Still, it's impossible to examine any of this without looking at race. There's even irony here involving Ruth. As Leigh Montville writes in his new book "The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth," his first nickname was contracted from "****** Lips" to "******" to "Nig," and that's simply what Ruth was called every day for years.
Montville quotes Ruth's sister, Mamie, as saying that Ruth's skin was "olive, like our mother's side of the family." And Ruth's wide nose and full lips gave him what a great many white folks and some blacks thought was a mixed-race look. In his early years of baseball, whites shouted racial epithets at Ruth all the time from the stands. And any long discussion of Ruth in, say, black barber shops was sure to include a sort of jocular speculation over Ruth's race.
