Sports editors don’t come along very often at The Columbian.
In the time America had 13 presidents — going back to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942 — The Columbian had five sports editors. Al Stump was followed by Ralph Fisher, Al Crombie, Don Chandler and Greg Jayne, who recently became editorial page editor.
That makes the recent appointment of Micah Rice as new sports editor a notable step around here.
To add another layer of history to this, Stump — who left The Columbian at the end of 1942 to become a war correspondent — is the guy who wrote Ty Cobb’s autobiography.
That’s right, Cobb, a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame’s 1936 inaugural class with Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, Honus Wagner and Christy Mathewson.
Cobb, who played his last game in 1928, was in declining health when he hired Stump as a ghostwriter. Stump spent some time with him and gathered material for Cobb’s 1961 autobiography, “My Life in Baseball: The True Record.”
Cobb died of cancer at age 74 on July 17, 1961; the book was published posthumously and was regarded as a whitewashed version of Cobb’s life.
Stump wrote a tell-all account — “Cobb: A Biography” — 30 years later. It was a shocking portrayal of an athlete who, as one reviewer said, “walked the line between greatness and psychosis.”
More recently, some researchers say that the tell-all included some tall tales. Stump was accused of making up material. He also was accused of fabricating collectibles and autographed items that Stump said he’d acquired during his collaboration with Cobb.
Portrayed in film
Stump died in 1995, but a cinematic portrayal lives on. His second book became the basis for “Cobb,” a 1994 film starring Tommy Lee Jones as the baseball legend. Stump was portrayed by two-time Emmy winner Robert Wuhl, who went on to star in “Arli$$.”
In a tribute in an Los Angeles newspaper following his death, a writer called Stump “the greatest storyteller I ever met.”
And in a turn of phrase that now seems … well, kind of weird, he described Stump as “a superb journalist with an eye for detail and a sense of both humor and history, the two things you can’t fake.”
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
