Lies When the Truth Doesn't Matter

I recently read an old article about Ty Cobb written in 1961. In case you don’t know, Cobb was a baseball player about a hundred years ago. He was great. When he retired he had more hits than anyone who had ever played the game, and even today only Pete Rose has more.

The man who wrote the article, Al Stump, spent time with Cobb near the end of his life. He portrayed a Cobb so angry, bitter and mean that people could barely stand to be around him. The seventy-five-year-old Cobb confessed to Stump that he killed a man in 1912 on the streets of Detroit when the man tried to mug him. Cobb suffered a knife wound to the back, but he went out the next day and collected two hits in three at-bats. Then he went to the hospital to be treated for the wound.

I always take these stories with a grain of salt. Especially in baseball. I once read a fantastic book about the 1964 World Series by David Halberstam. He interviewed dozens of baseball players for the book, and had some great stories. As I read the book I’d use various baseball and news records of the day to check the veracity of each story. Inevitably I’d discover that the truth behind the story was different from how the ballplayer remembered it. Something similar to his story happened, but it wasn’t exactly his story.

I’ve seen this too many times to count. I don’t think the players or the writers are trying to fool us. I think that everyone who repeats the story honestly thinks it’s the truth. When they look back at their careers, these are the things they remember. It has shaped them into who they are. Whether they’re true or not almost doesn’t matter, because it’s what they’ve accepted as truth.

I have a small example of this from my own life, and it’s been completely unintentional.

When I was a kid, my grandpa used to sing songs whenever my two sisters or I were in the car with him. I think he enjoyed singing the songs, but I think he knew that we enjoyed them also. The lyrics were bizarre, the melodies catchy, and one song in particular has remained with me to this day. I’ve taught it to my own kids. As I’ve taught it to my kids I tell them it’s a song that my grandpa made up, and it’s so silly that anyone would believe that a grandpa would make it up. If you knew my grandpa you’d have no doubt about it.

I learned the song long before I’d ever heard of the internet, and from time-to-time I think about doing a search for the lyrics of my grandpa’s song to see what comes up.

Then I decide not to.

For almost thirty years I’ve thought that my grandpa created this song. I’ve sung the lyrics for other people and no one has ever recognized it. So it’s entirely possible that he did create it. However, if I’ve remembered the lyrics for thirty years, it’s also possible that he remembered them for thirty, or fifty or sixty years and the song isn’t something he created, but something he learned in school, or on the playground, or maybe even from his grandpa.

Whatever the truth is, I don’t know want to know it. This song has become part of my memory of my grandpa, and I see no reason to tamper with that memory. There’s nothing to be gained by anyone in finding out the truth.

And the truth about Ty Cobb getting knifed, killing the man, and then getting two hits the next day? Al Stump checked on it, and he said “Records verified this.”

The only problem is that Al Stump’s story of Ty Cobb killing a man is told in two different works, Cobb’s autobiography (which Stump helped him write) and the article I read. In the book the encounter took place in Syracuse. In the article, it took place in Detroit. In one the man died, in the other he was just injured.

Who got the story wrong? Cobb or Stump? What do we make of the fact that Stump tried selling a forged Cobb diary twenty years after Cobb’s death?

The image of Ty Cobb as a sonofabitch has been around for more than a hundred years. It would be interesting to find out the truth about what actually happened between Cobb and the mugger, but it wouldn’t change anyone’s opinion of him.

The truth might be out there, but sometimes it just doesn’t matter.