It’s one of the best sports movies ever, Bull Durham, starring Kevin Costner, Tim Robbins, and Susan Sarandon. Costner’s character was fashioned after a real baseball player named Crash Davis, who played for the Durham Bulls while matriculating as a Duke graduate student.
Photo courtesy of Amazon.com
In the film, Davis, an older player trying to return to the Big Leagues, is mired in the minors. That’s true, but it’s important to know that Davis played during and after the war years of World War II, and careers in many fields started, stopped, and resumed.
Lawrence Columbus “Crash” Davis was born in 1919 in Canon, Georgia. Davis earned the nickname “Crash” as a teenager when he collided with a teammate while chasing down a fly ball. Despite a nickname that suggested he was a klutz, Davis was a Duke graduate, and he also had major-league talent, playing for the Philadelphia Athletics from 1940-42 and batting .230 in 148 games.
During the war, he was assigned to Harvard University, where he helped run the ROTC program and coached Harvard’s baseball and squash teams. After the war, Davis returned to Duke, where he combined studies with playing for the Durham Bulls of the Carolina League and, later, with two other minor league teams. His second baseball career spanned six years (1946-52), and (true to the film’s storyline) Davis never returned to the Majors.
Davis became a minor celebrity after Bull Durham’s release in 1988 and made a film appearance in Cobb, released in 1994. “Crash” Davis, whose name and legacy are forever tied to the film Bull Durham, passed away in 2001 at the age of 82 years.
