A look at the record of heavyweight championship fights reveals that on February 21, 1896, Ruby Robert Fitzsimmons defeated Peter Maher, the Irish champion, in a bout held in Mexico. Mexico? Well, sort of, if you consider that a sandbar in the Rio Grande just a few hundred yards from Langtry, Texas, may have belonged to Mexico and not the United States. The man behind the fuzzy geographical claim was of course Judge Roy Bean, “Law West of the Pecos” and Langtry’s most prominent citizen.
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