Truth for Tyrus

The latest riotous upheaval in Milwaukee presents a teachable moment. As staged protests morphed into death and destruction by riot, the chaos was prematurely chalked up as another boiling-over point caused by a systemic problem of racist police persecuting unarmed black men.

Then the facts began to materialize.

Oops. The cop was black, too. Double oops. The victim wielded a stolen high-capacity weapon loaded with 23 rounds of ammo. Triple oops. Police say body cam video shows the victim raising his gun before he was shot and killed.

As truth saw the light of day, all the presumed reasons for the riot turned out to be 100 percent untrue.

And as the Milwaukee County sheriff pointed out, shootings and murders are a constant problem in Milwaukee, but few in the mainstream media or the special-interest brigade seemed to take much notice before the police shooting on Saturday.

Here's the sheriff's tweet of bewilderment: "Four murdered, 9 shot in Milwaukee Fri night/Sat morning. Silence. 1 cop kills an ARMED black guy & riots break out?"

The relevant question isn't really whether four murders and nine shootings in one night should be stand-alone news in civilized society (they should). What's more pertinent right now is the problem of escalating media manipulation by special interests that increasingly misshapes and misrepresents truth in reporting.

Here in the midst of baseball season, the national pastime presents a perfect example of how a media story--across multiple channels and sectors--can be chock full of lies yet accepted (and repeated) by millions as "truth."

When the National Baseball Hall of Fame inducted its inaugural class in 1936, the player who got the most votes wasn't Babe Ruth, or Walter Johnson, or Honus Wagner.

It was Tyrus Raymond Cobb. "Ty" as everyone remembers him. But much of what "everybody knows" about Ty Cobb isn't knowledge at all. It's lies.

Lies told by a disreputable and discredited former reporter in a biography. Lies retold in a 1994 film based on that biography.

How can it be that Ty Cobb wasn't all the things "everybody knows" him to have been: a racist and a dirty player who sharpened his spikes, so universally reviled that nobody attended his funeral?

For People magazine editor Charles Leerhsen, who wrote a finely researched book on Cobb last year, it's simple. The truth got buried beneath "an avalanche of lies."

Ty Cobb was ahead of his time in almost every facet of life as a professional athlete. As a player, he epitomized the word "phenomenal." His record .366 lifetime batting average is beyond comprehension today; great modern players retire with averages around .300. The only player to wear a uniform in the 21st century even close to being in the same ballpark with the Georgia Peach is Tony Gwynn, who hung up his cleats in 2001 with a lifetime average 33 points below Cobb's.

Cobb excelled as an athlete by playing smart. He was a trailblazer in the "Moneyball" analytical genre, taking great pains to study other teams and players to identify weaknesses and opportunities.

Off the field, Cobb personified philanthropic generosity by founding a hospital in his hometown and starting a scholarship fund for kids. He was educated and a voracious reader, not a hick redneck.

Charges of Cobb's "avowed racism" are astonishingly inaccurate. Cobb was descended from Georgian abolitionists (his father advocated public education of black children, and once broke up a lynch plot), and was emphatic and enthusiastic in his support of integrating big league baseball.

When asked following Jackie Robinson's breakthrough appearance if Negroes should be allowed to play Major League Baseball, he replied "certainly."

"The Negro should be accepted," he said, "and not grudgingly but wholeheartedly." During his own career, he befriended the Tigers' black batboy and even snuck the 16-year-old into segregated hotels and train berths.

At his death, his family requested a private service, having seen Babe Ruth's funeral devolve into a circus. But that didn't stop thousands of fans from lining the streets and packing the church in mourning.

Looking back, it didn't take a vast conspiracy to replace truth with lies: only a greedy, shameless ghostwriter; another lazy biographer; and a couple of filmmakers who embraced shoddy reporting for its sensationalizing value. That small, self-serving cabal managed to misinform generations of Americans with malicious myths that misshaped history.

No doubt that in his day, when baseball was a brawling, rough-and-tumble sport, Cobb was as rough a brawler--and as fierce and zealous a competitor--as there was. But the lies repeated in the media didn't foster a better understanding of him as a player or a person. On the contrary, they darkly tarnished the truth (millions still wrongly believe him to be a murderer), and the public was poorer for it.

The real Ty Cobb was fascinating enough.

A myth like "Hands up, don't shoot!" can catch on as a rallying cry, but it can never foster a better understanding of relations between police and minority communities. Real progress on America's racial front needs foundations rooted in truths, which will never come from self-serving special interests.

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Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.

Editorial on 08/19/2016

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