ABSTRACT
Early Life Tyrus Raymond Cobb was born in Narrows, Georgia, on December 18, 1886. He was proud of his Southern heritage and his family. His father was a teacher and a landowner, and an ancestor had been a Civil War general who died at the battle of Fredricksburg. Cobb even claimed George Washington as a distant ancestor. As he was born only twenty years after the defeat of the Confederacy, however, Cobb's proud claim to Southern gentility was mocked by the reduced circumstances and opportunities of the area. Cobb's father wanted him to attend college or, perhaps, to win an appointment to West Point, but the young Cobb was determined to be a baseball player. He saw baseball as a career in which he might excel while he could not hope to compete with his father's record in academic studies. Baseball players were not, however, socially accepted at the time; even some of the greatest ballplayers were not admitted to many hotels or restaurants. Yet Cobb had a burning desire to try this career, so his father gave him six fifteendollar checks and sent him off to join the minor league team in Augusta.
