The Real Ty Cobb

[Draggingtree]

The Real Ty Cobb

By Norman Black on Oct 2, 2018

A Review of Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, by Charles Leerhsen, (Simon & Schuster, 2015).

Baseball fans familiar with major league records remember Ty Cobb for his .366 lifetime batting average during the dead-ball era. Some may even remember that he held more than 90 baseball records.

During his career, Cobb was the idol of millions of fans and received bushels of letters asking advice about how children could get into the game and other baseball-related questions. He answered most letters and sometimes sent a pamphlet with pointers in it or a picture. When someone asked for his autograph, he invariably said how flattered he felt.

Cobb died in 1961, and the story of his life was quickly re-written to cast him as a belligerent, southern, racist monster. Leerhsen, in a talk at Hillsdale College in 2016, said that he also thought this was true, that is until he began to research sources that previous Cobb biographers had ignored. That research revealed a totally different Cobb than portrayed in books and a Hollywood movie after his death.      https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/review/the-real-ty-cobb/

[Guest Lenagich]

But the Ring obeyed in most things his true master, and that was not necessarily the person wearing it. I had thought it unlikely that Frodo would possess the power to bend the Ring to his wishes and so to influence Gollum. But it is an interesting thought.