CCA - Sports and Character

Michael Poliakoff Author, "Combat Sports in the Ancient World: Competition, Violence, and Culture" Watch more at

Ty Cobb was one of the greatest baseball players of all time and king of the so-called Deadball Era. But for all that, most Americans think of him first as an awful person. This lecture is part of Hillsdale College's CCA seminar series on Sports and Character. Other speeches include "Why We Love Sports" by Michael Novak and "Sports in the Ancient World" by Michael Poliakoff. Watch them here: Charles Leerhsen is a journalist, author, and adjunct professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism. He has been an editor for Sports Illustrated, People, and Us Weekly, and spent eleven years as a senior writer at Newsweek. He has also written for Esquire, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, and Money. He is the author of several books, including Crazy Good: The True Story of Dan Patch, the Most Famous Horse in America and, most recently, Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, which won the 2015 Casey Award for best baseball book of the year. Hillsdale Coll

Michael Novak Author, "The Joy of Sports: Endzones, Bases, Baskets, Balls, and the Consecration of the American Spirit" Watch more at