Correcting myself, I've since read in a new biography by Charles Leehrsen that many of the standard ideas about Cobb are a myth. Leerhsen says that Cobb was not the racist that he is often referred to as having been, that while he was an aggressive player, he was not a dirty one, and that attendance at his funeral was affected by the fact that it was a private funeral hundreds of miles from the nearest big-league city. Leehrsen says that most of the ideas concerning Cobb are the result of a now discredited biography by a man named Al Stump who simply made up huge amounts of what he wrote about Cobb. The bio pic starring Tommie Lee Jones as Cobb was based on Stump's book.