Today in San Francisco History - Wyatt Earp Referees a Boxing Match

Timecapsule: December 2, 1896

Frontier lawman Wyatt Earp, legendary for his role in the archetypal Western gunfight, "Shoot-out at the O.K. Corral", is called upon this afternoon to officiate at a $10,000 heavyweight championship boxing match. As he strolls into San Francisco's Mechanics Pavilion to start work, police confiscate the ex-U.S. Marshall's six-shooter.

"Sailor" Tom Sharkey is the underdog against Australian heavyweight Bob Fitzsimmons, "the Freckled Wonder". Sure enough, Fitzsimmons knocks Sharkey cold in the eighth -- but referee Wyatt Earp calls a foul and awards the decision to Sharkey, lying unconscious on the canvas! Needless to say, outrage burns in the hearts of 15,000 men present (and the whole city) that the fight had been fixed!

The case went before a judge, and though Wyatt was -- if not specifically exonerated, at least not found guilty of fraud -- he was convicted in the court of public opinion.

But what on earth was Wyatt Earp doing in San Francisco standing in a boxing ring in the first place?

Well, it's all because of Josephine Marcus, a nice Jewish girl from San Francisco who'd run off with a traveling Gilbert & Sullivan theater troupe at the age of 18. Passing through Tombstone, Arizona, she'd met the tall, good-lookin' deputy U.S. Marshall there, and fell in love.

After the much-mythologized OK Corral gunfight (you remember, the Earps, Doc Holliday, the Clanton brothers) Wyatt Earp and Josie left Tombstone and wandered all around the West, settling down wherever a boomtown cropped up -- investing in mines, racing horses, running saloons and gambling parlors -- and south of the border, Wyatt had begun trading on his rough and ready lawman image by officiating at Mexican boxing matches. Sometime in the late 1890s, the Earps wound up living with Josie's parents back in San Francisco -- and there you have it.

We may never know exactly how Wyatt got mixed in the Sharkey-Fitzsimmons boxing boondoggle, or what his involvement truly was -- but in the aftermath of the scandal, the Earps left San Francisco, eventually settling down in Los Angeles. Wyatt wouldn't return to the Bay Area until his death in 1929, when his ashes were buried in Colma, in his wife Josie's family plot.