Ty Cobb, Baseball, and American Manhood

As the first baseball player to achieve real celebrity status, Ty Cobb embodies the strength and determination of classic masculinity. His grit and stubbornness, however, form a legacy that has been both lauded and condemned by America’s own changing views of ideal masculine behavior. With attention to Cobb’s formation, personal tragedies, and struggles with his peers, Steven Elliott Tripp examines this baseball icon as a product of the American South and as an emblem of a masculinity now out of fashion. Contradicting the team mentality of his fellow players to push himself to achieve personal records, Cobb became famous for his raw talent, but infamous for his self-serving tenacity. The persistent yet evolving nature of the public’s scorn of Cobb’s attitude reveal important psychic and cultural functions in American sporting culture. Departing from other historians’ psychologizing of Cobb’s behavior, Tripp reveals this early sports icon’s place in social, cultural, and gender histories within a great American pastime.