an excerpt from

The Real Mc Coy
by
Darin Strauss

"McCoy, or whatever his name in fact is, has been the herald of a new era. The fellow reveals that today a friend with a natty build can blaze a trail through the world of muscular sport. Notwithstanding the hullabaloo of his life and the mischief of his legend, threadlike McCoy with his wondrous speed and guile may be the first, greatest gentleman of this fresh age."
–H. H. Measures, The New York Evening World, 1910

"To be believable, the story must first of all arouse our astonishment: only the astounding will be believed."
–Elias Canetti, Selected Notes

"The one sincere confession is the one we make indirectly–when we talk about other people."
–E.M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

‘Zounds, McCoy

Here was a champion before he closed his hand into a fist. The boy's gumption was like the full steam of a locomotive. Plus he was a born liar.

In flat Indiana his father told him, "Falsity’s in your blood"–with a voice deep and dark like a thief's pocket. "Go and make yourself someone finer." Before too long the boy made himself several someones finer.

However.

When we pick up his story, he liked to think he'd never been Virgil Selby, and he certainly wasn't yet St. Corkscrew LeFist, or the other empty title he'd come to call himself. In December 1899, on the happy morning he earned lasting fame, this top-notch fibber, "scientific" brawler, future political hopeful, sometime poet, jewel thief and movie star was just about always McCoy.

McCoy had a wooer’s slicked-up brown hair and the sweet temper of a lucky man. But even using that celebrated name the kid was slight, a cousin to the ribbed washboards women had in those days: not an ideal case for a guy intent on the welterweight crown. O, ambition!

"It’s the hour for Kid McCoy," he was laughing, and the look he gave the mirror weighed more than he did. "What he’s been expecting all these years and here I am to delight in it." This was one of the last mornings of that century, and who'd have dared say the twenty year-old flimflammer couldn't have taken the world before sunset?

Picture our milieu: Ronny and Ray’s Sports Club on the Lower East Side of Manhattan felt about a hundred sticky degrees any season of the year, more or less suffocating, sweat heavy in its dead air. This was the gym the zealous went to–unpleasant enough to worry your skin and the one place in all New York McCoy felt relaxed. He had his own latchkey, and since six a.m. the battler had been waiting inside for the welterweight champ Tommy Ryan, the sort of pug whose head echoed if you tapped it.

By seven, the gym was still mostly empty. A bunch of us straggled in and out, though, trainers and towel boys and the fighter himself, and it was all of us who were responsible for spreading this story, even if accounts fail to mention that. Does the bible tell you about the beetle who took note from the manger?

"You know something, fellows?" McCoy was shirtless and scrawny and all keyed up as he boxed shadows in the ring. Most people still knew him only as the sparring partner Ryan had given a humiliating lesson in boxing a few years earlier. "Come ten minutes’ time," he said, "I’m going to start gathering the bricks to build my American Dream."

One of the towel boys said he didn’t know lying was part of the American Dream.

"Where you been?" And McCoy gave the littlest of smiles, which a stranger might have mistaken for cynical, or an expression of menace. I recognized it as McCoy’s self-possession getting the better of his giant enthusiasm, and I fell in love with the man for the thousandth, the ten thousandth time.

The champ Tommy Ryan finally turned up with his pretty if plump new wife Eleanor on his arm. "’Zounds, McCoy," was the brawny Champ’s hello, his voice mild and innocent as the look on his guilefree face. His hair was a haystack. "Jab high," he said.

"Rabbit-punch low," answered McCoy–this was some dead language from a brotherhood long gone.

"What’s all that to-do in your telegram? You get me here for a little of the old…" Without letting Eleanor’s hand out of his, Ryan pantomimed the act of sparring. (Tommy Ryan was the finest welterweight breathing and floored by the soft of one woman’s hand.) Over and again the champ blinked his left eye; at thirty, he had a crushed duct. A tear waddled down his shaven cheek.

"Hello, Mrs. Ryan." McCoy could show a lot of warmth toward anyone. "I didn’t expect to see you"–although of course he had expected her. "Now, Tommy," he said, "I have a big proposition, champ, that’s why I asked for you." McCoy made sure not to look at Ryan's terrible huge fisted hand.

"Ooh, a proposition!" Eleanor Ryan gazed at her husband even when he wasn’t looking her way. "It sounds an absolute pip, Thomas." Eleanor was a twenty-six-year-old schoolteacher who read poetry, and was therefore in a state of high romance all the time. (Don't tisk tisk. In my century an old pug could insult a girl and not have every female from Seattle to Miami take it personally.)

"’Zounds, McCoy," said Ryan again, climbing into the ring in his street clothes, his smile a show of nothing more genial than some muscles in his cheeks.

"What're we talking here, McCoy?" Ryan began to circle McCoy absent-mindedly, cutting off the space between the skinny kid and the ropes, dukes up. Even wearing buffalo-hide ankle boots and an overcoat with chinchilla lining, the champ was at all times a fighter. Ryan's punching knuckles were clearly thinking: Let me at that skinny McCoy.

"A benefit exhibition," McCoy said, himself a source of energy bouncing on its toes. Imagine a whirlwind coiling this way then that across the canvas. "For charity and it wouldn’t count. We’d stage the whole thing."

The champ stopped to stare into McCoy’s bobbing face. "Hey, you got a black eye or some such?"

McCoy didn’t quit dancing; more life in him than a congress of Ryans. "Who would be fast enough to tag me, Champ?"

"You got like rings around your eyes, McCoy. Maybe it’s you’re so skinny."

"Skinny enough to give you a run for your…" Sometimes for effect McCoy didn't finish his sentences. He'd borrowed the affectation from the great Chinese flimflammer Johnnie Gold. "I've gotten better than you know, Tommy," he said.

Other undersized pugs would find a lesson in McCoy’s shuffle, his spindle legs, in the spiral of his trademark coil punch. If every ounce of the kid weren’t in constant motion, pent-up energy might have jiggled his insides off their tendons.

"If that’s your say so," Ryan was sighing, and from his voice it was plain the champ still saw Kid McCoy as the sparring youngster who caved at the hint of punishment. Ryan had earned immortal renown with his 76th-round knockout of Mysterious Billy Smith in 1895.

"Now, for real, Kid," Ryan was saying, "what benefit?"

The champ'd remained undefeated in forty-six fights over ten years. (He too had taken a ring name: Ryan was born Joseph O’Youngs, and for a short time he'd gone by "Nonpareil Andrew Chiariglione." Now some called him "The Stinging Bee.")

McCoy said, "Raise money for immigrant literacy or some other bilk. It's some show next week." The boy's cheeks had gone shiny with the exercise. "A pretend fight, these guys are proposing for this charity set-up. 'Figure a little magnanimity on your part could make the newspapers quit hating you. The ones who call you ‘The Mick.’"

"‘The Mick who’s none too quick.’ Ain’t that what it is?" Ryan looked around the dusky gym as if hunting for unfriendly journalists. He saw only his schoolteacher of a wife and a few towel boys in unlit recesses. "Ah, what'a penny-a-liners know about the ring game, huh?"

Eleanor, rising on tiptoes, cut in: "A fight with no pay day, Mr. McCoy?" She scrunched her little nose as if calling to mind something gone to rot. "I hope you’ll take no offense, but I wouldn't imagine ‘free of charge’ is your cup of tea." Her blouse-sleeves showed a peek of her bare forearms, and the skin was awful pimpled.

"Mrs. Ryan, it’s not really a fight, and it doesn’t have to be free." McCoy bowed his head at her, as if at any time she might start treating him with respect. "’Way I figure, we arrange it about as violent as a ballet. But that’s not all." He now stood still enough to put his arm around Ryan, but his fingers still tapped a pulse on the Champ’s shoulder. "The guys who want to organize this fuss are due here any minute, a Mr. Hill and a Mr. Overton," McCoy said. "They're talking a thousand for you, Tom, and five hundred for me. 'Figure together we could squeeze them for a lot more; scheme out a way to up their ante. Of course, Champ"–here McCoy smiled his widest of the morning, showing a set of surprisingly gray teeth–"it’s up to you. But I heard Tommy Ryan could flimflam a little in the old days, and it'd be good press against those who say marriage has changed you."

Eleanor squinted at her husband. She chewed on her lip as if it were bubble gum.

All the while McCoy eyed her. He had such acute sensitivity to the changeable ambitions of men–and women–it wouldn’t have surprised me if he was of the same cloth as those balloons that tell specialists which way the wind’s blowing in China.

Right before Eleanor next spoke she inhaled as if she were about to walk through smoke and didn’t want to waste air. "Thomas," she said, "maybe you and Mr. McCoy should fight, even if it's for free."

"Free?" McCoy said. "Oh no, ma’am, I don’t fight boredom for free. I just reckoned there was some angle–"

"Eleanor," said the Champ, "darling." Another teardrop tiptoed the length of his cheek. "I haven’t trained a whit since the honeymoon. I could barely spar out my own grandma next week."

"You’re modest, Thomas, lovelily so," said Eleanor, the easy-grader part of her nature showing. "But it shan’t be a real fight, isn’t that so, Mr. McCoy? Play acting, so to speak. And for charity." She made sure she’d caught her husband’s good eye. "Charity looks quite good, especially if there’s no chance of anyone getting hurt."

McCoy saw his opening. "I suppose that’s right, Mrs. Ryan." He scratched at his chin to look contemplative. "Like a theatrical production, we could do it. At any rate, this pair of malooks Hill and Overton wants to pay us real money. If it’s for a right cause anyhow–"

"Who’d put up a thousand dollars to see me fight you?" The champ’s voice crept on tolerant contempt. His genius for wearing down rivals in the ring had been unequaled in the budding history of this mad sport.

Here, I thought, McCoy would mention that he’d had his own big victories of late. Knocked out Honeyblast in six. Dago Frank in two. But his smile stayed relaxed–if a curious relaxed. Still, his light eyes clouded just a bit. The smallest reaction.

As McCoy turned again to Eleanor, the shadow had passed from his face. Mrs. Ryan still looked to be in favor of this "charity event"; the key to the whole flimflam was getting her approval.

"I can hardly fathom it myself," McCoy said. "The money’s as good as the cause." (Later, when real success came, he would delight in a life Selby had only dreamt of: Selby had squirreled away cash, but as Kid McCoy he kept enough on his person after one joyous streak to add up his pockets and find $40,000.)

"Doesn't it sound too good, though?" Ryan said.

"Well, Tommy," McCoy winking, "maybe I mistook you for someone else. If you’ve still got that champion's belt of yours, check it. See if you aren’t the winner I took you for."

"Listen," the champ growing heated, "I think I know who I am, McCoy."

"It’s tricky, though. Could be today you find yourself a different guy?" And next, gently, "Tommy, you've forgotten more boxing than I ever knew, but here’s a chance for us both to get the cash without breaking a…"

Ryan tilted his head. He breathed in through his nose and out again–his big eyes trained on McCoy. The champ held stock still; then he started into the faintest of smiles. There it was: the Sucker's Smirk. It often turns up in the eye first, a flicky show of happiness. Next it skates down the jaw, wavering near the mouth like a bee around a hive, and soon it riffles under the flesh to shiver the chin. In a good flimflam the sucker's whole face will burst like a potato when it's cooked.

"Well, okay, McCoy. I guess that about says it." Tommy turned to his wife. "If you think, dearest."

"Yes, I suppose I do think." Eleanor was just woman enough to understand her schoolma’am smile melted Ryan's heart. "Why not?"

"’Zounds," the Champ said, a once-wild pet near finished his house-training. "Okay, McCoy–let’s listen to what these fellows have to offer."

Eleanor clapping lightly: "Thomas, why are you so dear when you’re agreeing with me?" There, now her heart had melted, too.

A few minutes went by and then Ryan poked McCoy’s shoulder. "Ever think of marriage, Kid?"

"Not for McCoy." As Virgil Selby, on the other hand, he was still married to a short person named Lottie. In ten years’ time, McCoy would be the most married man in America, with quite a few weddings to the same woman–the beautiful and fatal Susan Fields.

Both Mr. Hill and Mr. Overton perspired when they arrived. In truth, Hill and Overton were named Isley and Hewlett, button men of McCoy's and in on the grift.

"…so very generous of you to agree to help our worthy cause," Hill/Isley was saying, his voice a little husky this still-early hour, but pleasant. "Thank you, Kid McCoy, and especially you, Mr. and Mrs. Ryan." Isley’s was that style of enunciation well extinct nowadays, the ringmaster’s cadence, an obnoxious inflection that in the last hundred years has gone the way of Zoroaster.

McCoy was standing in the ring, a few feet above everyone else. The schoolma’am wore her kindly smile, and the Champ at her side blinked his crying eye and nodded like a baboon.

"Are these immigrant children very…"–Eleanor ran her pointer finger the length of her neck as she searched for a benevolent word– "indigent, Mr. Hill?"

Mr. Isley didn’t answer for a moment; Mr. Isley very near forgot his name was supposed to be Mr. Hill. "Uh, yes," he said at last. (Not that the Ryans caught his hesitation. Most who get duped see just what you want them to see. People don't put up a defense, or want to.)

"Oh, how sad and tragic for those children to be indigent, sad and tragic!" Eleanor patted her collarbone to show her pity, a gesture she probably thought was very touching. "These immigrant foundlings won’t–actually be present that night, will they?" With her plump waist and her chest what it was, she cut a young girl’s figure.

Hands in front of his body as if to start in on a hug, Isley with his worn brown suit and mock-reproachful smile made a fair picture of a man of charity: fussy yet tolerant of what is base in us. The other imposter, Overton/Hewlett, teetered like a humpty-dumpty egg in tight Sunday clothes. It was obvious Hewlett was drunk. The man hadn’t spoken, and his cheeks rippled pinkly with each belch hemmed in. McCoy could guess the foulness of Hewlett's breath just by watching those pale flapping lips.

"…Of course," Isley was going on, "we at Newcomer Goodwill will remunerate you for any and all altruistic efforts." (In reality, good old Isley was an opium-smoking confidence man whose deceit had brought him within an inch of his life at least seven times–the worst being a stab wound from a swindled Irishman outside O’Shaugney’s Pub on the Bowery.)

"Without this we’re just degenerate sapheads in the wild," said Hewlett, his first words of the day coming off his thick tongue. He made a very large humpty-dumpty egg: tired, ashen, fifty-odd. "Sapheads in the wild attempting to keep some miserable campfire from going snuffed." The final, nasty d in that sentence bounced around the room for a time.

Tommy Ryan shot a bewildered glance at his wife, whose face–though too prim to display real confusion–did wrinkle a little. "Without what we’re sapheads, sir?" Tommy asked.

"Charity," said Hewlett. He looked toward the ceiling and his eyes were dewy cue balls. "What I’m on about here is that." He brought his palms forward, then curled his fingers gently around nothing–a mime caressing the imaginary breasts of Charity. McCoy tensed. A flimflam is rehearsed like a stage play, and for one member of a con mob to crack out of turn like this was appalling.

"Well, Mr. Overton," McCoy said, and he winked at the Ryans as if there were some joke they were a part of, "I guess that’s why we’re set to do your little production, me and the good old champ here–charity." You can throw a cat however you want, it always keeps its head up.

"I lost money on you!" Hewlett crowed, his face turning the gray-green of an old pear.

"Lost on whom?" asked Ryan. Enjoying, at least, the chance to show grammar before his wife.

"Lost on youm." High-pitched Hewlett sounded like Dawn’s cock-a-doodle-do. "When you beat Mysterious Billy for the title in ’95. Twenty bucks." The club’s air smelled, as it tended to, from years of sweat and heat, cigar smoke, urine.

Eleanor said, "I didn’t know charitable men bet." And she blinked and blinked like some offended fairy.

"Isn’t that why we’re here, ha ha ha," said McCoy. I’d only ever heard him laugh loud, with explosiveness that would unnerve the deaf, but here his laughter was easygoing, of a charming kind.

A few hours later, once everyone had gone, it ended up just McCoy and a few towel boys alone in that old athletic club. He said, "I could kill Isley for bringing that drunk idiot Hewlett. How do you take a known sot to a grift?" He was laughing. "That devil Tommy Ryan punched the spit out of me when I was just a little shaver, and made a real neddy of me before a lot of people to boot." (Almost five years earlier, when he’d first traveled to spar Tommy Ryan, McCoy had been so nervous he’d donned his boxing trunks before leaving his hotel and worn them beneath his country clothes; he’d sat on the train like that. A fidgety prariebilly locomoting toward his big break, is how McCoy described himself.)

"After it was all over, I was bruised up enough to pass for a piece of crow bait." McCoy was shaking his head. "And the newspapers still say Ryan took me under his wing, taught me a few inside moves. Ha!"

Shifting from foot to foot in Ronnie and Ray's ring, McCoy said, "Listen up, fellows. If you’re going to beat someone silly in the ring, at least be decent and declare him a real opponent who you pay." He was speaking quiet enough almost to conceal his excitement. "This doublecross is going to be sweet."

Ah, those times! In this new-fangled century of yours everything is well lit. If information today throws a spotlight, it was scarcely a candle in 1899, and in the dark corners a con artist had his chance to convince a halfwit to jeopardize his championship belt without knowing that he was putting anything at risk. Would it even be possible to pull that classy a swindle in today’s gleaming world where everybody knows everything?

–But I’ve jumped ahead. Let me tell you how the scam played out in Ronnie and Ray’s, how McCoy prevailed over Hewlett’s drunken unprofessionalism in the turn of the century that this was….

Mid-morning. Hewlett’d finished his outburst about "charity." The daylight at the window seemed hesitant to enter–it shied across the floor in little canary chicks of sun. McCoy was watching the scene with the concentration of a young boy stooped over a maggot with his magnifying glass.

If Isley was stammering on about indigent children, and Hewlett could barely stop his head from drowsing, and if Tommy Ryan (always a chump to endorse or mock something based on another man's reaction to it) could only wait for someone else to speak up–the champ's wife, her delicate hands like carnations curling under, leveled on Hewlett and Isley the kind of stare that took in more by the moment. She hardened up her face the way shy women do when they grow skeptical: their eyes biggen, their brows worm toward each other.

A scam is a fluid thing. Though it didn't seem so just moments earlier, McCoy and his mob had reached the grifter’s stormy moment, the touch-and-wait when no one knows what to say to the suckers and the whole scam could unwind. The Ryans may not have realized it themselves, but they were about to form a united front against the flimflam–unless McCoy could find some switch to throw.

Time slouched along with mincing steps. Everyone watched everyone else. Even the windows were clouding in thought.

"My father, the coot, had a story." McCoy was addressing everyone, but he centered on Eleanor in particular. "Pa's uncle Michael–my great uncle–lost his finger as a boy, and that ninny kept that digit in an urn his whole life." McCoy leaned his head to one side, a youthful move.

"Everyone thought old Uncle Mike crazy. And he was, mean as a bear, too, especially when he slugged it out against the spirits of the long dead. See, he had howling fights with the deceased every morning and most afternoons, being part Maumee Indian and all." McCoy’s eyes were no wider now than fingernail clippings. "When old Michael passed away, my father said everyone in the family was secretly happy to be rid of the ding-dang grumbler who argued with his ghosts."

McCoy now smiled at the champ Ryan, who was doing little stretching exercises with his neck.

"But he passed away, my Uncle Michael who argued ghosts–" McCoy said, and even as he hated his mouth for being repetitive, he was calculating the effect his story had on everyone in the room. "–And the day of Michael’s funeral, the headmistress of the local schoolhouse, Mrs. Dutter, came to pay her respects. She told us Uncle Mike had been visiting her classroom once a week. This was funny to me, though I can't speak to the rest of my kin, me being the clever one in that group. But it turns out that Michael'd hiked across Bluffton to the schoolhouse every Tuesday without any of us knowing. The old nutjob had let the children play with that finger in that urn–"

McCoy saw that Eleanor was scratching her head like a country lawyer about to object. Was the con so obvious?

"The school," McCoy hurried, "had been paying Uncle Michael 3 _ cents a week for this service, and at the end of each year he’d given back to those children every fourth week’s pay, so they could buy books–yes, he kept that finger right in the urn his whole life. You understand why I’m telling you this?"

Tommy Ryan squinted and picked an imaginary piece of lint off his sleeve–a boy of ten or eleven hoping the teacher doesn’t call on him.

"Charity." McCoy put a hush onto his words. "You never know who’s going to be its keeper." He gestured sham-discreetly at Hewlett, for Eleanor’s benefit. "That’s my point." And didn’t he wink at her, a little one? "Now, if your own charity can give you a little benefit–every fourth week’s pay, say–then all the better."

Ryan, the champ, gave a nod in favor of charity.

"Well, lovely, then," said Eleanor, and a smile heaved onto her face like a wave on the beach.

"Wonderful!" said Isley. "You’re wonderful for helping us, madam!" He raised his arms. "Just wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, Mrs. Ryan." His rendition of a charity man was apparently a very encouraging person.

But Eleanor had spoken without thinking anyone would take hers as the final word; her eyes went timid. "Sirs, please wait," she muttered. "Are there not details to, to–"

"All right–Mr. Hill, is it?" McCoy was addressing Isley as if Mrs. Ryan hadn’t just spoken. "You mentioned a thousand for the champ here, sir, and five hundred for yours true?"

"Uh." Isley gave a worthy performance of an awkward moment, fussing with the hankerchief in his pocket. "No, sir. Our budget is nine hundred fifty for Mr. Ryan, and, gulp, three seventy-five for you, Mr. McCoy."

"Forget it," McCoy spat, maybe a little too quick and exuberant. "Forget that."

"Mr. McCoy–" Eleanor and Isley said it at the same time.

"Get someone else. You told me a price." McCoy was bouncing again. "Did you tell me a price? You told me a price."

"Wait, only nine fifty for me?" Ryan said.

"But, Mr. McCoy," Eleanor was saying, "what about your Uncle Michael?" Then she spoke intimately to Tommy: "Nine-fifty for doing next to nothing ain’t bad. Isn’t bad."

"Forget Uncle Michael, that story was bullroar," McCoy said. "Find somebody else. Hodge, for instance. You told me a price. Hodge’s still in town, I’ll bet."

J.K. Hodge, a.k.a. "Sweet Daddy Champagne," a fighter for the British Isles, was believed the most competitive spirit in the game; Ryan had battled him to a draw three times, before finally knocking him out in the fifty-eighth round of their last fight, but not before the Champ broke most of his knuckles on the Englishman’s facebones.

"No, no, no, not Sweet Daddy Hodge," said Ryan. He gently rubbed his huge hand. A champion with feelings. He seemed more fitted to violence when he was whimpering. He rubbed those knuckles some more. "Come now, McCoy," he said after a time. "Money’s not the whole of life. Ain't that what you just–"

"No, I don’t know." And McCoy let the shiver of a wilting suspicion enter his voice. "I suppose I could use the notices." While inside him his spirit must have jumped for joy. "Well–I’ll let you take me in sixteen, Tommy."

"Twelve," said the Champ.

"Sixteen," said McCoy.

"Fine, then." Ryan smirked as his dim eye wept. "It should be a pip, this fake battle." Had some photographer raced in to freeze the scene in black and white, it would’ve looked a tender meeting of the dearest of friends–smiles all around.

Nowadays you people merely stick the old flimflam days to the glass like some relic on a museum wall. Sure, people see the spectacle–but nobody gets a hands-on feel. Me, I live trapped inside my memory of old con jobs like a pistol under glass.

The date was set. Kid McCoy was going to fight an unprepared, unwitting moron and genius of the ring on January 1st, 1900, for $375. And the World Welterweight Crown.

Now, I knew Kid McCoy and he got to know me, especially later. This scam would be one of a thousand heights in a life that in unequal parts I watched, heard from the horses' mouths or read about in the papers of the day–not to mention spent the last many decades mooning over. McCoy's astounding weird story, as it lives in this old man's memory and guesswork, is what follows.

—–Reprinted from The Real McCoy by Darin Strauss by permission of Dutton, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright © Darin Strauss, 2002. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.