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  Johnson was sent to prison for drug dealing after appealing his case all the way to the Supreme Court, Sinclair wrote. He maintained that he had been framed. No drugs were actually found on him or in his home, the case being made against him by several “informants” who claimed they ran drugs for him. He was released from prison in 1963, and died five years later while dining in a Harlem restaurant.

  “We had been skeptical about whether permission would be granted,” Edna Mae wrote about their first visit to Alcatraz, “because [Johnson] was the acknowledged and accepted head of all alleged illegal or questionable activity above 110th Street. Skeets was also a well-known sportsman, who spent money lavishly and wined and dined the most beautiful women, a real Beau Brummell.” But they had no problem getting permission; Sugar’s visit was a joy to all of the prisoners, Edna Mae noted, and most of the papers raved about Sugar’s compassion and loyalty to his friends.

  After the visit to Alcatraz, Sugar prepared to meet Bobo Olson, a native of Hawaii. It was to be a rather lackluster bout. This was Sugar’s first defense of his second title reign, and he donated all but one dollar of his purse to the Damon Runyon Memorial Fund for Cancer Research. Sugar’s magnanimous gestures to the Cancer Fund were universally praised, though there were some who felt that he could have given equal contributions to the NAACP and the National Urban League.1

  Sugar won a unanimous decision, but it was not the Sugar of old, not the refined boxer who many were beginning to call one of the greatest fighters of all time. Maybe Sugar, at thirty, was past his prime. Or perhaps it was the long layoff—he hadn’t been in the ring since his victory over Turpin in September. A five-month layoff for a fighter who had been averaging two fights a month might have upset his rhythm.

  Down the road, a match was slated that would clear up this issue. Like Louis, Sugar had a formidable Rocky to deal with.

  Sugar versus Rocky Graziano: This was the fight everybody was demanding. Even Hollywood couldn’t top this for excitement.

  Once more, as when Sugar faced the Bull, it would be a simple case of the boxer against the slugger. Fortunately, the bout was slated for Chicago Stadium, Sugar’s lucky venue, on April 16, 1952. It promised to be a thriller between two thirty-year-old boxers, each of them wondering if he had been around too long or wouldn’t be around much longer, to paraphrase a quip popularized by comedienne Moms Mabley.

  “Fight night was a stellar evening,” Edna Mae enthused. “Sugar and Rocky faced each other in the ring. You could see the mutual respect. They waded into each other and Rocky landed a hell of a blow on Sugar’s head that hurt me more than Sugar.” Sugar recalled the same punch: “When the bell rang, Rocky was scowling instead of smiling. He came out of his corner with curly black hair flopping on his forehead, and with his right hand cocked like a revolver. While I watched that right hand, he caught me with a good left hook in the first round.”

  Edna Mae resumed, “It was all I could do to stay in my seat. The round was rough and I was so relieved when the bell rang. Round two was equally rough. It was apparent that Rocky was hoping for a knockout. Sugar was able to outsmart his sudden lunges and stay balanced.” Still, according to Sugar: “He whacked me on the side of the neck and I went down. Some of the sportswriters claimed that one of my legs had merely brushed the canvas, that it wasn’t an official knockdown. None of them had been swatted by that right hand. I was down, and Rocky put me there. When he saw me down, his instinct was to move in for the kill. That was a mistake…I’ve met many tough fighters in my long career, but no one ever stung me more than Rocky did.”

  Edna Mae added: “Sugar was up quicker than I, but…seconds later, Ray had Rocky on his back on the ring canvas. He attempted to rise but was in big trouble! He fell down again and his body lay there jerking with the worst twitch I’ve ever seen. The full count ended, and his corner rushed in to get him.” Sugar had hit Rocky so hard that his mouthpiece flew out of the ring and landed in someone’s lap. The punch also almost literally knocked Graziano into retirement—he would have only one more fight. When Graziano got up just as he was counted out, he leaned against the ropes and kicked his legs as if to get some feeling back into them, to get the blood circulating again. He had been bashed so hard, and so repeatedly, that the blows apparently had affected his nerve endings below the belt.

  “Graziano and his aggressive style, leading with his chin, was perfect for a fighter like Sugar Ray,” said boxing enthusiast Clint Edwards. “After the fight his face looked like it had gone through a meat grinder…he was chopped liver.” Scholar Gerald Early cast the fight in a deeper, metaphorical gloss: “The fight was symbolically the war machine, the white natural man against another type of natural man, the noble savage made American slick. Fictive psychopathic rage against fictive animal cunning.”2 Like LaMotta, who called Sugar a “black bastard” while taking his blows, Graziano admitted he too had cursed Sugar and called him out of his name.

  In Graziano’s final fight before he stepped out of the ring for the last time, he lost a decision to a soft-hitting southpaw, Chuck Daley, out of Michigan in December 1952. He became a comedian and actor, later writing a successful autobiography, Somebody Up There Likes Me. The quick-witted Graziano offered a sample of his humor during a television interview in recalling the time he floored Sugar: “After he knocked me down,” he said, “Sugar Ray tripped over my body.”

  For a moment, after Graziano had walloped Sugar, fans of Ralph Ellison, whose Invisible Man had just been published to great acclaim, might have wondered if he was the lucky yokel of Ellison’s imagination. “Once I saw a prizefighter boxing a yokel. The fighter was swift and amazingly scientific. His body was one violent flow of rapid rhythmic action. He hit the yokel a hundred times while the yokel held up his arms in stunned surprise. But suddenly the yokel, rolling about in the gale of boxing gloves, struck one blow and knocked science, speed and footwork as cold as a well-digger’s posterior. The smart money hit the canvas. The long shot got the nod. The yokel had simply stepped inside of his opponent’s sense of time.”

  CHAPTER 17

  TAKE IT TO THE MAXIM

  To overcome the weight advantage of his next opponent, light heavyweight champion Joey Maxim, Sugar would have to step inside Maxim’s “sense of time,” solve the rhythm of his attack without losing his deft, scientific boxing skills. “Rhythm is everything in boxing,” Sugar had once said. “Every move you make starts with your heart, and that’s in rhythm or you’re in trouble.”

  Nelson Mandela, who admits he was never an outstanding boxer, eschewing its violence, offered a similar analysis. “I did not enjoy the violence of boxing so much as the science of it,” he wrote in his autobiography, A Long Walk to Freedom. “I was intrigued by how one moved one’s body to protect oneself, how one used a strategy both to attack and retreat, how one paced oneself over a match. Boxing is egalitarian. In the ring, rank, age, color, and wealth are irrelevant.” While one may not concur with the South African leader’s conclusions about age, Sugar would probably have agreed with him on the subject of pacing, especially when he went up against the bigger and stronger Maxim. Maxim, however, would have another ally on that fateful evening at Yankee Stadium—the humidity. At ringside, the temperature would approach a torrid 105 degrees.

  On the night of the fight, June 25, 1952, the rain was the first bad omen; then came the humidity. Perhaps most ominous of all was the fact that on the day before the fight, Sugar dreamed that he—not his opponent—was going to die. The stadium in which Sugar and Maxim were to fight was packed and, according to Edna Mae, “felt like a Turkish bath.” Moreover, Sugar was not in the best frame of mind going into a fight with a man who outweighed him by more than fifteen pounds.

  The early rounds belonged entirely to Sugar, as he danced around the slower Maxim, beating him to the punch, working his strategy to perfection. He was also expending an enormous amount of energy in the process. The sweltering heat was so overpowering that referee Ruby Goldstein had to quit du
ring the fight and Ray Miller was brought in to replace him. Even the spectators were drenched in sweat. “The pants of some of the men were soaking, as if they had wet on themselves,” recalled Carl Jefferson, a longtime Harlemite who was at the fight and sat in the right-field bleachers. “No matter where you sat, it was scorching hot.”1

  “Fighting out of a crouch, ignoring the weight handicap, Robinson blazed through eleven,” New York Times sportswriter James Dawson reported. “He punched Maxim almost at will, with left jabs, lefts to the head and body. In the third, seventh, and eighth rounds, Robinson jolted Maxim’s head and he kept up a two-fisted fire to the midsection.”

  By the eleventh round, with Sugar well ahead on points, the heat was taking its toll on the smaller, more mobile fighter. Maxim barely moved from the center of the ring, wisely conserving his energy. In the twelfth round Sugar jolted Maxim with a right to the jaw but could not take advantage of it, as the bell sounded. It would be his last significant punch. Sugar was on the verge of heat exhaustion by the thirteenth round, his limp body almost pushed through the ropes by one of Maxim’s lesser attacks.

  At one point Sugar fell to the floor after missing a sweeping right. He was too tired to be embarrassed. Clinging to the ropes at the end of the round, Sugar had to be dragged to his corner by his handlers. Ice packs and smelling salts failed to revive the exhausted fighter, and when Dr. Alexander Schiff leaped into the ring and asked him if he could go on, Sugar shook his head and said no. This was the first and only time Sugar would ever be stopped. And it took a day for him to recover from the heat, which had left him barely able to function, his eyes glazed over. Gainford thought a cold shower would help Sugar’s condition, and with the assistance of the other handlers dragged Sugar to the shower. “One of the main reasons Maxim won that fight is because he used his weight advantage at every opportunity and he leaned on Sugar Ray,” said Clint Edwards.

  “Having a killing lead,” the legendary Grantland Rice reported in the Sunday Mirror, “Sugar could have afforded to take things easier after the tenth round. But there is still the chance that the collapse hit suddenly. The heat wasn’t all of it. Punching a much bigger man is a heavy burden. I recall at Toledo that many critics wondered why Jack Dempsey got so arm weary just before Jess Willard surrendered.”2

  The bout resembled the 1909 match between middleweight champion Stanley Ketchel, “The Michigan Assassin,” and heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. On that occasion, Ketchel was the smaller fighter, giving away more than thirty pounds to his opponent. For eleven rounds it was a rather polite fight, as they had agreed it would be. But in the twelfth round, Ketchel let loose a wallop that stunned Johnson, and he tumbled to the canvas. He picked himself up, glared at Ketchel, and within seconds landed a withering uppercut that dislodged five of Ketchel’s teeth. It took an hour to revive him. As with Sugar and Maxim, a good big man had triumphed over a good little man.

  “He didn’t knock me out, did he?” was the first question a still dazed, half-conscious Sugar asked before the flood of cold water chilled his feverish body. “No,” came a chorus of responses from his handlers and admirers. “It was the heat.” But Sugar thought otherwise: “The heat didn’t beat me, God did.”3

  Political activist Ron Daniels, who boxed a bit himself before joining the civil rights movement, watched the fight at the New Granada Theater in Pittsburgh. “That was the first time I’d seen Sugar Ray fight, and he was sharp with precision punches, a pretty stylist that I tried to emulate later in my brief career in the ring. He had the fight won until he ran out of gas.”

  Sugar was totally dehydrated after the fight, his son recalled. “People don’t know how near dying Dad was,” he said. “His body was covered with blisters. He could not retain anything in his stomach for two days; and he was delirious and was not well for six months after the fight.”

  Given Sugar’s state of mind and limp condition, the rules forbidding women in the dressing room were suspended and Edna Mae was allowed to enter. She immediately began to massage her husband and console him with soothing kisses. “Sugar was still groggy and was fighting anyone who came near him,” Edna Mae said of the people milling about, wanting to get close to their hero. “Ray demanded that he not be taken to the hospital and I told him that we were taking him home to Riverdale. He was so thirsty and begged for more juice, but the doctor advised me not to give him more than a spoonful at a time. Sugar took two spoonfuls, then quickly took the large glass out of my hands and emptied it before he put it down. He immediately threw it up all over the bed. While the housekeeper hurriedly changed the bed, I took off my wet outfit. Sugar yelled, ‘Honey, I forgot to tell you how beautiful your outfit was!’”

  Sugar had a restless night, and Edna Mae’s was not much better. The next morning she was alarmed to discover that Sugar’s body was covered with fever blisters, which were the result of his boiling blood. Despite reports to the contrary in his autobiography, for several days Sugar was ill, unable to go anywhere, Edna Mae insisted. “The fight had been a sobering experience for Sugar,” she wrote. “He later announced his retirement and was now ready to listen to some of the wonderful offers that were being waved in front of his face to try a career in show business. I thought with the right teachers Sugar could do anything.”

  Sugar announced to the press that he was going into show business because he had always loved to dance; he stopped short of saying he was retiring from the ring. Film footage of Sugar twisting and spinning attests to his nimble footwork, though he would be the first to admit he wasn’t Fred Astaire or Bojangles, who had taught him a few nifty moves. An opportunity to strut his stuff before a national audience occurred on November 2, when he was invited to appear on Toast of the Town, which by 1955 would be renamed The Ed Sullivan Show. Sugar did his tap-dancing routine, applying some steps taught to him by Ray Bolger and Hal LeRoy, and this was perhaps a wise move, given that his singing was only mediocre. Singing would have been out of the question during this appearance, since he was sandwiched between the powerful voices of Frankie Laine, with his rendition of “Jezebel,” and pianist/vocalist Alec Templeton, presenting arias from Samson and Delilah. Sugar’s version of “Mr. Success” during one of his television appearances revealed his ability to at least carry a tune, although his high-pitched voice was rather ordinary and unappealing. The rousing applause at the end of the performance sounded as if it had been canned.

  Later that year, on December 5, Sugar was hanging out with Roy Campanella and other celebrities, including popular cowboy movie actor Gabby Hayes, at the grand opening of Jackie Robinson’s men’s apparel store at 111 West 125th Street. During a confidential moment, Sugar warned Jackie about the challenge he faced selling men’s apparel in Harlem. He particularly stressed how terrible Edna Mae’s lingerie shop was doing, though his ever-popular café seemed to be doing reasonably well.4

  CHAPTER 18

  TOP HAT AND TAILS

  A week before Christmas in 1952, following his loss to Joey Maxim, Sugar announced his retirement from the ring. But soon he got restless sitting around his Riverdale mansion with little to do but manage his various businesses, including real estate property and a number of demanding tenants. Finally, he conceded to the badgering of Joe Glaser, who sought to be his agent and to convince Sugar to put on dancing shoes, grab a jump rope, and skip across a stage in time to “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

  It was around this time, duded up in a tux, that Sugar made his debut at the French Casino, located inside the Hotel Paramount on 46th Street, just west of Broadway. “He’s on and off, throughout the show,” writes Robert Dana. “He dances, sings, and kids with customers such as Milton Berle.” Sugar had put on a good act for the audience; in fact, he was feeling rather depressed following yet another blowout with Edna Mae. “But the audience, seeing Sugar in this new role, was ecstatic over him and overly generous in their cheers and applause,” Edna Mae remembered. “We soon knew that the dancing (there was a chorus line of long-limbed lovelies im
ported from France) was exciting and good, but the dialogue was poor. It was as if it had been resurrected from a bad show in the days of burlesque. Not risqué, but not funny. I frankly was embarrassed.”

  Gradually, the show improved, though Sugar was adamantly opposed to any suggestion from Edna Mae or Joe Glaser, his agent, that his dance partner, Scotty, be removed. Meanwhile, Edna Mae began rehearsals for her part in an off-off-Broadway production of Born Yesterday. She had a starring role in this popular three-act comedy by Garson Kanin. The premiere was on December 30, 1953, at the President Theater on 48th Street and Broadway. Edna Mae portrayed Billie Dawn, who seems a stereotypical airhead but whose intelligence shines through in the end. Three years earlier, Judy Holliday had deservedly won an Oscar in the role, beating out Bette Davis in All About Eve and Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. Edna Mae was also featured in several national ad campaigns in which she endorsed all sorts of products, including In the Mood, a Mary King perfume created by the J. R. Watkins Company, whose goods were distributed in the black community and were akin to the Fuller Brush items in the white community.

  Soon, Sugar and Edna Mae were moving along quite successfully with their shows, which minimized their contact. “Mine picked up interested backers, to the great joy of our company, but when Sugar was asked to allow me to continue with the show the answer was a final no,” she related. “We had an excellent show and one young man with only nonspeaking roles later became the very fine actor Raymond St. Jacques. When the backers learned that I would not stay with the company, they withdrew their offers and the company was disbanded.”