Roy Bean and the heavyweights

The 1896 fight for the world heavyweight boxing championship between Bob Fitzsimmons and Peter Maher almost took place in Dallas and then it almost took place in El Paso, Arkansas and Galveston, and then it almost didn’t take place at all. It wouldn’t have if Judge Roy Bean, the fabled Law West of the Pecos, hadn’t staged a daring last-minute rescue.

The bout’s tangled history represents a time when most of the United States had outlawed prizefighting. Texas was an exception until promoter Dan Stuart announced that Fitzsimmons and Maher would slug it out for money in Dallas. Governor Charles Culberson responded to the subsequent hue and cry of church groups and donors by calling a special session of the Legislature. Less than 48 hours later, prizefighting was taboo in Texas.

Hot Springs, Arkansas offered to host the fight but the governor of that state did his best Culberson imitation and with the same results. The “free state” of Galveston made a play but nothing came of it.

However, a group of businessmen in El Paso, who either didn’t know or care about the new law, offered Stuart a bonus of $6,000 if he would agree to stage the fight in their growing but isolated town.  Stuart, a gambling man by nature, went all in. The businessmen and boosters soon welcomed a rowdy contingent of fans, sportswriters and hangers-on while Texas Rangers from Ysleta showed up to keep and eye on things.

Stuart declared to the press: “Nothing short of lightning or the destruction of the earth by fire or flood can stop the contests we have arranged to pull off. It is a cold 200-1 shot that they will come off as advertised.”

Stuart’s calculations failed to account for the Ministers Union of El Paso, a group that agreed across denominations that prize fighting was inherently brutal, evil and not at all necessary. Reverend E.W. Anderson characterized the sport as “the prolific mother of all crime” and introduced a resolution calling on “all lovers of purity and honor” to rise up in protest against the onslaught of “gamblers, thieves, pickpockets, thugs and harlots” that this prizefight would bring to town.  

The ministers took their concerns to the U.S. Congress, which acted with uncharacteristic haste to enact a federal law against any “pugilistic encounter between man and man or fight between man and bull or any other animal for money or for other things of value, or for any championship” in any of the territories of the United States. Convinced they had outlawed pretty much every type of fighting anyone anywhere in the United States and its territories might find objectionable, Congress returned its collective attention back to whatever they were doing before the ministers interrupted.

This is where Judge Roy Bean enters the story. He had been monitoring the political and social drama in El Paso from its onset, wondering all the while if there was anything in it for him. As the scheduled date of the bout grew nigh without a firm indication of where it might take place, or ifit would, Bean sent a telegram to Stuart offering his town of Langtry, deep in the wilds of West Texas, on Mexico’s doorstep, as a site if he so desired. A panicked Stuart so desired.

The Southern Pacific train that pulled into Langtry on Feb. 21, 1896, unloaded its rowdy cargo of fight fans, gamblers, sportswriters and rangers while Bean regarded them from the front porch of his Jersey Lilly Saloon. He welcomed the people to his little fiefdom, sold some beer,and led the crowd to a regulation-sized boxing ring on a sandbar at the bottom of Rio Grande Canyon, just across the river in the state of Coahuila, Mexico and beyond the jurisdiction of rangers and meddling politicians.

With the logistics now settled, the featured performers, Fitzsimmons and Maher, stepped into the ring and engaged in a 95-second slugfest. These were two of the hardest punchers of the era, holdovers from the days of bare-knuckle boxing. Their respective opponents usually ended up unconscious, gloves or not. This time, it was Maher who went down for the count and then some. Said Maher when he finally came to: “I thought I had him licked until he punched me under the jaw and then it was all over with me and I quit thinking.”

The fight was a financial and public relations pleasure for Judge Roy Bean. He sold a trainload of beer and national press coverage of the minute-and-a-half fight lent the self-proclaimed judge an enduring fame that no one else involved in the fight ever equaled. Paul Newman even played him in a 1971 Hollywood movie.