Bat Masterson was a legend of Texas
By Clay Coppedge, Country World staff writer
Dec. 27, 2007 - Back in a former life adss a sportswriter I took part in a poll where current sportswriters were asked to name their favorite sportswriter of all time. I was the only participant who picked Bat Masterson. My colleagues were puzzled.
“Wasn’t he an Old West gunfighter?”
Well, maybe. Maybe not. The legend of Bat Masterson took full flower in his own lifetime. Any number of movies and books about the man (but mostly the legend) left some doubt as to exactly how many men he killed, if any.
As much as we might want to, we can’t claim Bat Masterson as a Texan but he was here for some important events, including the Battle at Adobe Walls and in the Army’s war against the Comanche.
In Sweetwater, he is widely reported to have killed a man, but recent scholars have cast doubt on whether he killed anybody at all, as if that somehow diminishes him. He was wounded in the gun battle at Sweetwater and soon left Texas and ended up in Dodge carrying a walking stick — a cane — instead of gun.
When some drunks decided to make sport of him for it, he went upside their head with the stick until they took a different view. Onlookers remarked on the way he “batted those fellows around.”
That’s how some people say Masterson got his name of “Bat.” Others say it was based on his middle name, Bartholomew. Still others say it was Barclay. All this confusion is his own fault for becoming a legend in his own time.
Bat Masterson is not included in any anthology of great sports writing because his place in the history of the American West overshadows anything his considerable accomplishments at the New York Morning Telegraph.
That Masterson, the old buffalo hunter, Indian fighter, lawman, crony of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Luke Short, Wild Bill Hickock, King Fisher and many others, ended up as a sportswriter in New York is generally treated as an ironic postscript to his legend.
Masterson made it back to Texas in February of 1896 to visit Judge Roy Bean, the Law West of the Pecos, in Langtry. As part of his visit, he refereed a boxing match between Bob Fitzsimmons and Peter Maher, and he wrote about the bout for his New York readers.
The match was controversial and Texas Rangers were sent to stop the fight, but Roy Bean staged the fight on a platform on a sand bar in the middle of the Rio Grande River to keep the bout out of Ranger jurisdiction. Steep canyon walls on each side of the river made for a nice natural amphitheater.
Just getting to the fight was a major ordeal but five trainloads of fans bounced and rattled their way on the Southern Pacific from El Paso to Langtry. More special trains came from the east. The fight, unorthodox as it was, had as much hype for its day as a Super Bowl does today. Bean charged spectators $20 a head and sold a lot of beer at $1 a bottle.
The fight lasted just under one minute. Fitzsimmons clobbered Maher with a hard right and Maher forgot why he was there, or even that he was there at all.
“That Fitz is the fastest creature alive,” Masterson wrote, and he was not a man given to hyperbole or exaggeration is his writing. That was, in fact, what set him apart from some of the other well known sportswriters of his day.
“He gained a wide reputation for his writing,” Damon Runyon wrote of his pal. “Four square to all the winds that blew, he despised hypocrisy and dishonesty, and he had a forceful way of expressing his feelings.”
Bat Masterson never lionized the athletes he wrote about the way Grantland Rice and others did. It took more than a good press agent to impress Masterson. He was quick to spot a phony and just as quick to write about. “Leach Cross is a good fighter when he isn’t scared’ is a typical Masterson line. He wrote of bantamweight Eddi Campi: “As a tango artist, he is without peer.”
While Rice and other sportswriters played along with the Great White Hope silliness, Masterson called the whole thing a charade. When clean cut and wholesome Willie Ritchie started winning every fight by a knockout, Masterson called him a fraud. He went so far as to say that an April 1914 fight with Tommy Murphy was fixed.
“Two clever and experienced fighters, like two skillful grapplers, can go through the motions of a contest and still be working according to schedule,” wrote the erstwhile lawman and boxing promoter. “Such things have happened before.”
On Oct. 25, 1921, Masterson went to the Telegraph office to write a column about a fight he had covered the night before when Rocky Kansas had defeated Lew Tendler on points.
For a change, Masterson didn’t write much about the technical aspects of the fight but instead pondered the inequities of life that the fight illustrated. Here’s what Masterson wrote that day: “Lew Tendler received a little more than $12,000 for his scrape with Rocky Kansas. Not so bad for a little job like that, and by the way, Rocky got nearly $10,000 for the part he played in the show. No wonder these birds are flying so high when they can get that kind of money for an hour’s work.
“Just think of an honest, hard-working farmer laboring from daylight to dark for forty of the best years of his life, and lucky if he finished with as much as one of those birds gets for an hour’s work.
“I suppose these ginks who argue that way hold that because the rich man gets ice in the summer and poor man gets it in winter everything is breaking even for both, but I can’t see it that way.”
That said, he suffered a heart attack and died at his desk.
Against odds that only a gambler like him could have appreciated, Bat Masterson breathed his last sitting at a desk and clutching a fountain pen and not a six-gun.
