The Kid

In a small Detroit hotel room, one afternoon last week, velvet-voiced, 66-year-old Norman Selby, a Ford-plant thrift-garden supervisor, pensively fingered a bottle of sleeping pills. Through his mind there flashed a hodge-podge of recollections:

The day he ran away from his father's Indiana farm at 13 . . . saloon brawls and street fights ... the first time he knocked out a man with his famed "corkscrew punch" (glorified left hook) and decided to call himself Kid McCoy . . . the night in 1896 when he stopped Tommy Ryan, world's welterweight champion . . . champagne suppers at Delmonico's . . . fights he threw and the chicanery he got away with . . . the carpet tacks he dumped into the ring to agonize a barefoot opponent in South Africa . . . early days of the century when U. S. sportswriters hailed him as the Real McCoy to distinguish him from spurious Kid McCoys . . . night life in Paris ... a grey day in 1925 when he entered San Quentin Prison charged with killing one of his sweethearts . . . the day he walked out seven years later with a parole in his pocket. . . .

Hazier & hazier grew the recollections. Next morning Norman Selby, the mortal remains of immortal Kid McCoy--famed for his ten marriages as well as his 100-odd fights against the best in the business with only six conceded defeats--was found in the hotel room. Beside him was a note: "... Sorry I could not endure this world's madness. . . ."

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