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 . ....