The BFD | Phrase of the Week

Gerry

The Real McCoy

Kid McCoy was born as Norman Selby in Indiana in 1867 (he later took the name Charles McCoy). By the end of the 19th Century, Kid McCoy was one of the most renowned boxers in the world.

Just five foot eleven and one hundred and sixty pounds, McCoy is still regarded as one of the greatest light heavyweights in the history of the sport of boxing. His surprising punching style and his deceptively slight build has led to a number of legends about McCoy that allegedly serve as the basis for the genesis of the phrase “the real McCoy.”

One of the legends involves McCoy being at a bar when a much bigger man began picking on him. Others in the bar warned the man that he was messing with famed boxer Kid McCoy. He laughed them off, figuring that this small guy in front of him couldn’t be McCoy. So he challenged the smaller man to a fight. McCoy promptly knocked him out, leading the man to exclaim, “Oh my God, that was the real McCoy”.

Another version of the story is also the most simple. Since McCoy’s build was so reasonably sized, people who were not obviously athletes could attempt to pose as McCoy, especially during the late 19th Century and early 20th Century when there were not as many readily available photographs to show otherwise. Therefore, when McCoy would visit a new city for a match he would have to let people know that he was, indeed, the real McCoy.

Is any of these stories the real origin of the term “the real McCoy?”

I do not believe so. Sadly the real answer is more prosaic but interesting nevertheless.

The phrase “the real MacKay” appeared in Scotland in print as early as 1856 in the poem Deil’s Hallowe’en. It is referred to as such in the poem as, “A drappie o’ the real MacKay.” There was, indeed, a Scottish whisky company at the time named G Mackay & Co Ltd and by the 1870s they had definitely adopted the phrase as their advertisement slogan. Famed author Robert Louis Stevenson mentioned the phrase in a letter in 1883, noting “It’s the real Mackay.”

The first usage of the term “the real McCoy” in print occurred in The Rise and Fall of the “Union club” by James S Bond (no relation to 007) in 1881. In the book, a character Jim Hicks says “By jingo! Yes … it’s the ‘real McCoy”

So you can debate whether there really is a difference between the term “the real MacKay” and “the real McCoy,” or if the latter was merely a derivation of the former, but either way, it appears evident that the term predated Kid McCoy, who was not even ten years old when “the real McCoy” first saw print.