Mention Cal Ripken, Jr. in a post on the Internet, and if you look deep enough into the comments, you’ll invariably see someone repeat a story about the time that Kevin Costner allegedly banged the wife of Cal Ripken, Jr., and nearly cost Ripken his record-breaking consecutive games streak. It’s a rumor that’s been going around for nearly 20 years now, and like many urban legends, it’s been repeated so many times in the bowels of the Internet that a lot of people have come to believe it.

But is it true? With Kevin Costner’s new movie Black or White coming out today (SPOILER: It’s terrible), I thought we’d quickly look back at a story that has dogged Kevin Costner almost as much as the gerbil story has followed Richard Gere around for the last two decades.

The story, according to Internet lore, goes something like this: Kevin Costner and Cal Ripken, Jr. had become close friends after meeting at the premiere of Dances with Wolves in 1990. In 1997, after Kevin Costner had finished filming The Postman, Cal Ripken allegedly let Costner stay in his home.

One day while Costner was there, Ripken left for Camden Yards to go to a game. However, before he got to the park, he apparently forgot something, returned home, and found Costner in bed with his wife, Kelly, with whom Ripken had reportedly been going through a bad stretch of their marriage.

Ripken allegedly then beat the crap out of Kevin Costner so badly that he couldn’t make public appearances for several weeks. Ripken, however, was so overcome with the grief of catching his wife in the act with one of his best friends that he called the Orioles organization to let them know what happened and tell them that he couldn’t come to the game that night, thus finally ending his streak (he had, by this time, already surpassed Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games stretch).

However, because that streak was such a huge selling point for Orioles games, the Orioles owner reportedly told Ripken not to worry about it. The game was cancelled that night due to an “electrical failure” that resulted in the lights not working. However, the rumor also asserts that the electrical crew at Camden Yards said that there was absolutely no problem with the lights whatsoever.

In either respect, the game was cancelled, and Ripken returned the next day to continue the streak.

That’s how the rumor goes. But is any of it true?

Yes. One part. There was an electrical failure at Camden Yards in August 1997 that resulted in a game being cancelled. But everything else about that story is completely concocted. In fact, Ripken was there for the game, as he told Scott Simon in an NPR interview in 2008: