“Nobody asked me, but…” was Cannon’s familiar lead. A protege of Damon Runyon and Mark Hellinger, Cannon’s prose was admired by Ernest Hemingway. Cannon started as a copy boy for the New York Daily News in 1926 and joined the New York American as a sportswriter in 1936. In WWII he accompanied Gen. Patton’s Third Army as a war correspondent. Cannon joined the New York Post in 1946 and, except for war correspondence duty in Korea, remained with the paper until hired away by the New York Journal-American in 1959 ; his $1,000 a week salary was believed to be the most in the country paid to a sports columnist. An early observer of the impact of black athletes on both sports and society, he made the immortal comment that boxer Joe Louis was a credit to his race – the human race.
