Thanks to Facebook’s massive servers, today I received a ”memory” of something I posted five years ago. It was an article written by Charles Leerhsen, a graduate school of journalism professor and former editor for Sports Illustrated and People magazines. He has also written for numerous newspapers and authored a number of books.
The article, based on a speech he gave at Hillsdale College, was about the baseball player named Ty Cobb. Kind-of.
What it was really about was the reputation that Ty Cobb has had since his death in 1961. He is well known as having been a racist and a dirty player.
Except that he wasn’t.
Leerhsen thought Cobb’s reputation as a bad guy was true. Then he started doing journalistic research. What he found was that there was nothing to support the commonly accepted allegations against Cobb. In fact, he found the opposite to be true, in some cases.
Was Cobb a racist? No. He attended Negro League games, and as desegregation of baseball was at hand he said, “The Negro should be accepted wholeheartedly, and not grudgingly.” “The Negro has the right to play professional baseball and whose [sic] to say he has not?”
That isn’t surprising, since he came from a family of Georgia abolitionists. His great-grandfather was run out of town for his abolitionist views, and his grandfather refused to serve in the Confederate army because of his.
So, why did famous documentarian Ken Burns describe Cobb as a racist? Well, Charles Alexander wrote a biography about Cobb, and in it he cited fights Cobb had with three black men. Leerhsen researched the black men with whom Cobb fought and discovered that two of the three were actually white. Cobb fought with a lot of people because he was thin-skinned. Fighting isn’t a good thing, of course, but it’s far less troubling than being a racist. Ken Burns used Alexander’s information without checking it, and I guess he had no reason to believe he should. Now, the millions of people who have seen Burns’ Baseball documentary also see Cobb as a racist.
Cobb was an amazing player who still holds many records and was the first player elected to the hall of fame (by 98% of the players who voted). But Leerhsen’s speech wasn’t about Cobb. It was about things we believe… things we’ve been told are true, that aren’t.
What have you been told about modern day politicians and celebrities that might turn out not to be true if it were researched? What things do we believe about a person because “that’s the kind of person he is,” when it turns out, he isn’t. Or she isn’t. Making up plausible lies seems acceptable, as long as those lies are about the “right” people.
A newspaper man named Al Stump ghostwrote an autobiography for the aging Cobb. He mostly made things up. Cobb was furious, and was in the process of suing the publisher when he died. Then, after his death, Stump wrote another book about Cobb that depicted him badly. Most baseball historians don’t take those books seriously, but still they are out there for a new generation to read.
Baseball and baseball players aren’t really very important in the scheme of things. What is important is a person’s reputation. It is really a shame when, through malicious intent, self-aggrandizement, or laziness journalists or pundits or attorneys general ruin someone’s reputation forever.
If you’d like to read the essay/speech by Leerhsen, it’s at
Peter Wallace Writes 