Court began Monday morning, with Sharkey in attendance for the first time. Julian's attorney, Kowalsky, called Dr. Daniel Lustig to the stand to describe how he was not allowed to see Sharkey after the fight. Kowalsky then asked his big question: "Could those injuries have been caused by artificial means?"
"Yes, sir."
"By the injection of fluid?"
"Yes."
"What fluid?"
"Any acidulated water."
Lustig said that as far as could be judged, the groin was not injured. Such an injury would have caused greater swelling, accompanied by discoloration. He said he would have expected to find the injury in worse condition had it come from a blow by Fitzsimmons.33
Fitzsimmons followed the doctor and insisted there had been no foul. "I have never made a mistake of that kind yet," he said. "If I had been in a dazed or groggy condition, it might have been possible for me to have made a mistake. But I was as cool then as I am now. Sharkey was not fouled at all. I have been through an experience of that kind, and know just how an injured man acts." Fitzsimmons said he had been hit in the most tender of locations by a cricket ball, and he knew what would happen.
Julian followed and told of a meeting with Riley Grannan and Moses Gunst in which he was told, "Don't you under any circumstances stand for Wyatt Earp to referee that fight." According to Julian, Grannan had overheard Earp in conversation with horseman Joe Harvey. Harvey said, "It's all right then." And Earp responded, "You rely on me." After that, a number of sure-thing-only gamblers put down big bets on Sharkey.
Sharkey, Needham, and Earp all took the stand on Tuesday, denying that any plot existed. Earp's comments proved particularly unusual: The Chronicle headlined it "Peculiar testimony of the referee," while the ever-partisan Call headlined: "WYATT EARP EXPOSES EXAMINER'S FAKE METHODS; Swears He Never Gave Any of Long Green's Young Men the Statements Printed as From Him." The Chronicle presented a less than flattering picture of the onetime marshal:
Wyatt Earp was in court all afternoon looking, as far as outward appearances go, less like a bad man [than] about anybody else present. His testimony was startling in some particulars. He swore more than once that Sharkey had never fouled Fitzsimmons, that the sailor had never caught his opponent by the legs, that Fitzsimmons was fouling all the time throughout the fight, and that Martin Julian never made any announcement of any kind in the ring on the night of the fight about the referee being "fixed"; all of which evidence astounded nobody more than [Earp's attorney] General [William H. L.] Barnes himself.
Earp's confused, repetitive comments took up most of the afternoon. He had trouble remembering Gibbs's name, calling him Hibbs or Dibbs, and said he had never spoken to reporters or given a signed statement to newspapers. Of course, the Call leaped on the issue to denounce the statements run in the Examiner.
Earp described the fight and forcefully denied any conspiracy to help Sharkey. He said Julian's statements of his involvement were false: "I will say now that what he testified to, the other day, was a pack of falsehoods in every respect."
Kowalsky, Julian's attorney, quickly moved to strike the statement. Earp spoke up before a ruling could be made, saying "I am on the stand now, and have got my right hand up, and I say it is a pack of falsehoods."
Judge Sanderson told Earp to just answer the questions, and he responded quickly, "I am not like him, going around and shutting people's mouths."
"Mr. Earp, I instruct you to only answer the questions," Sanderson said before Kowalsky continued his cross-examination. Earp denied all allegations of favoritism and bristled when the attorney asked why he had separated the fighters by pushing Sharkey in the breast and placing his fingers in Fitzsimmons's eye.
"I never did it," Earp said. "I emphatically say I did not do it on any occasion-and I don't believe Fitzsimmons will say that I did it."
Earp left the stand sounding confused about details while maintaining his innocence. Fifteen years earlier he had been a vision of clarity in Tombstone courtrooms; now he struggled and stumbled through cross-examination. Testimony ended after a couple of minor witnesses, and a decision was left to Judge Sanderson.35
The crowd returned to court on Thursday, December 17, for the expected climax of the hearing, with a judge determining the quality of Wyatt Earp's honor. The expectation never met the reality. Sharkey's attorneys moved to dissolve the injunction, arguing that the case was unworthy, nothing more than an argument over the purse of a prize fight. The Fitzsimmons team repeated its massive conspiracy theory, then submitted the case to Sanderson. His ruling followed strictly technical grounds.
Prizefights were still illegal -technically illegal -in San Francisco. And the judge took it to be so: "In my opinion, under the statute standing as it does now, they can no more legalize a fight in this city than they can legalize a duel," Sanderson said. "And this is simply an instance to disobey the law. There is no doubt in my opinion ... that these men were fighting, must have been fighting if this complaint is true. For, if they were boxing they were fighting. They were committing an offense against the law; and it is elementary law, and no lawyer will challenge it, that no court, either of law or equity will take cognizance of a suit of this character the moment it is challenged.... I understand that these exhibitions are given; and they are given because the people and the police wink at them. But no court will recognize any such proceeding. And there is no doubt in my mind that this injunction should be dissolved and it would have been dissolved if the motion had been made immediately upon the heels of issuing it, as the court in fact expected. The order to dissolve the injunction will be granted."36
Sanderson's ruling provided no vindication for Earp, Sharkey, or the National Club. Sharkey could cash his $10,000 check. Earp would be free to hang out around the race track again. As to guilt, innocence, or culpability, Sanderson made no ruling.
Debates would continue through the saloons and beer halls of the city, most centering on the direct question of whether Earp took the bribe and fixed the fight. The question can never be satisfactorily answered, but there are three possibilities:
■ Fitzsimmons actually fouled Tom Sharkey, and Earp made the correct ruling.
■ Earp took a bribe and fixed the fight.
■ Sharkey pretended to be fouled, doing so convincingly enough to fool Wyatt Earp and a good portion of the crowd.
It is certainly not impossible that a blow by Fitzsimmons caught Sharkey in the tender region. Sharkey fought from a crouch, and could well have risen after Fitzsimmons's shot to the head, which preceded the blow that Sharkey claimed landed too low. The most damning evidence against this came from Dr. Lustig, who said that the injury appeared more likely concocted than actual. While Sharkey may have been legitimately injured, the circumstances surrounding the post-fight dressing room scene make the legitimacy of Sharkey's injury highly suspect.
Author Eugene Cunningham met Sharkey around 1915 and asked about the incident. "Tom looked down at his feet and up at the ceiling and seemed honestly embarrassed," Cunningham told Robert Mullin. "Finally, he muttered something about there being 'more to it than folks knew about' and 'no use talking about it., 1137
As to the great conspiracy theory, that seems far-fetched. A conspiracy to deliver Wyatt Earp as referee would have had to involve at least one of the Gibbs-Groom combination, probably both, along with Earp, Lynch, Sharkey, and probably several others. Keeping this legion silent before the fight would have been difficult; preventing them from talking in later years would have been impossible. The only evidence of such a conspiracy comes from hearsay among the sporting crowd, a circle where rumors travel faster than comets. In addition, had Earp been paid to throw the fight, this would have been an awfully poor way to do so. Waiting until the eighth round left him open to the risk that Fitzsimmons would finish Sharkey with an unquestionably clean blow.
What seems most plausible is that Sharkey, Lynch, and Needham simply duped Wyatt Earp. Earp had refereed about thirty fights, probably all bare
knuckle affairs, before the Marquis of Queensberry rules became the accepted code. Referees of the time were instructed to follow the rules and never allow the freewheeling fighting that had accompanied the old bare-knuckle brawls.
Manager Lynch's wrangling over an official could well have been devised to rule out competent and experienced referees, forcing the National Club to come up with a man lacking the experience with the Queensberry rules to properly recognize a foul. Wyatt Earp fit the description perfectly, with his past reputation for honesty and current status as both a local character and an oft-confused saloon denizen and sport. If trainer Smith is to be believed, Lynch quickly reminded Sharkey to grab his groin and scream foul, an acting job that fully convinced the Bulletin reporter as well as Wyatt Earp. This would also square with the strange post-fight scene, in which Dr. Lustig was refused admission in favor of the dubious Dr. Lee. And it would have allowed Sharkey a chance to see if he could win the fight on his own merits before lowering himself to cheating.
Charles Fernald wrote of riding on a steamer to Alaska with Earp. "He claimed that there was a lot of money bet on this fight, and he told me that to make the foul stick, somebody injected iodine into Sharkey's groin. I always understood Wyatt Earp was on the square in his decision, but he did not know about this iodine business until sometime afterwards."38
Had Earp not called the foul with Sharkey rolling around in the ring, the referee would have faced an outcry from Sharkey's bettors nearly equal to the one he faced from Fitzsimmons's backers. And he would have been accused of incompetence or conspiracy by the Sharkey forces. In the early days of the Marquis of Queensberry rules, it was one of the great downfalls of boxing that such a decision rested simply with the official in the ring. In this case the officialWyatt Earp-lacked the experience and qualifications to make such a determination.
Devil or dupe, Earp's reputation in San Francisco had been seriously damaged by the decision. He had become a local joke for the wags of San Francisco. From bar to beer hall, they laughed and told stories about the famous lawman, the kind of stories that ridicule a reputation. San Francisco had become, for him, a city filled with scorn.
It was left for his friends to defend him throughout the West. Diarist George Parsons, now in Los Angeles, attended a party and heard carping about the fight. "Wyatt Earp disliked because of awarding Fitzsimmons Sharkey exhibitions or physical culture symposium to latter on a claimed foul. Wyatt was always straight in Tombstone. Tracked Apaches with the Earps. Good man as men went there. "39
And Bat Masterson ran into a little tussle of his own in Denver while defending the honor of Wyatt Earp. Felix O'Neill, a Colorado politician and regular sports gambler, lost heavily on the fight. He publicly denounced the whole affair as a swindle, and the word got back to Masterson.
The Bulletin wrote: "Bat Masterson is known from the Golden Gate across the Rockies, and his record in Arizona shows him to be a man who has a fancy for backing up his opinion. And it also happened that Bat Masterson had followed the example of O'Neill and had wagered large sums on the Cornishman's end of the fight."
Masterson and O'Neill met in a saloon, "and in a few minutes from the start Felix O'Neill had all sails set and was bowling along at a high rate of speed in his denunciation of Yurrip. It was high time that prize-fighting was stopped in San Francisco if such men were to be permitted to act as referees; men like Earp should be driven out of the community, and so forth. Who was this man, anyhow? A scoundrel, a thief, a bully, everything that was bad." Masterson listened quietly before replying that he knew Wyatt Earp and strongly believed in his old friend. O'Neill yelled across the saloon, "I say he's a thief. You read the papers. Did you hear of such a. .
"Stop." Masterson cut him off. "You are all wrong. I was with this man Wyatt Earp in Arizona, Tombstone, Arizona. I know his character. He was my friend there. In all America there is not a fairer, squarer, straighter man than Wyatt Earp. He's game as a pebble, too, and no game man is a cheat. Now, O'Neill, you've got to take back all you said about Earp just now."
"Take it back," O'Neill roared.
"That's what's the matter," Masterson said coolly.
"I'll see you damned first," O'Neill yelled.
"Now, O'Neill, be sensible. You lost your money; I lost mine. But we both lost fairly and squarely. If there was any job Earp wasn't in it, you bet."
"I say he was. I say he's a...'
And Masterson quickly ended this argument with his fists. O'Neill was left, "laid up for repairs," getting by far the worst of this fight, which had no ref- eree.40
The aftermath of the fight left her husband greatly disturbed, Sadie said:
The falsehoods that were printed in some of the newspapers about him and the unjust accusations against him hurt Wyatt more deeply than anything that ever happened to him during my life with him, with the exception of his mother's death and that of his father and his brother, Warren [in 1900]. He was not a man to show emotion by tears but I knew him so well that I could read the extent of his mental pain. Even the articles praising his fairness, his courage and sincerity that other newspapers, both in San Francisco and the rest of the country, published in his defense, could not wipe out the sting of these attacks. They were so viciously untruthful and unfair...
It had left Wyatt weary and dispirited, sick with longing to get away again to unsettled country and to be wrapped in its quiet and obscurity.41
Wyatt Earp had always been a proud man-proud of his ability to avoid trouble and proud of his ability to handle trouble when it could not be avoided. The ridicule he faced after the fight scarred him inside. He had twice in his life become a victim of press attacks. Now he would keep his mouth shut for nearly three decades.
Before Earp moved on from northern California, he would suffer one more humiliation. Fitzsimmons and Corbett finally settled on a date for what would really be a title fight-March 17, 1897, in Carson City, Nevada. Bat Masterson was to supervise a squad of special ringside police and probably recruited Earp as a member of the force, although that cannot be confirmed. Whether as an officer or not, Earp attended the fight, and his decision in San Francisco three months earlier was not forgotten. Earp made an effort to visit Fitzsimmons, which came as a surprise to just about everyone. According to the Examiner, a New York newspaperman brought a wagon loaded with guests to Fitzsimmons's house. Among the guests was Wyatt Earp, and Fitz still carried a grudge. The journalist hailed the fighter and Fitzsimmons nodded, then noticed Earp and turned his back on the wagon and walked away. Fitzsimmons avoided the problem, but his wife said she had no regard for a man who, after having deeply wronged her husband, sought to make his acquaintance-and as for the newspaperman, whose act of bringing Earp out there had the appearance of an intentional affront, she could only say that she "regretted that an important newspaper was represented by such a one."
The unhappy Fitzsimmons told the Examiner: "That fellow evidently brought Earp out here to insult me. Of course, the roads are open to people -but people are not taking any pleasure drives out here on a cold and snowy day like this, and if they did not intend to go to my place, they would not have been out in that direction. At any rate, for a man to speak to me, when he is in company with Wyatt Earp, is a little more than I care to stand. I suppose this person, being employed by a newspaper, thinks he can insult me as he pleases. Possibly it is true, for I don't see any means of redress. I believe Earp deliberately wronged me, and shared the profits of the wrongdoing, and I don't want to have any dealings with him whatever."42
The fight came off the next day, and Fitzsimmons refused the customary prefight handshake. In the fourteenth round, Corbett saw the last of Fitzsimmons's hands, taking a knockout blow that ended the fight. As with most fights, the rumors of a fix had circulated before this one, too. Only it was Fitzsimmons who had been the expected fall guy.
"I trust I will be pardoned for dwelling a little on the general impression circulated by my enemies that I had been 'fixed' to lie down," Fitzsimmons sa
id. "If the truth were known, and I see no reason why it should not be, I was offered $500,000 by a San Francisco combination to throw this fight and $250,000 by a New Yorker. I gave my answer to those overtures to-day." Fitzsimmons ended this fix rumor with a knockout of Corbett.43
A note of irony would be added five years later when Fitzsimmons returned to San Francisco to fight Jim Jeffries in July of 1902. The aging Fitz fought gamely until Jeffries floored him in the eighth round. The Examiner headlined "Fight a Fake," and charged that Fitz had taken a fall. This time the Call argued the fight was honest while the Examiner charged the fix. The charges and countercharges would sell many newspapers.
THE LAST
FRONTIERS
TYATT AND SADIE SAW THE SHORES OF ALASKA for the first time in the fall of 1897 as they chased another gold rush. His first two years there, Wyatt managed saloons and ran gambling concessions. He then went into partnership with Charlie Hoxie in the Dexter Saloon in Nome, Alaska's most prominent boomtown. He was a celebrity again, a man with a reputation as he handed out beer to the thirsty miners. At the end of the 1899 mining season, the Nome Gold Digger wrote: "Wyatt Earp, who was a Deputy U.S. Marshal in Arizona at one time, and who is a celebrated personage in nearly all the mining camps of the country, left on the steamer Cleveland for San Francisco."' The San Francisco Examiner noted Earp's apparent success on November 13, 1899, by reporting, "He is making money perhaps faster than he ever made it before and he told his friends that if business runs with him next summer as it did after his arrival in the camp ... he will be able to retire with all the money he desires."
Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend Page 49
