The year-end rankings also serve the important function of starting off the new year in a flurry of comment and enthusiasm. Boxing has thus received a much-needed stimulus and I’m proud to think that I inaugurated the system. [Illustration: 26] MEET THE PRESS Let me tell you about some of the outstanding sports writers in American journalism. I am not going to attempt to list all the great reporters, past and present, who have kept the achievements of our athletic heroes in the headlines, because it would take far more space than can be devoted to it here. Of all the colorful writers from all parts of the world with whom I worked, my first choice is Tad Dorgan, whose boxing cartoons were unexcelled and whose coinage of words formed the pattern for later-day sports writers. Tad held an amazing place in American journalism. He was not only a great writer about fighters and an expert in the game, but he was one of the most graphic cartoonists we have had on the west side of the Atlantic. He was the John Leech of the modern school—now, alas, modern no longer. In England the closest to him is Tom Webster, whom I also esteem among my friends. When Tad Dorgan died, a stout heart ceased to beat; he was a man who had given pleasure and a laugh daily to hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world. In the quarter of a century that I knew Tad, I can recall at least fifty “nicknames” that he had originated to describe fighters with certain peculiarities; and the names by which he called them are to this day their identification in the fistic world. He was the most accomplished coiner of the sports page phrase. He and Damon Runyon and Bill McGeehan contributed more to the slang expressions that swept the country from time to time than any other writers. Battling Nelson, Tad dubbed “The Bat” and the “Durable Dane.” Billy Petrolle in later years he called the “Fargo Express” because of his speed, and the “Fargo Express” he remained throughout his fighting days. Jem Driscoll, to Tad, was the “Will O’ The Wisp.” ... Tad’s comic strips, his humorous, human interest cartoons and wisecracks continue to retain the appeal they had years ago. Tad had a flavor and the tang that no man in the boxing game has ever been able to duplicate. As a boxing commentator Tad rated with the best: Bill Naughton, Bill McGeehan, Ed Smith, Charley Van Loan, Hugh Fullerton, George Siler, Macon McCormack, Bat Masterson, Charley Mathison, Sam Austin, George Touhey, and others whose articles made them famous authorities on boxing in America. Tad was an intimate of every sportsman of note from the early nineties to the day of his death. He was a good friend of James J. Corbett, John L. Sullivan, Jim Jeffries, and Jack Johnson—the four aces in his list of fistic celebrities. Jim Corbett once said that Tad, who was born in the same district as Gentleman Jim, when only a lad showed all the symptoms of becoming “the funniest man in the world.”