Al Stump spent time with Detroit Tigers' Hall of Fame baseball player Ty Cobb in 1960 and 1961, collaborating on Cobb's autobiography.
15 Facts About Al Stump
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From this research, Al Stump went on to write at least two books and at least one magazine article on Cobb.
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Al Stump had been banned from publication in multiple newspapers and magazines for making things up.
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Al Stump began his sportswriting career while attending the University of Wisconsin.
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Al Stump became a war correspondent during World War II, after which he wrote about sports for True and Esquire magazines and worked as a reporter for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and the Los Angeles Times.
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Al Stump spent approximately three weeks with Ty Cobb over eleven months, researching the ballplayer's life.
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Cobb's autobiography that Al Stump coauthored, My Life in Baseball, came out a few months after Cobb's July 17,1961, death and painted the former Tiger in a sympathetic light.
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Al Stump said afterward that he found Cobb difficult to work with most of the time.
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Thirty years later Al Stump published a new book, which offered a very negative portrait of Cobb.
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Al Stump's 1996 book on Cobb, Cobb: A Biography, was a reworked and expanded version of the 1994 book, published after Al Stump's death.
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Cobb's peer-reviewed research indicates that all of Al Stump's works surrounding Ty Cobb are, at the very best, called into question and, at worst, "should be dismiss[ed] out of hand as untrue".
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When Leerhsen published his biography of Cobb in 2015 he concluded that Al Stump concocted stories about Cobb in order to boost sales.
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Leehrsen concluded that Al Stump invented stories about Cobb for his subsequent articles and books in order to make money.
14.
Al Stump had been banned from publication in multiple newspapers and magazines for making things up.
15.
On December 14,1995, Al Stump died of congestive heart failure at Hoag Memorial Hospital in Newport Beach, California, at the age of 79.