Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty
Whether Charles Leerhsen's 2015 biography of Ty Cobb is designed to rehabilitate the famous baseball star's reputation or to tarnish that of Al Stump is problematic. Stump ghost-wrote Cobb's autobiography, and then wrote a famous (notorious?) piece for "True" magazine entitled, "Ty Cobb's Wild 10-Month Fight to Live". The "True" essay has been anthologized many times, often in such anthologies as "Greatest Sports Stories of the 20th century". It depicted Cobb as a drunken maniac, a paranoid jerk, and a racist and sexist.
Stump's "autobiography" of Cobb was published after Cobb died, in part because the dying baseball star tried to suppress it and claimed that Stump made most of it up. Leershen agrees, and claims Stump also invented most of the True piece. A 1990's movie about Cobb starring Tommy Lee Jones was based on Stump's book, and Stump served as a consultant to the film. Stump also profited from selling Cobb memorabilia, much of which he forged, and some of which he may have obtained illegally (acc. Leerhsen).
Was Cobb a racist? The "Georgia Peach" probably was, by today's standards, but he came from a line of abolitionists; his great grandfather and grandfather opposed slavery, and his father (a State Senator) fought successfully against a popular proposed law demanding that only taxes collected from black Georgians could be used to fund the (segregated) black schools, which would have made those schools even worse than they already were. Cobb played exhibitions against Negro League teams and supported Jackie Robinson's integration of the Major Leagues.
Did Cobb kill three people? There's no record of it, except from Stump.
In addition, Stump clearly invented several of the scenes in "Fight to Live", including the moving scene where the dying Cobb sits by his future tomb in the snow and asks Stump to pray with him (it didn't snow that entire month in Georgia).
Baseball fans probably know that Cobb's mother shot and killed his father, shortly before the 18-year-old Cobb was called up to the Majors. But the "facts" most people "know" surrounding the case are inexplicably incorrect. Stump claimed Amanda shot her husband with a shotgun as he was peering in her second-story window,having climbed a ladder. Supposedly, he had sneaked back home from a supposed business trip to try to catch his wife in adultery. However, a photo of the house (which no longer exists) reveals that it was a single story house, and Cobb's father was killed with a pistol, not a shotgun.
Baseball fans who have read Lawrence Ritter's "The Glory of Their Times" (the great oral history of early baseball) know that Cobb was driven, unpopular with teammates and opponents, and intensely competitive -- but many of the calumnies that have been leveled at him appear to be false, and Stump appears to have been a money-grubbing hack (he made more from the "True" article than he did from the autobiography).
