“Crash” Davis is gone but not forgotten

by Matthew Paris

One of the best sports movies ever, Bull Durham (1988), starred 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.

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.

Davis played during and after World War II when careers in many fields started, stopped, and resumed. 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), but Davis never returned to the Majors.

In the film and true to his life story, Davis is mired in the minors, an older player trying to return to the Big Leagues. Celebrity never came for him back in the day, but it did when the film was released in 1988.

He even got a chance at Hollywood when he appeared in the baseball film Cobb (1994) about legendary Ty Cobb.

“Crash” Davis, whose