that this is a messy movie, sometimes repetitive, sometimes too compressed and allusive. But that's like saying Ty Cobb was not a very good sport -- irrelevant in comparison to the horrific fascination of his story.