Who Was Ty Cobb? – Part 2

Who Was Ty Cobb? The History We Know That’s Wrong

The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on March 7, 2016, during a program on “Sports and Character” sponsored by the College’s Center for Constructive Alternatives.

When I pitched my idea for a book on Cobb to Simon and Schuster, I was squarely in line with this way of thinking. I figured my task would be relatively easy. I would go back to the original source material—the newspaper accounts, documents, and letters that previous biographers had never really looked at. I would find fresh examples of Cobb being monstrous, blend them with the stories that Al Stump and others wrote, and come up with the first major Cobb book in more than 20 years. But when I started in on the nuts-and-bolts research with original sources—the kind of shoe-leather reporting I had learned working at Newsweek in its heyday—it didn’t even take me ten minutes to find something that brought me up short.

Cobb being from Georgia—he grew up and is buried in Royston, a town in Georgia’s northern hills—I had begun by searching old issues of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I quickly came across a curious article written in late 1911, after the baseball season had ended, when Cobb was touring in a three-act comedy called The College Widow. (In those days, ballplayers were tied to their teams by the reserve clause and couldn’t sell their services for their true market value; to make extra money, they often capitalized on their fame by appearing in plays or vaudeville.) The writer of the article was recounting a backstage visit with Cobb, and described him as a man who very much wanted to please the audience. Cobb was also going out of his way to accommodate the interviewer (who was asking tedious questions) while simultaneously being hospitable to a second guest—a catcher he had played with in the minor leagues—who showed up in the small dressing room smoking a cigar. It was like the crowded stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, and meanwhile the play was in progress, Cobb was trying to make costume changes, and the stage manager was barking at Cobb to be on his mark in 30 seconds.

What did this story say about Ty Cobb? On the one hand, he was just doing what any decent person would do—being as polite as possible under trying circumstances. But on the other, Cobb’s ordinary decency was exactly the point. For me, with this one story, the myth of the evil Ty Cobb began to crumble.

This is Part Two of a multi-part series. Keep watch for the next installment!