What can you really believe?

I'm sure every one has had the experience of having some long held belief or knowledge turn out to be less than accurate or even untruthful.

In addition to my collegiate background in art, I also possess a bachelor's degree in history. I have been a long time viewer of the History Channel and the American Heroes Channel and I am a voracious reader of things historic.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Paul Revere never actually rode out to Concord, that Napoleon wasn't really short, that Vikings never, I mean never EVER, wore horns on their helmets, and that Jesse James didn't die at the hands of the Ford brothers. There hasn't been a year go by when I haven't turned up some fact or evidence that upsets what I had previously believed to be true.

You would think with all the writers, historians and resources that Major League Baseball can muster that the history of the game, and that of the players of the game, would be something that could be written with a high or some degree of accuracy.

I became a baseball fan in the early 1960s and have been pretty clued in on how things were going in the pros since then. I had an uncle who was once a pitching prospect for the Pittsburgh Pirates and a lot of my kin are baseball fans. Growing up, I read baseball magazines cover to cover and even had a subscription to the Sporting News, a venerated magazine covering baseball since 1886.

I knew something of early baseball players. Babe Ruth hit lots of home runs, Lou Gehrig was a great player and a great man, and Dizzy Dean was a fun pitcher and later broadcaster. I also knew that the legendary Detroit Tiger Hall of Famer Ty Cobb, the Georgia Peach, was the most racist, violent, cold blooded, dishonest and evil man that has ever played in the Major Leagues.

Concerning Ty Cobb, I don't recall how I knew the things that I did, but just that I did. I knew what I knew until I found out that I didn't know what I knew, that what I had believed about someone for the past 50 some years was completely false.

Last year, sports writer Charles Leerhsen won the 2015 Casey Award for the best baseball book for that year. His book was "Ty Cobb: a Terrible Beauty," the most recent biography of professional baseball's first Hall of Famer. Leerhsen, a former college journalism professor, served a time as an editor for Sports Illustrated and has authored a number of books.

Leehrsen went into his latest project looking for all the dark stories of Cobb's reign of terror when he played for the Detroit Tigers in the early 1900s. The funny thing was, what he uncovered was the undeniable truth that nearly all the stories and legends relating to Cobb's personal behavior were in fact made up lies or distortions.

In the early 1960s, Al Stump was a writer who was writing a story for the "True" magazine, a sensational magazine read in barber shops all over America, a kind of National Enquirer of its day. They wanted a sleazy, sensational story about America's first real sports superstar and Stump was glad to oblige.

In Stump's book, Cobb routinely pistol whipped any black man he would encounter, was often drunk and ran around with a loaded gun threatening people, and was said to have committed three murders. The book related many stories of how Cobb sought to injure opposing players with dirty play, sharpening his spikes to a razor edge. Stump said that even Cobb's family feared him and that only three people attended his funeral.

The TV miniseries "Baseball" by famed filmmaker Ken Burns relied on Stumps book for his history of Cobb and a book and movie "Cobb" that came out in the '80s relied on the same lies and distortions.

Leehrsen discovered that Cobb was descended from many generations of abolitionists. His great-grandfather was run out of town for calling slavery sinful, his grandfather refused to fight for the Confederacy because of slavery, and his dad was a state senator who personally intervened to prevent lynching of black people by white mobs. Cobb himself never treated black people any differently than his parentage and actually was one of the voices that implored the majors to allow the inclusion of black players. Cobb attended many a Negro League game and was a big fan of Willie Mays and Roy Campanella. A racist he certainly was not.

While Cobb was a tough player, there is no actual evidence or testimony from any player that he ever intentionally injured someone. The three black people he was said to have murdered were actually white people. Besides being white, they weren't murdered and were actually the instigators of the fracas cited. Regarding his funeral, thousands of people packed the church and the grounds and there were people lining the streets from the church to the cemetery.

Cobb was a popular player of his day, and opposing Major League teams relished his playing in their stadiums because of the crowds he drew. Cobb had a lifetime .366 batting average and was the first great base stealer in baseball. Once he stole three bases on three straight pitches. He still owns the major league record for stealing home, having pulled of that difficult trick 54 times. Detroit's arch rivals the Chicago Cubs once gave Cobb an award of appreciation for the way he played the game.

Of Cobbs' play, one sports writer summed up what a lot of the writers felt. This writer said that "Ty Cobb getting a walk was more exciting that Babe Ruth hitting a home run."

So why do so many people today have such a bad image of Cobb without any actual proof or evidence? Because they heard about it, over and over, from many sources. The problem was, it was the same source and that source, Al Stump, would be banned from writing for a lot of publications because of his reputation for making things up rather than researching them.

Hitler convinced the German people of a lot of falsehoods because he knew, as his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels stated, "If you tell a lie often enough and long enough, people will believe it." It seems the same has been true concerning the public perception of Cobb.

Today in politics, popular culture and, even in science, there are people who will tell a lie, promote a lie, repeat it, repeat it and repeat it until it becomes "common knowledge."

I once had a class called historiography in college taught by the head of Harding University's History Department. Dr. Muncy always reminded us that to get to the truth of a matter, you can't have too many sources. The more sources you can bring to bear, the more likely you will come across the truth. He also cautioned us when evaluating the validity of any source, find out who the author is and why he might be saying what he's saying.

I hope this newest book on Cobb leads to a movie to set the record straight.

•••

Editor's note: John McGee is an award-winning columnist and sports writer. He can be contacted through The Times at [email protected].