Fighting fit — Brian Maye on bare-knuckle heavyweight boxer Tom Sharkey

Ireland has a long and distinguished boxing history and Tom Sharkey, who was born 150 years ago on November 26th, featured early in that history. His recorded ring career lasted only around a decade but during that time he had some noteworthy achievements. Although he was declared world heavyweight champion, controversy dogged the declaration.

He was born in Mill Street, Dundalk, Co Louth, son of James Sharkey, a labourer, and Margaret Kelly. We know little about his early life, except that he spent a decade at sea, for which he earned the nickname “Sailor”. It was an adventurous decade, during which he survived four shipwrecks and had a series of no-holds-barred fights. His boxing career began professionally in Honolulu, Hawaii, on March 17th, 1893. It would seem that he won his first 20 professional contests by knockout over the next three years.

In June 1896, he drew a four-round match with “Gentleman Jim” Corbett and in August had an exhibition three one-minute-rounds encounter with the legendary John L Sullivan. The big contest came in December that year when he took on Bob Fitzsimmons in a match advertised as the heavyweight championship of the world for the vacant title (Jim Corbett had retired undefeated). Fitzsimmons floored Sharkey in the eighth round but the referee, the famous Wild West sheriff Wyatt Earp, judged the blow to be foul and awarded the victory to Sharkey. This caused controversy, with accusations that Earp had been bribed, and public opinion was mainly on Fitzsimmons’s side.

When Corbett decided to return to the ring, Sharkey’s title, such as it was, was forfeited, and he returned to Ireland in 1897 and fought in Belfast, Warrenpoint and his native Dundalk. Back in the US, in May 1898, he fought James J Jeffries (soon to be world champion) in a 20-round slugfest; Jeffries was declared the winner, this being Sharkey’s first loss in 37 professional bouts. His second encounter with Corbett, which occurred in November 1898, was also to provoke controversy. It seems Sharkey was getting the upper hand when one of Corbett’s seconds entered the ring, resulting in Sharkey being declared winner. One claim afterwards was that the second was paid to do so by the Sharkey camp while another was that his action was to prevent a more comprehensive defeat for Corbett.

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Sharkey fought Jeffries for the title in November 1899 in a memorable contest. He “lost in 25 rounds in a fight that is still regarded as being one of the greatest – and toughest – title matches of all time,” according to Jim Shanahan, who wrote the entry on Sharkey in the Dictionary of Irish Biography. He suffered a broken nose, two cracked ribs and a grossly swollen ear. It was the first championship fight filmed for motion pictures and the first indoor fight successfully filmed; the artificial lights required for the filming are reputed to have burnt the hair off both men’s heads.

Following that defeat, he won six contests in a row by knockout but the heavy punishment he’d taken over the years began to tell on him. Defeats by Gus Ruhlin and Fitzsimmons in a rematch brought an end to the big-time bouts.

He was knocked out in the 11th round of another contest with Ruhlin in June 1902, after which he retired from the ring.

He was “undoubtedly one of the toughest competitors ever seen in professional boxing,” Jim Shanahan believes, with a creditable knockout rate of almost 70 per cent, but was unfortunate to be active in a boxing “golden era”; his chief opponents, Corbett, Fitzsimmons and Jeffries, were great boxers who held the world title among them for 13 years (1892-1905). “He was never in any sense a stylish boxer, but his ability to take punishment was legendary . . . [His] aggression and intensity astonished many observers, and his punching was often wild and erratic, leaving himself wide open to counterpunch,” according to Jim Shanahan, who pointed out that he was neither particularly tall nor heavy.

He handled the money he earned wisely and after retirement ran a bar for a time, had a big house in Brooklyn and a stable for horses, but poor investments and some trouble with the authorities brought him down in the world. In the 1920s and 1930s, he and Jeffries, who’d become close friends, reenacted on the vaudeville circuit their famous fight. For the last 20 years of his life, he worked as a night watchman and security guard on racetracks in California, while living on Jeffries’s ranch there.

He died on April 17th, 1953, in San Francisco and is buried at Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno. “Jeffries always regarded him as his toughest-ever opponent, and among heavyweight boxing’s ‘nearly’ men, he has a good claim to be considered the best – and toughest – of them all,” is Jim Shanahan’s conclusion.