After a century of newspaper and magazine articles, novels and biographies, motion pictures and television dramas, the image of Bat Masterson as fearless Western gunfighter, gambler and lawman is firmly imbedded in the public consciousness. But few today are aware that William Barclay Masterson, better known as Bat, achieved fame in an entirely different field and arena, or that he spent the last 20 years of his life as a boxing authority and newspaper columnist in New York City.

Pugnacious by nature and a gambler by profession, Masterson was drawn to the prize ring during the 1880s, when prizefighting was promoted and controlled by professional gamblers. Over the next 40 years he attended almost every important fistic event held in the country and was involved as manager, ring official, promoter and boxing columnist. In 1893 the National Police Gazette, America's barber shop bible, hailed him as 'The King of Western Sporting Men,' one who 'backs pugilists, can play any game on the green with a full deck and handles a bowie or a revolver with the determination of a Napoleon.'

Masterson's first sports columns were written for George's Weekly, a Denver newspaper. When a boxing promotion partnership with Otto Floto, sports editor of the Denver Post, ended rancorously, Masterson took up the pen to retaliate against vituperation Floto hurled at him in his columns. The word battle led to a street brawl in July 1900. Bat belabored Floto with his cane and sent him running. Many Denverites viewed the feud as a comic affair, but it grew more serious when Floto and his Post employers imported notorious gunman 'Whispering Jim' Smith to deal with Masterson. The two gunfighters never met, but in May 1902 Bat, disgusted with Denver, left town.

Accompanied by prominent Chicago gambler Charles E. 'Parson' Davies, he went to New York City and booked passage on the ocean liner Lucania, sailing for England on Saturday, June 7. The two sporting men saw an opportunity for lucrative boxing promotions during the celebrations planned for the coronation of the new British king, Edward VII.

But Bat Masterson was not destined to make that trip. The day before he was to sail, two detectives arrested him on a Manhattan street corner, booked him on charges of running a crooked faro game and relieved him of a large pistol. The arrest story filled the front pages of the city's newspapers. New Yorkers were fascinated by the appearance in their city of a real-life Western man-killer, toting the six-shooter with which he had dispatched two dozen or more badmen.

Oddly enough, the legend of Bat Masterson, gunfighter nonpareil, had its genesis in a wildly exaggerated story about him in a New York newspaper more than 20 years earlier. Titled 'A Mild Eyed Man Who Killed Twenty-six Persons,' the largely fictitious account first appeared in the New York Sun in 1881 and was reprinted in papers all over the country. Now, in 1902, the New York papers trotted out the old canards about Masterson's sanguinary career, the story went out over the news services, and the legend was further reinforced.

Masterson's arrest was the result of a complaint filed by George H. Snow of Salt Lake City, a Mormon elder who claimed he had been swindled out of $16,000 in a braced faro game. Bat was also charged with carrying a concealed weapon. He was arraigned and released on $2,500 bond, pending a hearing scheduled for the following Monday. When Snow failed to appear at the hearing, the judge dismissed the swindling charge but fined Masterson $10 for carrying a concealed weapon.

The affair caused Bat to miss his ship to England and embarrassed him publicly. He sued Snow for $10,000, claiming false arrest and damage 'to his good name as a square gambler.' Snow procured an affidavit, signed by the arresting officers, stating that he had never named Masterson as a party to the fleecing scheme, and the case was settled out of court.

Despite his rather unpleasant welcome to New York, Masterson was captivated by the city. He remained there for the next 20 years, living and working within easy walking distance of Longacre Square (later Times Square), the heart of the sporting and theatrical district, the site of the best restaurants and hotels, and the center of New York night life. It was an environment far different from the dusty streets of Dodge City where he had first achieved renown, but the 49-year-old former frontiersman adapted well to this new milieu. In New York he became one of the 'Broadway guys' immortalized by Damon Runyon in his popular short stories. (In the hugely successful stage play and motion picture Guys and Dolls, based on Runyon's stories, the character Sky Masterson, Colorado gambler, played by Marlon Brando in the movie, is drawn from Runyon's memory of his close friend Bat Masterson.)

Bat had many friends, but none had a more profound effect on his success in New York than the Lewis brothers, Alfred Henry and William Eugene. Both were journalists who had known him since they worked on Kansas City papers in the 1880s.

Alfred Henry Lewis first gained national attention with the publication in 1897 of his book Wolfville, a collection of Western stories. Over the next 17 years, Lewis published 18 fiction and nonfiction volumes and became the nation's highest paid magazine writer. Pugnacious and noncomformist, Lewis had much in common with Masterson, for whom he became mentor and benefactor as Bat made the transition from Western frontier sporting man to Eastern metropolis newspaperman and prize ring pundit. Alfred Henry Lewis widely popularized the legend of Bat Masterson, writing highly imaginative articles about him for national magazines and a novel, The Sunset Trail, which appeared in 1905. As editor of a slick monthly magazine called Human Life, Lewis published in 1907-08 a series of Masterson articles on gunfighters Bat had known in the West.

Younger brother William Eugene Lewis sponsored Bat's journalistic career. As managing editor of the New York Morning Telegraph, W.E. Lewis hired Masterson as a sportswriter and quickly promoted him to columnist and sports editor. As Lewis gained greater control of the Telegraph, rising to general manager and finally president, Bat followed his friend right up the ladder, eventually becoming vice president and company secretary. He worked at the paper until his death in 1921.

The Telegraph was unlike the other dozen or so daily papers published in New York City. News of prominent people, especially if it involved divorce, scandal or suicide, got extensive coverage. The photograph of a beautiful young woman, usually a showgirl, adorned every front page. The lead story on page one was as likely to be a horse race or a prizefight as a presidential election. Sensational crime stories were featured, but attention was given also to financial reports, racetrack betting odds, vaudeville, theater and motion picture news and sports, particularly boxing. The New York Morning Telegraph was a combination of Daily Racing Form, Wall Street Journal, Variety, Sporting News, Billboard and Silver Screen Magazine, with a dash of National Inquirer.

Memorable personalities who worked with Bat on the Telegraph included Sam Taub, Louella Parsons, Stuart N. Lake, John Barrymore and Heywood Broun. Taub, hired as an office boy by Masterson in 1908, later gave blow-by-blow accounts of 7,500 fights over the radio. Louella Parsons went from the paper's motion picture department to California, where she reigned as the queen of Hollywood gossip. Stuart Lake, as a young reporter on the Telegraph, was captivated by the Wild West stories spun by Masterson, and 20 years later made Wyatt Earp a household name with his classic biography of Bat's friend. Barrymore worked as a caricaturist on the paper before achieving fame as a stage and screen actor. Broun had a brilliant journalistic career and became the first president of the American Newspaper Guild.

Bat's columns, headed 'Masterson's Views on Timely Topics,' appeared three times a week. Lengthy commentaries churned out over 18 years, they totaled more than 4 million words. Dealing primarily with the fight game, they often were spiced with outspoken, iconoclastic opinions on war, crime, politics and societal changes. As his renown as a boxing authority grew, his comments were picked up and reprinted in this country and abroad. Occasional quaint aphorisms appeared:

'There are more ways to kill a dog than by choking him to death with a piece of custard pie.'

'Every dog, we are told, has his day, unless there are more dogs than days.'

'When a man is at the racetrack he roars longer and louder over the twenty-five cents he loses through the hole in the bottom of his pocket than he does over the $25 he loses through the hole in the top of his pocket.'

'There are those who argue that everything breaks even in this old dump of a world of ours. I suppose these ginks who argue that way hold that because the rich man gets ice in the summer and the poor man gets it in the winter things are breaking even for both. Maybe so, but I'll swear I can't see it that way.'

What distinguished the Masterson columns were his passion for boxing and his willingness to express his beliefs honestly and with utter fearlessness. 'I dare and double dare any sports writer of today to say some of the things about managers and boxers that old Bat Masterson used to say in almost every column he produced,' Damon Runyon wrote in 1933. 'Bat had no literary style but he had plenty of moxie.' When Masterson refused to embellish his accounts of ring battles with fanciful embroidery to make dull fights sound more exciting, some critics called him a 'ham reporter.' If telling the truth was the qualification, Bat admitted cheerfully, he was 'a ham of the most pronounced type.'

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