Pound for Pound Page 10
Since he was already in the South, Sugar took on a couple of exhibition bouts with Gene Burton, his reliable sparring partner, in Shreveport, Louisiana, and in Dallas, defeating him in both places—as he would five years later in Hamilton, Ontario—before proceeding home to see his newborn son.
He was only back in New York City a week when he learned that the great dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the oldest of the three famous black Robinsons of New York City, had died. He always admired the dancer’s nimble footwork, and Bojangles would loom even larger in his memory a few years later when he retired from the ring to pursue a stage career.
Seated on a pew toward the middle of the church during the funeral, his mind slipped back to Hell’s Kitchen, where he’d first begun to imitate the dancer’s intricate steps. “Heel and toe, heel and toe,” he would repeat to himself as he performed outside the theaters not too far from where he lived. When the daydreaming ended, Sugar discovered he was surrounded by a cluster of celebrities who had jostled their way into the funeral at Abyssinian Baptist Church. Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Duke Ellington, Brooklyn Dodger pitcher Don Newcombe, and W. C. Handy were among the more prominent African Americans who turned out to pay their last respects to a dancer who could run as fast backward as some could forward. The crowd at the funeral was nowhere near as large as the numbers who’d filed into the 369th Regiment Armory to view the dancer’s body a few days earlier, but it certainly rivaled the massive assembly of folks at the funerals of two other prominent African Americans, actress Florence Mills’s in 1929 and entrepreneur A’Lelia Walker’s in 1931. For two days more than three thousand people visited the armory, many of them only vaguely aware of Robinson’s prowess as a tap dancer, even if they knew him as the “Mayor of Harlem.”7
From the funeral, Sugar headed directly home to help Edna Mae with the baby. This was his second chance at fatherhood, and he was doing his best, in his own way, to play the role. Still, there were some things he couldn’t face. He was squeamish about changing his son’s diaper and insisted Edna Mae have somebody available to perform this task when she wasn’t around. After only a few weeks of domesticity, Sugar was eager to get back in the ring. It was far more appealing to be across the ring from an opponent, ready to go mano a mano, than it was to change a baby’s diaper. On January 30, 1950, he knocked out George LaRover in the fourth round in New Haven, Connecticut. It was on the basis of such overwhelming victories that Nat Fleischer, then president and editor of Ring, deemed him the best all-around fighter of the year. Sugar, he wrote, possessed “fighting ability, hard hitting, clever boxing, ring generalship, masterful feinting and blocking and hitting…”8
As much as he despised the South, he accepted a bout in Miami. He was partly motivated by the chilly February weather in Harlem, and by an invitation to dine from noted columnist and radio commentator Walter Winchell, whose broadcasts with a clicking telegraph key in the background and the urgency of his “Mr. and Mrs. North and South American and all ships at sea…let’s go to press” endeared him to millions of Americans.
When Sugar arrived a few days before the scheduled event, Winchell was determined to take him everywhere he went, including to clubs and racetracks where blacks were forbidden. One sign read: No Negroes, Jews, or dogs. Sugar nudged Winchell, pointing to the sign. “Walter we’re not supposed to—”
“Forget it, Sugar Ray,” he barked. “You’re with me, you know.”
“Yeah, but you’re Jewish,” Sugar said.
“I’m Winchell,” the columnist snapped.9 On another occasion, Rachel Robinson, Jackie’s wife, was with Sugar and Edna Mae in Winchell’s company when he marched the couple into a Miami Beach nightclub. “He [Winchell] literally led the way, parted the waters, as Jack and I, Sugar Ray and his wife, followed like sheep to his table,” she said. “It was more tense than fun, but it was another barrier broken.”10
Inadvertently, Sugar and Edna Mae, along with the other Robinsons, were challenging discrimination in Miami and thereabouts, though it is debatable what impact they had in Miami. In Harlem, meanwhile, residents and activists were screaming about the increase of discrimination in industry. There were concerted cries for more militancy. Speaking at the Theresa Hotel in September 1950, Milton Webster, vice president of the Sleeping Car Porters, a union founded by A. Philip Randolph in 1925, asserted, “Negroes are relegated to black men’s jobs, where the work is hard, the hours are long, and the pay is poor.” Webster scoffed at the notion that Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, or Sugar Ray Robinson were “examples of Negro progress.” To him they were but “isolated incidents.” “They brought us here in chains,” he blasted, “and we’re still in chains, and we must break them ourselves.”11
Fully involved in Harlem, to the extent that he even invested in it, he plunked down a few dollars at the pari-mutuel window at Miami’s Hialeah racetrack. When he wasn’t watching the galloping ponies circling the track, his eyes were fixed on the pink flamingos that waded in the track’s infield pond. Pink also caught his attention later at a party, when he saw Willie Pep’s manager wearing a pink tie. He begged the man to let him borrow it, because he was on his way to a car dealer in the Bronx and that was the color he wanted for his new Cadillac. There would be no more dark blue Buicks, which had hitherto been his trademark. After purchasing the car he drove it to a paint shop on 56th Street and 11th Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen, not too far from where he lived as a kid. The paint job cost him three hundred dollars, but it was one-of-a-kind and exclusively his, Sugar boasted. There was only one Sugar Ray Robinson in the world, and now there was only one pink Cadillac, and always with a pair of gloves dangling from the rearview mirror.
Folks came from miles away to gaze upon the shiny new car, which in the sunlight radiated a special glow. For a moment it rivaled its owner in popularity, so much so that Life magazine sent a photographer to get pictures of it parked out front of the café. It stood as an emblem of possibility for a multitude of young black boys, who begged for an opportunity to polish it or to keep an eye on it for Sugar. When Sugar cruised through Harlem behind the wheel with the top down and his hair glistening, the sight was absolutely mesmerizing. “It was a spectacle you didn’t want to miss, and once you saw it you never forgot,” said boxing aficionado Clint Edwards. “No doubt about it, that was Sugar Ray.”
Sugar drove his fancy car downtown on September 27, 1950, to attend the fight between his friend Joe Louis, fresh out of retirement, and Ezzard Charles. Louis wanted him there for moral support, but he could have used him in the ring as well. Charles punished him over the first half of the fight and then carried him to the end, winning an easy fifteen-round decision. The once potent Brown Bomber was but a shell of his former self, so badly beaten that Sugar had to lean down and help him put his shoes on. Louis promised then and there that he would call it quits. But he didn’t, and bounced back in November with a victory over Cesar Brion.
Louis’s star was fading as the Sugar was reaching the pinnacle of his glorious flight. As he ascended, many black Americans vicariously soared with him, celebrating his appearance on the cover of the June 25, 1951, issue of Time magazine. Pedestrians passing his cluster of businesses saw the cover taped to the window of each store. A poster-size version, probably mocked up by Langley Waller, the pioneering Harlem lithographer, leaned atop the jukebox inside the café. There hadn’t been a black on the cover of the magazine since Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong made his appearance in February 1949, and there wouldn’t be one after Sugar until Willie Mays arrived there in 1954. He was the second black boxer to receive this honor—Joe Louis was the cover boy in 1941. On his cover, Sugar is beaming proudly as two boxing gloves with legs climb up a globe, one glove bearing a 147-pound marker and the other a 160, indicating his conquest of the world welterweight and middleweight championships. Sugar was riding a gigantic wave of success; the world was truly his oyster. He was at the top of his game and, according to several accounts, worth more than a hal
f-million dollars.
CHAPTER 13
“LE SUCRE MERVEILLEUX” IN PARIS
In 1951, A. J. Liebling, a highly respected writer on boxing, visited Sugar’s café and offered this description in a lengthy article on Sugar for The New Yorker. It was “a narrow but deep saloon with walls of blue glass chips tastefully picked out with gold. The bar was as crowded as the street outside, but at the back of the place, where the bar ends, Sugar Ray’s widens out enough to permit three parallel rows of tables, one row against each side wall and the third between them, and there were few empty seats. Since I could not find a place to stand up, I sat down at a table. The rear section…is decorated with four huge photomontages, two on each side wall. Two show him making a fool of Kid Gavilan, the Cuban fighter, who is a competitor of his for local fame…Another shows Robinson bringing an expression of intensely comic pain to the face of the French middleweight Robert Villemain, a muscle-bound, pyknic type with a square head. The fourth shows him standing above Georgie Abrams, a skillful pugilist who is so hairy that when knocked down he looks like a rug. Abrams got up after this knockdown, but from the picture it doesn’t seem as if he ever would.”1
On any given night, you might see Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, Nat “King” Cole, Lena Horne, the Brown Bomber, and other celebrities strolling through the door. “It was really a high-class club,” Langley Waller recalled, “and you had to check your hat and coat at the door, no matter how long you were going to be there.”2
In the first half of 1950, Sugar was in perpetual motion, jumping from business to business and vacillating between the welterweight and middleweight divisions. This meant managing the seventeen-pound difference between the weight limits. Strangely, the weight fluctuation had no bearing on the outcomes in the ring. In June he defeated Robert Villemain in Philadelphia for the state’s middleweight crown and in August successfully defended his welterweight crown against a veteran mauler, Charley Fusari. The fight with Fusari was memorable for a couple of reasons. Sugar learned at the weighing-in ceremony that he had to lose a quarter of a pound in one hour to meet the weight limitation—which he did. He was able to do this after several trips to the steam box and rubdowns. Later, when Sugar was asked what his toughest fight had been, he said it was the one with Fusari because “I had to fight my fight and his, too.” This would be Sugar’s last fight as a welterweight. Making the weight was getting to be too difficult.
The bout with Fusari was also memorable because Sugar took only one dollar from the purse. The rest he donated to the Damon Runyon Memorial Fund for Cancer Research, at the suggestion of Walter Winchell and in honor of his old Jewish teammate Spider Valentine, who had died of cancer. Sugar grew increasingly preoccupied with cancer and its causes and would support its elimination through various fund-raising campaigns throughout his life.
Having reached a pinnacle of success within the United States, Sugar began thinking about going overseas. Time and again he was being told of the rewards of exhibiting his talent abroad, of letting his European fans see him at his best. In November, Sugar gathered his entourage and booked passage on the SS Liberté for Paris. “On the pier with Edna Mae and me that day were my sister, Evelyn, George and Wiley, Honey Brewer, June Clark and Pee Wee Beale, and my barber-valet Roger Simon,” Sugar recalled. They took with them more than fifty pieces of luggage. They were traveling like royalty, and Sugar was footing the bill, which would total more than fifty thousand dollars. It was an unforgettable moment for many in the group, Simon said in an interview years later. “We were all excited, and we knew that Sugar was ready to take on the best fighters in Europe.” And Simon, a barber whose clients also included Duke Ellington, made sure Sugar was looking well groomed and properly attired for the captain’s table on the ship.3 They would be joined later by Jimmy Karoubi, a midget who served as a translator and mascot.
Traveling with a large number of friends and associates was not uncommon for Sugar. He seemed to relish having a crowd around him at all times. Hardly a moment passed in the day when he wasn’t surrounded, like a monarch, by a knot of well-wishers, each seeking to get what was virtually impossible—his undivided attention. At the training camp, in his office, and even at his home, there was a constant flow of visitors. Among the hundreds of pictures of Sugar the family has, it is rare to find a photo of Sugar alone, unless it is one of those stock pictures with him posing. There are many with him amid an ensemble of men friends carousing in a nightclub, huddled in a gymnasium, playing cards, or settled behind a set of drums.
And if there were no drums, he was at the piano trying to pick out a tune. He was often complimented for his natural musical aptitude, which he had no idea where he came by. Many of his friends agreed that he had an innate feel for bebop’s quick tempos, both with his hands and his feet, the coordination of which was particularly important for a drummer. There were many fights when Sugar was a virtuoso pianist with gloves on, a soloist in a pugilist recital, delivering a rapid arpeggio of stiff left jabs against an obbligato of right crosses, and then standing in awe of his combination of chromatic punches as he looked down on another fallen opponent. To watch him skipping rope or shadow-boxing or perfecting his balance and movement with a sparring partner was to see an athlete in complete control of his body and the laws of rhythm, no matter how complex and demanding. And what a body. When he had completely filled out his six feet and weighed between 150 and 160, he had a model’s physique. With long slender legs and a well-developed upper body, Sugar was the perfect fighting machine, swift afoot and with power in his punches. He possessed all the tools of the ultimate warrior, in the opinion of most boxing experts. By the late fifties he’d come to exemplify the modern age, with his flair, lifestyle, world traveling, and glamorous associates, giving him a popularity that extended well beyond the ring. And he had practically mastered all the elements of the sweet science as no other boxer ever had; he had squared the ring better and faster than Pythagoras, the great Greek mathematician, who was reputed to be somewhat of a boxer himself.
There were also pictures of him playing pool, which was another one of his hobbies. “He was very good around the pool table,” said Johnny Barnes, who portrayed Sugar in the film Raging Bull and who has emulated his idol by developing his own prowess with a cue stick.
In most of these settings, Sugar could be seen amid a gaggle of his male friends. How this extensive male bonding, in which machismo was usually the expected behavior, may have abetted Sugar’s tendencies toward violence, domestic and otherwise, we can only speculate.
Edna Mae often commented on Sugar’s violent temper and how for the least little annoyance he would slap her or anyone else who disobeyed an order or made the mistake of crossing him. The abuse, which started as a slap here and there and escalated to violent punches, would continue—along with his infidelities—throughout their marriage. When he hauled off and slapped her a few hours before the SS Liberté launched from New York to France, it made headline news. “Sugar Ray Kayos His Wife,” the Amsterdam News reported on its January 1, 1951, front page. For its using the word “kayo,” Sugar sued the paper for fifty thousand dollars. Dr. C. B. Powell, the paper’s owner, contested the libel claim, arguing that the word “kayo” meant “emphasis.” After a two-day trial, a jury upheld the charge, but reduced Sugar’s demand to twenty-five thousand dollars.4
In Edna Mae’s notes, but not in her memoir, she said the blow came as a result of her discovery that Sugar was fooling around with a young Frenchwoman, and that it was she who brought the lawsuit against the weekly. “I tried to leave, but Sugar wouldn’t let me,” she said. “The lawsuit was a gamble to get some money, since his first wife had just won a settlement and we were short on funds following the tour of Europe. I declared under oath that I had not been beaten.” Because of the lawsuit, there was never any mention of this suit in the pages of the Amsterdam News. That’s one story that they wanted to forget. Sugar, in short, was used to resolving conflicts and disputes with punches. Fortu
nately, but not always, he reserved most of his aggressive behavior for his foes in the ring, and he would need a good supply of it as he headed for Europe.
The first fight on the European tour was against Jean Stock, a tough middleweight, at the Palais des Sports on November 27, 1950. More than seventeen thousand spectators attended, many of them in typical European style, with bottles of wine and bags full of cheese and bread, as though they were going to a picnic. They had hardly taken a swig of wine and a bite of cheese before Stock was out for the count in the second round. Sugar had been informed that Stock couldn’t take a hit to the belly, so to spare the fighter and prolong the bout he aimed his punches at the head, connecting with devastating results to the Frenchman’s chin. Apparently, Sugar had been given the wrong information. Stock’s chin was his weak spot, not his belly.
No matter—the spectators erupted in cheers for Sugar and he graciously accepted their warm regards. Some of the fans began yelling “Le sucre merveilleux”—“Marvelous Sugar.” Others screamed to him that he was an artiste. Not even at Madison Square Garden had he been greeted with such unbridled enthusiasm. Parisians were as enthralled by Sugar as a previous generation of boxing fans had been dazzled by Panama Al Brown.
Brown, who was black, was in France in 1926 after living in Harlem, and it didn’t take him or his extravagant lifestyle long to be all the rave on the streets of Paris and in commodious ateliers. For, much like Sugar, he was far more than just another American curiosity. Not only was he able to amaze Parisians with his fists, but he also stood with them at the gaming tables, nightclubs, and wherever else raconteurs and boulevardiers gathered for the good life. Brown attached himself to other luminaries in the City of Light, including Jean Cocteau and Maurice Chevalier, and from Pigalle to the bistros of Montmartre he was the center of attention, the ebony bon vivant. “He dressed elegantly, frequenting the best tailors in London and at times changing clothes six times a day,” Tyler Stovall observed in his engrossing Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light. Brown, according to Stovall, once proclaimed that all he needed to live was “20,000 bottles of champagne.”5 As Sugar would find later, Brown reveled in a milieu seemingly devoid of racism, moving comfortably amid a sea of admirers. A year of fighting in France kept him in money for champagne, and as a bantamweight he even fought the European welterweight champion, Henri Scillie of Belgium, to a draw.