ESPN Reaches Back to Cobb’s Era

[Don Wassall]

Check out the homepage of ESPN if you can today. The lead story is called "Furious Styles" with this intro: Ron Artest destroying a TV camera at the Garden. John McEnroe chewing out a chair ump. Bobby Knight's fingers curled around a player's throat. Anger may be a Deadly Sin, but it's also quite sporting, writes Scoop Jackson.


It's illustrated with a racially balanced drawing of a jury box with 13 athletes, 7 blacks and 6 whites (guess ESPN thinks juries are comprised of 13 people). While all the blacks are contemporary except for Bob Gibson and recent retirees Albert Belle and Bryan Cox, they reached all the way back for Ty Cobb to find enough whites to balance it out! Ninety damn years ago!!

 

[Colonel_Reb]

All people in the media ever say about Ty Cobb is that he was one mean SOB. They keep it in people's minds so much, that picking him for a list like that makes sense to most of them.

 

[GWTJ]

On the MLB.com website Chevrolet has a section where you can vote for your favorite players who display certain skills. Right now the skill featured is speed. You have a choice of six different players to vote for. Guess who just happens to be missing from the list. Yup, Mr. Scott Podsednik. I guess they don't want a white player winning the speed vote. The token white they put on the list of six was Eric Byrnes. Quite the household name.

 

[Colonel_Reb]

I wonder how many of the speed demons on the list were black? That's just like Caste System sports to only put one white guy on the list.

 

[robcat]

Its actually a compliment to white athletes that they have to go back a century to find whites to balance out the article. Most days i see enough athletes in the arrest section of the sports page to fill the black quota! And Cobb was nowhere near as bad as hes made out to be.

 

[Colonel_Reb]

Your right about Cobb, robcat. Plenty of modern day athletes have done worse. I think Cobb just got under people's skin more than anything else.