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SHOWMAN
then a baseball promoter, J. C. Kennedy, a newspaper man, and A. G. Batchelder, the president of the allpowerful American Wheelmen's Association. We left our mark on the business. It was we, for instance, who introduced America to paced racing. We brought over its chief exponent, Jimmy Michael, the famous Welsh Rarebit, who was the idol of the cycling world during his short career. His opponents used to laugh out loud when they saw this pink-cheeked midget, hardly out of short pants, trotting his wheel out on the track to compete with grown men. But, once he was in the saddle and digging into the pedals behind his pace, he turned into a streaking wonder. He made so much money and received so much adoration— particularly from the ladies, who thought he was the cutest thing they'd ever seen in their lives— that his head was badly turned. Most of his winnings went in a misguided effort to turn himself into an ownerjockey, with a big racing stable. And then, when he finally got started home to take the remains of his money to his mother, he took sick and died on shipboard— out of the running at nineteen.
Paced racing has been about as dead as Mayan ringball. It always did survive in Newark, N. J., and there's an effort being made now to revive it, with motorcyclepacing, in New York. But it's all Greek to the general public, so I suppose it calls for some explanation. It developed from the curious fact that a cycler makes much better time if, instead of pushing round the
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