Martin Bandyke Under Covers: Martin interviews Charles Leerhsen, author of Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty.
b'Ty Cobb is baseball royalty, maybe even the greatest player who ever lived. His lifetime batting average is still the highest of all time, and when he retired in 1928, after twenty-one years with the Detroit Tigers and two with the Philadelphia Athletics, he held more than ninety records. But the numbers don\\u2019t tell half of Cobb\\u2019s tale. The Georgia Peach was by far the most thrilling player of the era: \\u201cTy Cobb could cause more excitement with a base on balls than Babe Ruth could with a grand slam,\\u201d one columnist wrote. When the Hall of Fame began in 1936, he was the first player voted in.\\nBut Cobb was also one of the game\\u2019s most controversial characters. He got in a lot of fights, on and off the field, and was often accused of being overly aggressive. In his day, even his supporters acknowledged that he was a fierce and fiery competitor. Because his philosophy was to \\u201ccreate a mental hazard for the other man,\\u201d he had his enemies, but he was also widely admired. After his death in 1961, however, something strange happened: his reputation morphed into that of a monster\\u2014a virulent racist who also hated children and women, and was in turn hated by his peers. \\nHow did this happen? Who is the real Ty Cobb? Setting the record straight in Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, Charles Leerhsen pushed aside the myths, traveled to Georgia and Detroit, and re-traced Cobb\\u2019s journey, from the shy son of a professor and state senator who was progressive on race for his time, to America\\u2019s first true sports celebrity. In the process, he tells of a life overflowing with incident and a man who cut his own path through his times\\u2014a man we thought we knew but really didn\\u2019t.\\nThe interview with Charles Leerhsen was originally recorded on May 5, 2015.'