Word: cobbs
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Cobb says Massie, who was a surprise winner of the lieutenant governor nomination, has little confidence in pre-election surveys...