04-06-2013, 06:02 PM
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Join Date: May 2012
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JimStinson
Setting the record straight is what started this thread ...  So in a way we are doing it...This is from SMITHSONIAN.COM and pretty much explains what happened after Cobb passed away......
Stump’s True magazine article won the Associated Press award for the best sports story of 1962 and went a long way in cementing the public’s memory of the baseball great. “From all of baseball, three men and three only appeared for his funeral,” Stump wrote at the end of his story, as if Cobb died a despised man who had alienated opponents and teammates alike. But the Sporting News reported that Cobb’s family had told friends and baseball officials that they wanted his funeral (held just 48 hours after he died) to be private and requested that they not attend, despite offers from several baseball greats to serve as pallbearers. Most of Cobb’s closest baseball friends were, in fact, already dead by 1961.
Doctors, nurses and hospital staff who attended to Cobb in his final months later came forward to say they never observed any of the rude or abusive behavior attributed to Cobb in Stump’s article. And a friendship-ending argument Stump described in a dramatic scene between Cobb and Ted Williams never happened, according to Williams. “He’s full of it,” he said of Stump.
In addition, it should be noted that Cobb’s views on race evolved after he retired from baseball. In 1952, when many whites from the Deep South were still opposed to blacks mixing with whites both in and out of baseball, Cobb was not one of them. “Certainly it is O.K. for them to play,” Cobb told a reporter. “I see no reason in the world why we shouldn’t compete with colored athletes as long as they conduct themselves with politeness and gentility. Let me say also that no white man has the right to be less of a gentleman than a colored man, in my book that goes not only for baseball but in all walks of life.” In his last year of life, Cobb may have shown a cantankerous side, but it seemed reserved for the state of baseball, which he saw as over-reliant on the home run and lacking in players of all-around skill. Willie “Mays is the only man in baseball I’d pay to see play,” he said not long before he died
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jim@stinsonsports.com
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