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Cory Maxson is Troy and Rose’s son. Cory is a sweet, hardworking, and respectful high schooler who hopes to gain his father’s approval by following in his footsteps via athletics. While Troy was a baseball player, Cory’s sport is football, and he is such a promising player that a white scout is interested in recruiting him for a college team. This is an exciting and potentially life-changing opportunity, because if Cory is drafted to a college football team he will be able to attend university, a path that’s out of the realm of possibility without football. While Cory and Rose are both optimistic about the outcome of the scout’s visit, Troy is skeptical. Embittered by his own experience in the Negro League, Troy assumes that Cory will put his hopes into a career in football only to end up disappointed and disadvantaged when racism inevitably keeps him from succeeding in the industry. While Cory and Rose see football not as a professional career path but rather as a route to higher education, Troy imagines that his son’s path will mirror his own, leading to financial struggles and humiliation. Thus, Troy sabotages Cory’s high school football career and his meeting with the scout, which consequently destroys any chance for Cory to attend college. While Troy believes he is doing right by his son by pressuring him to find a practical trade, his inability to understand that the world has changed—and that a college football career is actually possible for Cory—undermines his son’s future. Troy’s hardheaded mistake causes a rift to grow between him and Cory, who is deeply and justifiably angry with his father. Their rivalry nearly comes to blows, and when Troy threatens to beat Cory for standing up to him, it’s evidence that Troy is becoming increasingly like his own abusive and violent father.
At the end of the play, when the Maxson family gathers for Troy’s funeral, Cory returns home from the Marines. It’s implied that, his chance at a college football career destroyed by Troy, Cory turned to the military for shelter and future prospects after Troy banished him from the family home. In adulthood, Cory harbors complicated feelings surrounding his father. Despite returning home due to Troy’s death, he initially does not want to attend the funeral service. He explains to his mother that he needs to keep himself separated from his father’s presence and influence due to how damaging and miserable that influence could be. To attend the funeral would be to allow his father’s shadow to continue to follow him. However, Rose convinces Cory that he should put his problems with Troy aside in order to make space to properly grieve his father. He and Raynell sing the song “Hear it Ring Hear it Ring!” together, which allows Cory to access the childhood love and respect he once had for his father. While Cory is emotionally mature and self-aware enough to realize that he needs to break the cycle of abusive patriarchs in his family, that same maturity and awareness also causes him to empathize with his father and grieve his loss.
