He 'even met publicly with black boxer Harry Wills in 1924.' As The New York Times noted, Ruth also befriended black actor and tap-dancer Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, who became an honorary pallbearer at Ruth's funeral. According to the book Sport and the Color Line, the Babe enjoyed barnstorming ( playing exhibition games) against black ballplayers and spoke highly of them. But it's worth noting that Ruth regularly went out of his way to interact with black athletes in an age when many whites spurned them. Writers responded to the various contrivances and fact gaps by creating their own conflicting and sometimes cockamamie versions of reality.ĬBS didn't delve deeply into said evidence, simply noting that Ruth's second wife Claire vehemently vouched for her husband. Undeterred by this revelation, Ruth simply celebrated his birth on the wrong day. But official records listed the date as February, 6, 1895. For the bulk of his life Ruth believed he was born on February, 7, 1894. It also didn't help that he sometimes willfully rejected reality.

To make matters worse, Ruth had a 'hazy memory' and inconsistently recalled the past. Ruth further fueled confusion by making misleading statements. He did spend years at a school for boys, but only because he was (by his own admission) 'a bad kid.' Reporters also wrongly asserted that Ruth's legal name was George Herman Ehrhardt, an allusion to his German ancestry. However, certain assertions are certainly false. A number of rumors about Ruth are probably unverifiable, like the claim that he had a giant Johnson.

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