Posted on 04/12/2016 6:43:36 AM PDT by C19fan
Ty Cobb was one of the greatest baseball players of all time and king of the so-called Deadball Era. He played in the major leagues—mostly for the Detroit Tigers but a bit for the Philadelphia Athletics—from 1905 to 1928, and was the first player ever voted into the Hall of Fame. His lifetime batting average of .366 is amazing, and has never been equaled. But for all that, most Americans think of him first as an awful person—a racist and a low-down cheat who thought nothing of injuring his fellow players just to gain another base or score a run. Indeed, many think of him as a murderer. Ron Shelton, the director of the 1995 movie Cobb, starring Tommy Lee Jones in the title role, told me it was “well known” that Cobb had killed “as many as” three people.
(Excerpt) Read more at imprimis.hillsdale.edu ...
The first major bio of Cobb (long ago) was full of vicious lies. This is well known.
When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
OTOH, the truth always comes to the surface, eventually.
I heard his sister was named Cornonda.
Ty-land?
Ken Burns is a guilty white liberal.
I watched a few minutes of his Baseball documentary and it was only about race relations,
maybe the rest was OK but I couldn’t take it.
Cobb is not as bad of a villan as he was made out to be, just as much as Jackie Robinson was not a Saint.
I wonder who made Ken Burns the ultimate expert of baseball.
George Will?
That is the most correct answer possible, sir!
This is an excellent article of a ballplayer who, like all of us, had his faults but has been maligned in the movies and literature. His competitors did not like him, and Al Stump,his first biographer, Ken Burns, and others piled on, adding the “sin” of racism, when in fact he was probably no more prejudiced than anyone else in his time. Truman, Eisenhower, Roosevelt, and others of Cobb’s contemporaries commonly made observations about blacks, Jews, and others not of European Christian background that would run them out of public life if they said them any time after, say, 1970.
Thanks! It’s always refreshing to see people peer past the curtain, and see Cobb as he truly was. A good read.
It’s a very good read, and a valuable reminder that falsehood oft repeated is still falsehood. Our culture is flooded with an absolute sewer of falsehood so bad that it even besmirches such trivial things as professional sports.
“Imprimis” is offered in print, gratis, to anyone who asks for it. I have great respect for Hillsdale College.
This guy obviously hasn't studied up on his Joseph Goebbels and Hitler theories concerning the big lie.
Thanks for posting this. I’ve long thought that the nasty caricature of Cobb was true. It was in everything I’d ever read about him. This was an eye opener.
My grandfather ....a Sullivan from Sullivans Hollow in Mississippi
Played early league in southeast against Cobb before Cobb took off
He knew him and they both went off with Pershing around the same time
He said Cobb played hard and liked to fight and wasn’t affable
Cobb came up hard
Not the first revisionist history about Cobb and long overdue. The accusation of racism in particular seems to dissolve every time it is subjected to the slightest scrutiny. And the fellow he supposedly “killed” in 1912 was a mugger who was apparently not even seriously injured. I think a major apology is owed by Will and Burns for presenting themselves as authorities on the topic.
I’m so glad to hear another side of the Ty Cobb controversy. He was, and perhaps always will be, the greatest baseball player of all time.
The entire world and all history has been reinterpreted as an eternal conflict between the reactionary "rednecks" and the oppressed, progressive Blacks. Certainly this has now become the main narrative of "American history" as now taught and even talked about. It's a sort of supersessionism, with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson being replaced by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
The really ironic thing in all this is that Blacks are among the very oldest and most native population groups in the country, unlike all the groups celebrated along side them. Plus they are of rural, Southern, agricultural, and Fundamentalist Protestant origins and traditions. Not that you can tell by their political activity and their leadership. As much as I detest liberals and liberalism, they could not have been transformed into the "ultimate otherness" without a lot of actual racism and atrocities committed against them over the centuries.
It's a d@rn shame all around.
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