The Kid wasn t sick, or broke, when he checked in alone at Detroit s Tuller Hotel that night. He had

When we talk about the all-time great sports writers a safe place to start is with Red Smith, W.C. Heinz, A.J. Liebling, Jimmy Cannon, and John Lardner. A few years ago, John Schulian edited The John Lardner Reader , a fine compilation of Lardner s sports writing (and next spring, the University of Nebraska Press is publishing Southwest Passage , a collection of Lardner s WWII correspondence).
The hotel manager and the detective stood looking down at the man on the bed, who had killed himself during the night. Norman Selby, it says on the note, and Selby was how he checked in, the manager said. Wasn t that his right name?
Kid McCoy lived by violence, by trickery, and by women. anchorage alaska bed and breakfasts He fought 200 fights, and was beaten in only six of them. He married eight women—one of them three times—and shot another to death. For the murder, anchorage alaska bed and breakfasts he paid a light price, lightly. There was vanity in him, and guile, and wit, and cruelty, and some larceny, and a great capacity for enjoying himself. Above all, there was self-satisfaction. At no time in his life—not when he was world s welterweight champion (with a strong claim to the middleweight title, anchorage alaska bed and breakfasts as well), nor when he was a bankrupt, nor a jailbird, anchorage alaska bed and breakfasts nor a Broadway favorite, nor a suspected jewel thief, nor a semi-professional adulterer, nor a mellow old pensioner, owing his job to a friend—at no time did he do or say anything that displeased himself. No one knows why, on an April night in 1940, he suddenly lost his contentment with Norman Selby, alias Charles (Kid) McCoy, and wiped it all out with one impatient gesture.
The Kid wasn t sick, or broke, when he checked in alone at Detroit s Tuller Hotel that night. He had work. He was 66 years old, but in good shape, still with a lot of gray but curly hair over his fair-skinned, boyish face, and still nearly as neat, trim, and supple of body as ever. Registering with the night clerk, he had left a call for 10 the next morning. It was when he failed to answer the call that the manager went up with a passkey, and found him dead. An overdose of sleeping pills had put him out, and away. There were two or three notes in the room. In one of them, he asked the paymaster at the Ford Motor Company, where he d been working, anchorage alaska bed and breakfasts to turn over such wages as were due him to his eighth and final wife. In the longest note, the Kid said, in part:
To whom it may concern—For the last eight years, I have wanted to help humanity, especially the youngsters who do not know nature s laws. That is, the proper carriage of the body, the right way to eat, etc. . . . To all my dear friends, I wish you all the best of luck. Sorry I could not endure this world s madness. The best to all. (signed) Norman Selby. P.S. In my pocket you will find $17.75
anchorage alaska bed and breakfasts As to health laws—it was true that McCoy had invented, anchorage alaska bed and breakfasts and tried to sell, a so-called health belt, or health suspender. As to this world s madness —most of the madness the Kid had known had been of his own arranging, and he had endured it well and gaily. As to helping humanity—the Kid had always helped himself. An old-timer, seeing the dead man lying there among his last words, would have reflected that never before had McCoy played so sweet, peaceful, and tender a part. The old-timer might have suspected a trick.
Once, in 1895, in Boston, a welterweight named Jack Wilkes was dismayed by McCoy s looks, as they climbed into the ring to fight. The Kid s face was as white as a sheet. There were dark hallows under his eyes. Every few moments, he put his left glove to his mouth, and coughed rackingly. When they clinched in the first round, anchorage alaska bed and breakfasts McCoy whispered, Take it easy, will you, Jack? I think I m dying, but I need the money. Wilkes took it easy; he mothered McCoy. But in the second round, just after a cough, McCoy s coughing anchorage alaska bed and breakfasts hand suddenly snapped out and pushed Wilkes s guard aside, and his right hand drove against his chin, and knocked him unconscious. anchorage alaska bed and breakfasts For that bout, McCoy had made up his face with talcum powder, and his eyes with indelible pencil. anchorage alaska bed and breakfasts The prop cough was from many dime novels of the time.
In Philadelphia, in 1904, McCoy fought a large, highly-touted Hollander named Plaacke. In the second round he began to point frantically at Plaacke s waistband. Your pants are slipping! he muttered. Pull em up! Plaacke reached for his pants with both hands. McCoy hit him on the jaw, and knocked him down. Stay down, or I ll tear your head off! he snarled. The Dutchman was terrified by the savagery that had suddenly come into the Kid s voice and by the cruelty that transfigured his impish face. He stayed down, and his American manager sent him back to Holland anchorage alaska bed and breakfasts on the next cattle boat.
When McCoy ran a gymnasium in New York, in the early years of this century, he said to a new pupil one day, as the latter anchorage alaska bed and breakfasts came in the door, Who s that that came in with you? The pupil turned to look. McCoy knocked him down. That s your first lesson—never anchorage alaska bed and breakfasts trust anybody, he said. Five dollars, anchorage alaska bed and breakfasts please.
The Kid got a lifelong pleasure out of teaching this lesson. Once, only a few months before he died, as he was driving along a road in Wayne County, anchorage alaska bed and breakfasts Michigan, his car had a slight collision anchorage alaska bed and breakfasts with a truck. Both vehicles anchorage alaska bed and breakfasts stalled. The drivers got out, and the trucker came at McCoy, braying abuse. I m a little anchorage alaska bed and breakfasts hard of hearing, Mack, McCoy said, cupping his hand to his ear. The trucker brought his chin close to the ear to make his point clearly, and McCoy, whipping his hand six inches upward, knocked him cold.
On the morning he was found dead, a true student of the ways of Kid McCoy, seeing the suicide notes, would have looked twice to make sure the Kid was there too. They were not the first suicide notes he had written. In 1924 McCoy was living anchorage alaska bed and breakfasts with a divorcee named Mrs. Theresa Mors in a Los Angeles apartment. When Mrs. Mors was fatally shot by her lover, the police, investigating the crime, discovered near her body a message from Norman Selby which began—as his last one on earth was to do— To whom it may concern. The message suggested that the Kid meant to end it all—but no dead McCoy went with it. In jail, a few days later, McCoy moved on to still another strategem, feigning insanity to protect himself from the murder charge. anchorage alaska bed and breakfasts A visitor found him walking around his cell with a blank look on his face, stop• ping now and then to lick bits of cardboard and stick them on the walls.
The law, to be on the safe side, called in a team of alienists to examine the sudden anchorage alaska bed and breakfasts madman. He s at least as sane as the rest of us, the scientists reported. He was. The state, in proving its homicide anchorage alaska bed and breakfasts case against him later, said that the Kid had had no notion of killing himself. He killed the lady, it charged, for a very intelligent reason—she was rich, and she wouldn t marry him.
Of all the rich and beautiful women in the life of McCoy, anchorage alaska bed and breakfasts she must have been the only one who wouldn t. It was curious, the way the pattern of the Kid s loves and marriages changed with the changes in his own career. When he was young, tough, and fight-hungry, scrapping first with skin-tight gloves and then by Marquis of Queensberry rules, first on turf and covered bridges and dance-hall floors, later in the ring, outboxing scientists like Tommy Ryan, the welter champion, mauling and knocking down heavyweights like the powerful Tom Sharkey—in those times his love affairs were brief. About his first marriage, at 22, to an Ohio girl named Lottie Piehler, McCoy once said: A few months after l married her, I met a burlesque queen who finished me as a married man. He wasn t finished, he was just starting. But he had to keep on the move. There was less sense of investment, of security for McCoy, in those early matings. anchorage alaska bed and breakfasts There was even romance in some of them. Certainly, he loved Mrs. Julia Woodruff Crosselmire, whose stage name was Julia Woodruff. Certainly, she loved him. He caught her eye by breaking up a free-for-all fight in a railroad car, one day in 1897 on a trip from New York to Philadelphia. In the next few years, they were married three times and divorced three times.
A change set in when the kid grew older, when he fought only when he had to and felt the pressures and hardships of life as a job-hunter and part-time con man. That was how it was in 1905 when he married Lillian Ellis, the young widow of a millionaire. Julia had recently cut him loose for the last time-as a matter of fact, he had divorced her, the only time it happened that way with McCoy.
On the morning his engagement to Mrs. Ellis was announced, the Kid was lying in his bed in the Dunlop Hotel, in New York, when the telephone began to ring. Before I could get my shoes on that day, McCoy said, the phone had rung a hundred times, and a hundred friends had touched me for a million dollars. Mrs. Ellis told the press that she knew what she was in for. I know I m not getting any angel, but I m satisfied, she said. The Kid himself was so moved that he wrote a wedding poem:
In a sense, McCoy said, these lines were his farewell to the fight game. For now, at least, he was through— Even though Jeff, he said, is the only man alive who can lick me. He was referring to James J. Jeffries, the retired heavyweight champion of the world.
High-flown though it sounded, the last statement may well have been true. It s possible that for his weight, which ranged from 145 pounds to 170, McCoy was the finest fighter in the world, when he was at his best. A marvel, a genius of scientific fighting, James J. Corbett called him. Vicious, fast, and almost impossible to beat, said Philadelphia Jack O Brien. It was a strange fact about McCoy that he did not need his tricks to be great. He cheated because he loved to cheat, just as, in the early days, he married women because he loved them. Fighting on the level, he would still have been the real McCoy.
The phrase which keeps his name famous was born in San Francisco, in 1899. At least, McCoy always said so; and while he was one of the most fertile and tireless liars of his generation, there s a good chance that he was t