“The complete story of his life would make Lolita read like Sunday School literature,” assessed The Ring magazine’s Stan Weston.
A Hall of Fame boxer who won the world welterweight and middleweight titles, McCoy was known for his success — he lost six times in 105 bouts — and for inventing the corkscrew punch, which was something akin to a left hook on steroids.
He was also remembered for the know-no-bounds tricks he sometimes used in the ring.
For a bare-knuckles fight, he once wrapped his hands in friction tape to better cut his opponent’s face. Another time he rubbed his gloves with ammonia, which soon ended up in his rival’s eyes.
Before he fought “Sailor” Tom Sharkey, he kidnapped the heavyweight’s sparring partner and pressured him for a scouting report. And then there was the time he fought a deaf boxer, mouthed the words that the bell had just rung and pointed him to his corner.
When the guy turned, McCoy knocked him out.
“The Kid has a mean streak running from the top of his curly hair right down to the troublesome ingrown nail on his left toe,” said Tommy Ryan, the welterweight champ who was snookered out of his title by a sand-bagging McCoy, his onetime sparring partner.
Yet, the boxing is just part of the story.
McCoy owned a saloon on South Main Street in Dayton, was as a suspected international jewel thief, had parts in 19 movies, was married 10 times and then, in a high-profile Hollywood crime that paralleled and eclipsed the saga of O.J. Simpson 70 years later, he murdered the woman with whom he lived, acted bizarrely as he was chased by the police and then, with cameras in the courtroom, went through a trial that commandeered national headlines, especially here in Dayton.
Later, as he sat in San Quentin prison, he reportedly told a young inmate:
“Remember that the bright lights go out the quickest. Kid McCoy knows.”
A hook with a twist
Born Norman Selby in 1872, he was raised on a farm outside Moscow, Ind., about an hour west of Oxford. He claimed to have run away from home at age 13 and hopped trains with hobos who taught him to fight.
During that time he changed his name to Charles McCoy and then Kid McCoy.
He made his pro debut at 18 and won his first 19 fights thanks, in part, to that corkscrew punch he was beginning to perfect.
It was essentially a left hook that came with a twist of the wrist just before impact and often caused him to cut his opponents. He said he learned the motion when he was sleeping in a barn during his ride-the-rails days and watched a cat bat a ball of string with its paw.
He was in his mid-20s when he got to Dayton. He lived in downtown hotels, trained at the Dayton Gym Club on Wayne Avenue, eventually opened the bar — called Number 10 — at 10 South Main Street and ended up marrying for the first time.
As he later explained quite unapologetically, the union with the quiet Middletown girl Lottie Piehler was short lived:
“A few months after I married her, I met a burlesque queen who finished me as a married man.”
He did love Dayton as a fight town and fought five bouts here.
The first was Aug. 13, 1897 against unbeaten Lima light-heavyweight Dan Bayliff at Shantz Hall on East Fifth Street. Although he gave up more than 20 pounds, McCoy put Bayliff down three times in the first three rounds and the fight was stopped.
With a real following now, he moved his fistic talents to the Victoria, which then was known as the Grand Opera House and already was a popular venue in the city.
Originally opened on New Year’s Day in 1866, the theater had been destroyed by a suspected arsonist’s fire three years later. It was rebuilt and in the coming years would survive another fire, the 1913 flood and finally a looming wrecking ball in the 1970s. Today it is one of Dayton’s most treasured landmarks
Back in November 1897 — when McCoy packed the house to knock out two men, George LaBlanche and Beech Ruble, on the same night — the theater likely could accommodate an even bigger crowd than it can now, Victoria archivist Shelby Dixon said.
“The entertainment given at the Grand Opera House last evening by Kid McCoy attracted about two hundred sporting men from abroad and a sufficient number from the city to fill the house to the doors,” reported The Dayton Evening News afterward. “Every seat was occupied and the greater portion of the standing space taken. It was the nearest approach to a fistic carnival ever witnessed in this city.”
A month later McCoy won the middleweight crown in New York and then returned to Dayton for a sold-out Feb. 15, 1898 bout with Harry Long.
The Dayton Evening Herald’s headline summed up the night:
“Tremendous House Greets The Champion…His Bout Stopped By Police.”
Midway through the second round, McCoy was battering Long when the police jumped into the ring and halted the show because the Dayton mayor supposedly hadn’t granted a permit for it.
As the crowd stood and yelled “Fake! … Fake!” for several minutes, McCoy salvaged matters by fighting a four-round exhibition with another boxer.
His showmanship surfaced even more in April 1898 when he had his last — and most talked about — fight here.
After refereeing the early bouts — which included the racist Battle Royals that used to include several black fighters in the ring at once, all flailing away at each other — McCoy was scheduled to meet a Cincinnati boxer.
When that guy failed to show, McCoy looked out at the crowd, which actually overflowed out the front doors, and came up with a plan.
He challenged anyone from the audience to get into the ring with him. He’d give them $50 if they lasted the three minutes of the first round and then $25 for every minute thereafter.
Tom Shea, a traveling salesman from Wichita, Kan., stepped onto the stage, stripped down and proceeded to last the first round.
Knowing the crowd was now sated, McCoy met the charge of his heavyweight opponent at the start of the second round with a left hook to the jugular and that ended the fight.
The Evening News ended its story with “the sports were pleased and satisfied.”
Flair for the dramatic
Many say the phrase “The Real McCoy” originated with Kid McCoy and he had a story that explained it.
“I’m in a saloon with a charming young lady, as usual,” he once told reporters. “A drunk is making passes at her. I try to brush him off without too much fuss. ‘Beat it!’ I says, ‘I’m Kid McCoy.’
“He laughs and says, ‘Yeah, well I’m George Washington!’
“I have to clip him a short one and down he goes. He wakes up 10 minutes later, rubs his jaw and says ‘Jeez, it was The Real McCoy!’ ”
Regardless, one thing was not exaggerated about McCoy. He was a great boxer. Fighting from 1891 to 1916, he had 81 victories, six losses, six draws, nine no-decisions and three no-contests.
Damon Runyon described McCoy in a Chicago Examiner story as “one of the craftiest men who ever put on a boxing glove.”
He also was one of the toughest.
In 1899 he fought rugged light-heavyweight Joe Choynski in San Francisco. Although he suffered a broken nose, three broken ribs and was knocked down 12 times, McCoy put Choynski down 16 times and won the decision in 20 rounds.
Yet, through it all, he couldn’t resist the chicanery.
Before he fought Jack Wilkes in 1895, McCoy dusted his face with talcum powder and rubbed dark eye shadow beneath his eyes to give a hollowed-out look. Before the opening bell he broke into a coughing fit.
“I’m sick as hell, Jack,” he told Wilkes when the first round began. “Take it easy, OK? I shouldn’t be fighting, but I need the money.”
Sympathetic, Wilkes began to pull his punches.
When McCoy broke into another supposed coughing spell at the start of the second round, Wilkes dropped his hands to help him.
And that’s when McCoy caught him with a haymaker and knocked him out.
Even at the end of his career, McCoy had a flair for the dramatic.
He was getting battered by a British seaman in London when the timekeeper was served a tall whiskey and soda by an attendant and placed the drink on the ring apron. Soon after, McCoy was knocked down right in front of the guy.
Seeing the drink, McCoy grabbed it, chugged it down and got up to beat the Brit.
The Ring magazine has rated him one of the 100 greatest punchers of all time and the Boxing Hall of Fame enshrined him in 1957.
Colorful to the end
After he said the burlesque queen submarined his initial marriage and made him realize he was not the marrying type, he was wed nine more times. One woman he married three times.
His wives includes a pair of well-known actresses and more than one rich widow.
“I could always fight the men,” he once said, “but not the women.”
He charmed almost everyone he met and through the years was pals with the likes of actor Charlie Chaplin, movie director D. W. Griffith, numerous politicians, a Pulitzer Prize winner, the prince of Monaco and, for a while, a princess from Belgium, though soon after he left her, she reported she was missing over $80,000 in jewels.
Eventually, he settled in Hollywood, where his bank account disappeared and his alcohol consumption rose.
He finally took up with Theresa Mors, the estranged wife of a wealthy art and antiques dealer. They soon were sharing an apartment, even though some of her friends told her he was “a bum.”
On Aug. 12, 1924 McCoy came home drunk and Theresa told him she was thinking of leaving. He beat her up, stabbed her and shot her in the head.
He drank through the night at the apartment and the next morning stumbled out with plans to kill Mors’ husband and the people who criticized him.
When he couldn’t find them, he took 11 people hostage at the antique shop. When one man tried to flee, he shot him in the leg.
He then tried to escape, but the police finally caught up to him, found blood in his car and didn’t believe his story that Mrs. Mors had committed suicide.
The trial drew press from around the world and the Dayton Daily News ran the story on the front page every day with headlines like:
“Police Refute M’Coy’s Assertion Woman Suicidal” and “Bloody Axe Handle Near McCoy’s Auto” and “McCoy Goes Crazy in Jail.”
The jury was split on a verdict and finally convicted him of manslaughter. He was given 24 years and spent a third of it as a model prisoner at San Quentin. While there he was visited by celebrities Sophie Tucker, Al Jolson and John and Lionel Barrymore.
Eventually movie stars like Lon Chaney and William Powell, along with Gen. Douglas MacArthur, several governors, dozens of Congressmen and even the U.S. vice president Charles Curtis combined forces to get him out of prison and even pardoned in California.
McCoy ended up in Detroit working as a security guard for the Ford Motor Company. He remarried a former wife and seemed to be living a low-key life when he rented a room at the Hotel Tuller on Aug. 18, 1940.
The next morning the desk clerk found him dead in the room, an empty bottle of sleeping pills next to him, $17.78 in his pockets and a suicide note nearby.
McCoy ended the note with the line: “To all my dear friends … sorry I could not endure this world’s madness.”
He went out as he had come in, signing it Norman Selby.
Later it was discovered he had been working on an autobiography.
He had entitled it: “Life Jabs Back.”
About the Author