We often speak of America as the land of opportunity, the one place where you can really make it regardless of your background, your family, your lack of inherited social rank.
Now, that’s all splendidly true. But what’s also true, what we don’t put on the brochure, is that America will probably try to kill you first. To become the greatest at anything in this country often entails horrific struggle. The sun burns only brighter the higher you get. The price of greatness can be a sort of insanity: an all-consuming passion, a dedication to success that is borderline pathological. With the desire to be loved, admired, revered, comes the willingness to be hated.
Few have known this so richly as Ty Cobb (1886–1961). A true-blue American nutcase, he was the best baseball player who ever lived and the first true antihero in sports. Through his greatness, he achieved immortality—the final reward of lasting fame. But the media warped him into a caricature: a bigot of supernatural proportions, a purely evil man. Today a cottage industry of Cobb defenders, misguided in its own way, looks to absolve him of everything he did.
How do we reckon with Cobb? In the many descriptions recorded over the years, you notice the word “greatest” is commonplace. Grantland Rice called him “the greatest competitor I’ve ever known.” Ernest Hemingway called him “the greatest of all ballplayers, and an absolute shit.” Jimmy Cannon was right when he said Cobb was “the strangest of all our national sports idols.” And equally right when he added, “But not even his disagreeable character could destroy the image of his greatness as a player. Ty Cobb was the best. That seemed to be all he wanted.”
