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  POUND FOR POUND

  A Biography of Sugar Ray Robinson

  Herb Boyd with Ray Robinson II

  Dedicated to the memory of Edna Mae Robinson

  Contents

  Foreword

  Prologue

  CHAPTER 1

  From Red Clay to Black Bottom

  CHAPTER 2

  Street Dancer from Hell’s Kitchen

  CHAPTER 3

  A Home in Harlem

  CHAPTER 4

  The Crescent’s Star

  CHAPTER 5

  The Man with the Golden Gloves

  CHAPTER 6

  Punching for Pay

  CHAPTER 7

  Sugar Ray and Edna Mae

  CHAPTER 8

  The Matador and the Bull

  CHAPTER 9

  From Silk to Olive Drab

  CHAPTER 10

  Champion at Last!

  CHAPTER 11

  A Dreadful Dream

  CHAPTER 12

  A Brown Baby and a Pink Cadillac

  CHAPTER 13

  “Le Sucre Merveilleux” in Paris

  CHAPTER 14

  The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre

  CHAPTER 15

  It’s Turpin Time

  CHAPTER 16

  Bumpy, Bobo, and Rocky

  CHAPTER 17

  Take It to the Maxim

  CHAPTER 18

  Top Hat and Tails

  CHAPTER 19

  Return to the Ring

  CHAPTER 20

  The Perfect Punch

  CHAPTER 21

  Broke!

  CHAPTER 22

  Sugar’s Dilemmas

  CHAPTER 23

  Millie and the Mormon

  CHAPTER 24

  Mexican Divorcée

  CHAPTER 25

  The Other Woman

  CHAPTER 26

  Ali

  CHAPTER 27

  Up Against the Mob

  CHAPTER 28

  A Bloody Bridegroom

  CHAPTER 29

  Pound for Pound

  CHAPTER 30

  Lord of the Ring

  The Final Bell

  Epilogue

  Sugar’s Ring Record

  Interviews

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Searchable Terms

  Acknowledgements

  About the Authors

  Other Books by Herb Boyd

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  FOREWORD

  It was in the mid- to late 1950s in Harlem, on a Saturday afternoon at a Malcolm X rally that drew more than twenty thousand spectators, that I met the man called “Sugar.” Sugar Ray Robinson was born in Georgia, nurtured in Detroit, and developed as a boxer in New York City. He had incredibly fast fists and feet, and matchless pugilistic skills in the ring.

  I was Malcolm’s lawyer then. But after meeting the Sugar Man, I represented him on two occasions on matters of not great monetary consequence to him or to me; however, it was of some emotional consequence to Mr. Robinson. In the first instance, I was his lawyer in an incident involving an itinerant car washer who left a scratch on the Sugar’s beautiful pink Cadillac. An unforgivable, but uncollectable sin.

  When Sugar was seeking to get his tavern and businesses on the New York City Visitor’s Bureau schedule of important places to see, I successfully represented him.

  Sugar Ray Robinson, then and always, had enough celebrity, glitter, and glamour wattage to match all the neon that glowed from his array of businesses on Seventh Avenue. The Sugar Man was a most radiant personality.

  Herb Boyd has done a superb job of capturing Ray Robinson’s life and ring prowess, particularly those stirring bouts with Jake LaMotta, Gene Fullmer, Kid Gavilan, and Carmen Basilio. For many boxing authorities, Sugar was “pound for pound” the greatest fighter to ever lace on gloves. And Herb Boyd has amassed enough information and woven a sufficiently detailed and informative story to confirm this fact.

  Because of my limited relationship with Sugar Ray, I didn’t get a chance to know his wife, Edna Mae, in any substantial way, but her life—from what we can glean in these pages—was a remarkable one as well. Together, there was a time when they were an indomitable couple, dominating the social scene and providing Harlem with its own touch of royalty.

  In the seamless weave of their lives, we are able to relive the community’s promise in the forties and fifties, when Sugar Ray’s pink Cadillac was symbolic of an evanescent prosperity. Those were the years when Sugar Ray’s glory was inextricably linked to Harlem’s fortunes, and we reveled in the ascent of those moments, just as we mourned their demise.

  When I, with a large body of help from Congressman Charles Rangel, placed time, money, and energy of my own, my family, and my company—Inner City Broadcasting Corporation—into the rehabilitation of the Apollo Theater in the early 1980s until 1992, some of the intent was to revive a community that had slumped considerably after Sugar Ray’s enterprises were no longer available to inspire. In fact, the Apollo and Sugar Ray can be compared in the sense that each was, for a while, a singular lodestar that drew millions of visitors to Harlem. And during those years in which they existed simultaneously, the allure was undeniable. Thanks, Charlie Rangel; thanks, Harlem; thanks, Sugar Ray and Lady Edna Mae.

  How wonderful it is to experience, once more, some of Harlem’s halcyon times in this marvelous book. It not only depicts a man and a community, but a man and a woman, two star-crossed lovers who found it difficult to live together and apart. I was also thrilled to learn of the close companionship between Sugar Ray and Joe Louis. The similar trajectories of their lives gives the book an extended, and engrossing, leitmotiv.

  But above all else, this book is Herb Boyd’s biography of a great fighter, a boxer who compiled an incomparable record as an amateur and as a professional. In my lifetime, I have seen a number of fighters come along who have anointed themselves “Sugar,” but there was only one Sugar Ray, and Herb Boyd places him back in the ring, back in the spotlight that he relished—and that relished him. Pound for pound, the Sugar was the best, and page for page this book matches his poetry in motion, his powerful punches—his fascinating and fulsome life.

  —Percy Sutton

  Chairman emeritus, Inner City Broadcasting

  Corporation, and cofounder & CEO, Synematics, Inc.

  PROLOGUE

  “Do I remember Sugar Ray? Indeed I do. Watched him fight Duran and Tommy Hearns…”

  “No, I mean Sugar Ray Robinson, the original Sugar.”

  This was typical of the exchanges that occurred between men in their forties and me when I asked them if they had ever seen Sugar Ray fight. When the same question was posed to older men, men in their sixties and seventies, they knew exactly which Sugar Ray I was talking about. Then would come a flood of memory—Graziano, Basilio, Gavilan, Maxim, and the slugfests with LaMotta. “Pound for pound,” they would conclude, “Sugar Ray Robinson was the greatest fighter to ever step into the ring. He had it all: speed, power, endurance, savvy, and style. There will never be another like him.”

  When literary agents Jim Fitzgerald and Ed Summer and editor Manie Barron took me to lunch to talk about my writing a biography of Sugar Ray Robinson four years ago, I was very excited, though a bit apprehensive. Sugar Ray Robinson had a special place in my memory, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to tamper with it or know any more about him than what I had read and seen of him in countless films, to say nothing of the Friday-night fights on television sponsored by Gillette Blue Blades. The first time I heard his name, which reminded me of Detroit’s Sugar Chile Robinson, who was a child prodigy at the piano, I was hooked.

  Much of what I heard of Sugar Ray’s legend was very familiar. Whenever
he returned to fight in Detroit, particularly at the Olympia, right around the corner from one of the many places I once lived in the city, I longed for a chance to see him entering or leaving the arena. A gang of us, mainly there to see what dimes we could earn watching the cars, would cluster near the arena’s back exit, hoping to see Sugar Ray. It never happened.

  Before my mother’s hard work and good fortune commanded enough money to get us out of a basement apartment on Detroit’s North End to within two blocks of the border at Eight Mile Road, she had a roomer who used to box. Sonny was an aspiring welterweight, and he would take the time to show me how to ball my fists and hold them up to protect myself. He taught my brother and me the proper way to execute a jab—the slight twist, the locked elbow. To keep our opponents from taking our jaws off, he showed us how to tuck them down under our shoulders, and to keep them that way as we extended a stiff jab.

  Sonny rarely missed a Friday-night fight on NBC, and it was with him that I first listened to Don Dunphy and Bill Corum on radio as they did a blow-by-blow account of Sugar’s fight with Kid Gavilan. I was amazed at how fast Dunphy could call a fight, the words flying out of his mouth as he tried to keep up with Sugar’s rapid punches. You could tell when Sugar had the other fighter in trouble because Dunphy’s voice would become even more dramatic and the roar of the crowd even more intense. One night, after what Dunphy described as a brutal exchange of punches, Corum came on the radio and said, “It wasn’t a very interesting round,” which baffled us and caused us to wonder if he had fallen asleep at some point. When the fight was over, and the decision went to Sugar, Sonny, my brother, my mother, and I cheered. I was only nine and I guess I cheered because Sonny had told us that he had met Sugar and that he used to live not too far from him in Detroit’s Black Bottom.

  This was my introduction to Sugar Ray Robinson, and from that fight onward I looked for his picture in the newspapers and in the magazines my mother would bring home from the people’s houses where she worked as a domestic. When my brother and I went to camp the next summer, we both were part of the boxing tournament; like me, my brother had absorbed all the lessons Sonny had taught us, and the championship bout was between us. But we decided we were not going to fight each other. After some prodding we were finally forced to fight, and after we both danced around the ring like miniature Sugar Rays they gave me the decision, I think because I was able to stay away from my brother’s windmill blows. That summer at camp in upstate Michigan was the first and last time I ever put on boxing gloves. I didn’t like the idea of being punched squarely on the nose, no matter the prize. My brother felt the same, and we shifted our childhood passion to baseball. But Sugar remained my hero.

  One of the reasons he was my hero was that he always seemed to win. And everyone loves a winner. When we moved from the North End to the “suburbs” of Detroit, we also acquired a front lawn, a backyard, a driveway, and a television set, with tinted cellophane taped across the screen to give us the illusion of color television. Now, rather than listening to Sugar Ray’s bouts, we could watch them, and no fighter was ever more suited for television than Sugar. Everything about him was immediately telegenic—from his flashy style to his radiant smile. Dunphy’s colorful descriptions on radio were marvelous, but now we could see what was happening. The advent of televised fights put the golden age of boxing on the tube and into the living rooms and dens of millions of fans, making Sugar a household name.

  One of Sugar’s most memorable televised fights was in 1952 against Rocky Graziano. We had a houseful of folks that night and, naturally, we were all pulling for Sugar to win, which of course he did. By this time I had begun to read more and more about Sugar, particularly in the Detroit Times. It seems that Detroit still made claims on him, though he moved from the city when he was eleven. From the articles I learned that he used to hang out at the Brewster Center, where he would carry Joe Louis’s bags. In fact, the idea that both Joe Louis and Sugar Ray had their roots in Detroit and had come to the city from the South gave me additional reasons to admire them, since we shared the same migratory pattern. My mother brought my brother and me to Detroit in 1942 from Alabama, exactly ten years after Sugar had moved on to Hell’s Kitchen in New York City.

  By the time I moved to New York City in 1960, Sugar’s career was in decline. His enterprises were closed or being closed and no longer significantly vital to the Harlem community, which was fast becoming the prototype of a squalid ghetto, and a place that even Sugar had begun to avoid. This meant avoiding his fans. James Baldwin, like others who grew up in Harlem, had experienced these conditions. “The people in Harlem know they are living there because white people do not think they are good enough to live anywhere else,” the author observed in an often published essay, “Fifth Avenue Uptown,” before concluding, “No amount of ‘improvement’ can sweeten this fact. Whatever money is now being earmarked to improve this, or any other ghetto, might as well be burnt. A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.”

  When Sugar’s last great fight, with Gene Fullmer, took place in 1961, I was dealing with the Army and the draft. Boxing was the last thing on my mind. I was living in Bedford-Stuyvesant and working at a brake factory in Canarsie when I read about his loss to Fullmer. From then on, I preferred my memories of Sugar: when he was picture-perfect, an untarnished icon, a stylish symbol of black manhood, and my idol. Rather than see him defenseless and humiliated by second-rate fighters, I stored my Sugar away, way back to the late forties when he was at the top of his game.

  It was within the roped square that Sugar gathered his iconic power, and it was this aura that captivated millions, placing him in a pantheon of athletic greats. But the swift feet of the ring master often turned to clay when he stepped from the pedestal.

  CHAPTER 1

  FROM RED CLAY TO BLACK BOTTOM

  Sugar Ray Robinson on the page is almost as elusive as he was in the ring. In the opening chapters of the autobiography that he completed with the assistance of New York Times sportswriter Dave Anderson, Sugar states that he was born May 3, 1921, in Detroit’s Black Bottom. While the date of his birth is accurate (though it is listed as 1920 in Ring magazine, boxing’s bible), the location he gives is contradicted by a birth certificate that cites Ailey, Georgia, as his place of birth. Whoever filled out the certificate—and it could have been Sugar’s father, Walker Smith, Sr.—was only barely literate, since colored was misspelled “colerd.” He was named Walker Smith. His mother’s name appears to be Lelar, though in his book Sugar refers to her as Leila; her maiden name was Hurst. According to the certificate, Walker, Sr., is twenty-eight and a farmer and Lelar is twenty-three and a domestic. Gene Schoor, who wrote a biography of Sugar Ray Robinson in 1951, notes that Mrs. Smith was born August 25, 1900, which would have made her twenty-one at the time of Sugar’s birth, and was one of sixteen children. Walker, Jr., was the couple’s third child. And “Junior” would be the name Sugar would answer to as a boy.1

  In his autobiography, Sugar writes that his parents were from Dublin, Georgia, which is about 130 miles northwest of Savannah. Both of his older sisters, Marie and Evelyn, were born on a farm not too far from Dublin. In 1980, Walker Smith’s funeral announcement states that he arrived in Detroit in 1916; Schoor reported 1917. If either is true, then he must have gone back and forth for the children to be born in the South, or he came alone and his wife came later. This region of Georgia at that time, mainly within Montgomery County, was well-known for three things: cotton, the Ku Klux Klan, and lynching. During the post–World War I years, particularly 1919, the year Evelyn was born, at least ten black soldiers were lynched, half of them in Georgia. According to author Donald L. Grant, “Many of the demobilized black veterans continued to wear their uniforms, sometimes because they had no other clothes and sometimes because they were proud of their service. Many whites reacted savagely to this practice.” Countless numbers of black soldiers who had gone abroad to make the world “safe for democracy” returned home with a
newfound spirit of freedom, only to be brutally reminded by the Klan and other white residents that nothing had changed. And to drive this point home, the Klan torched several black churches and lodges, burning them to the ground.2

  With the cotton infested with boll weevils and the membership of the Klan increasing with each lynching, black farmers had few alternatives but to seek better opportunities elsewhere. Sugar’s aunt and her husband were among the migrants who moved north to Detroit looking for a better life. They found a place to live and settled in an area known as Black Bottom. This sector on the city’s east side was an outgrowth of the restrictive covenant that confined the movement of African Americans. It contained the most dilapidated houses and received the least services. Even so, it was an improvement over where its residents had lived before. Sugar’s aunt and uncle notified Walker, who followed them, gaining employment almost immediately as a ditch digger. “Pop was a wiry little guy,” Sugar recalled in his autobiography, “five foot seven and a hundred and fifty pounds, with a dazzling smile that lit up his dark brown face. And he was strong.” Much of Walker’s strength—and certainly his fatigue—came from wielding a shovel, digging out cellar shells for buildings. Resourceful and hardworking, he was soon behind the wheel of a shiny new black Ford Model T, tooling about town and “styling,” like sashaying while driving, just as his son would do years later in flashier automobiles: Cadillacs and Lincolns.