Pound for Pound Page 17
“Advance ticket sales were very good,” Edna Mae remembered. It was a chilly September fight night in New York, and Edna Mae admired all the rich and famous assembled at or near ringside. “Ray’s mother sat with me and the opera diva, Charlotte Holloman, the wife of the then-president of New York’s Health and Hospital Corporation, and Marguerite Mays, then the wife of Willie Mays. Sugar had just given me a chinchilla wrap. I wore it that evening.”
The fight was fifteen rounds of hell, and Sugar gave as much as he took, but in the end the split decision went to Basilio. The ex–onion picker matched blow for blow with Sugar. The scar tissue over Basilio’s half-closed eyes made it difficult for him to make out the often swirling image in front of him, but his punches found the mark with unerring ferocity. It was all Edna Mae could do not to turn away from the carnage, and she was hoarse from screaming, particularly at the reporters and fans after the fight who insisted her husband was through. “Sugar is finished” was practically chanted by a vocal knot of Basilio supporters. With Sugar struggling to catch his breath, Edna Mae was furious, refuting any contention that her man was over the hill. “He was always champion,” she wrote. “Our personal differences had nothing to do with how great he was in the ring and I hated the way many columnists vacillated. Even when he’d have my heart in pieces and, yes, maybe my eyes and body badly bruised!” she lamented.
Sugar wasn’t too beaten to voice his opinion about the rampant incidents of police brutality in Harlem. In one filmed interview, according to Ray II, “He said that the police would have to start treating people the same way they treated him, Joe Louis, and Jackie Robinson or there was going to be continuing trouble.” Such a bold statement in 1957 on police affairs was quite a leap for a man who had said on various occasions that he didn’t get involved in politics.
The police attack on Hinton Johnson in December was just the kind of atrocity that had prompted Sugar to speak out. Johnson was a Black Muslim and a member of Temple Seven, where Malcolm X was the minister. When Johnson and another Muslim failed to move as fast as the police wanted them to, they were viciously assaulted. As Malcolm related: “Brother Hinton was attacked with nightsticks. His scalp was split open, and a police car came and he was taken to a nearby precinct.” Alerted to the attack, members of the Nation of Islam quickly assembled in tight formations outside the police station. Behind this phalanx of men in bow ties were rows and rows of onlookers, each one waiting to see who would win the Mexican standoff between the Fruit of Islam and the men in blue. At first Malcolm was told that Johnson wasn’t there; then the police said he was but that no one was allowed to see him. “I said that until he was seen,” Malcolm wrote, “and we were sure he had received proper medical attention, the Muslims would remain where they were.” When the assembled learned that Johnson was out of serious condition, Malcolm gave a signal and the Muslims dispersed. “No black should have that kind of power,” a white police officer reportedly muttered.
What Sugar had to say about the police in Harlem was consistent with his remarks about the racist policies and bigotry of Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas. “I never interfere in politics, no kind of way, but I’d give that Faubus my whole purse and take him on after Basilio,” he told a Time magazine reporter. Sugar had a few barbs for President Eisenhower, too. “There he is playing golf and his country is darn near revolution.”
Such comments were fodder for the tabloids, each of them eager to pump up controversy, particularly when it came from high-profile celebrities. Sugar was getting additional attention beyond the local media in New York City, but it wasn’t the sort he welcomed. Not only had he suffered the indignity of a loss in the ring, now the IRS was on his tail again. Unbeknownst to Sugar, another lien had been placed on his earnings once the bell sounded in his fight against Basilio. A notice was served by an IRS agent ordering the IBC to hold all of Sugar’s money, both from the live gate and the ancillary rights. “I owed the government about eighty thousand dollars in taxes from the previous year, in disallowed expenses,” Sugar explained. “The government wanted to get square.” Sugar garnered almost a half-million dollars from the fight, and he wanted to pay the IRS in increments, but the agency rejected his plan as illegal. The situation called for a tax lawyer.
With Howard Rumpf handling the case for him, Sugar was soon granted $100,000 of the earnings from the fight to pay his immediate employees. After several more sessions at the IRS, there was no final verdict on the situation and Sugar and his lawyers had no recourse but to wait. Sugar was also in the middle of another financial tiff, with his former manager, Ernie Braca. Braca brought his suit against Sugar and one of his trainers, Harold “Killer” Johnson, charging that he was entitled to a share of Sugar’s earnings over the last three years, earnings estimated at close to $200,000. Bronx Supreme Court justice Sidney Fine decided in Braca’s favor, awarding him an $18,000 settlement of a suit filed for $150,000. Neither Braca nor Sugar appeared in court.1
Even more distressing, there was a rumor that his purse from the return match with Basilio, scheduled for March 28, 1958, was also going to be confiscated by the IRS. Anticipating this situation, Sugar finally hired Edward Bennett Williams, the famous Washington, D.C., lawyer who would later represent Adam Clayton Powell in his tax evasion trial. Sugar’s case was so helpless that even a lawyer of Williams’s stature could provide only momentary relief. He had dug a hole so deep that it was impossible to extricate himself and ultimately he had to pay the debt or shift it to Edna Mae, which he did.
Sugar took his frustration out on Edna Mae. Around this time, his sister was given only a short time to live, and Sugar sent for his father in Detroit to come and see her. “I was very pleased to have him stay with us,” Edna Mae noted. “He was asleep in our guest room one morning when Sugar became abusive to me and then began slapping me viciously. His dad heard us and ran into our room and tried to stop Ray and begged him not to hit me again. While he tried to hold him, I ran downstairs and called the police precinct, which was only blocks away, and in minutes they were at our front door. I ran and opened it. They were shocked to find out it was ‘Sugar Ray the champ.’ Ray told them that he barely touched me, despite the fact that my face had the full imprint of his hand across it. He offered them drinks, which they accepted, showed them around the house, and gave them autographed photos of himself. They, and Ray’s dad, asked me not to press any charges, and with big smiles and handshakes to Sugar and his dad, they left our home to return to the precinct. So much for our protectors in uniform.”
This incident caught even Ray II off guard. “It was about this time that I first witnessed my father hitting my mother,” Ray II said. “Until then I had no idea their relationship was so abusive—so abusive that it was the cause of five miscarriages.”
Behind closed doors Edna Mae was at the mercy of Sugar’s rage; in public, her bruises covered with makeup, she was the dutiful companion who was escorted to various functions. Whenever they appeared in the audience at Ed Sullivan’s television show, the host would introduce them and the couple would stand and wave to the audience, a seemingly happy twosome. They put on happy faces for Edward R. Murrow as well, when he invaded their Riverdale home to feature them on his Person to Person show. You would have thought they were Ozzie and Harriet the way they cuddled and gushed in response to Murrow’s questions about their home life. The ruptures, some of which led to separations, between the Robinsons rarely made the press, and when they did they were usually deeply embedded in gossip columns that few took as credible.
CHAPTER 22
SUGAR’S DILEMMAS
No matter how often Sugar abused her, Edna Mae was almost always at her husband’s side during a major prizefight, expressing an uncommon loyalty or hoping that he would someday end his abusive ways. And Sugar would need her companionship and loyalty more than ever as he prepared for the second showdown with Basilio, which was to take place in Chicago, Sugar’s lucky town, on March 25, 1958. During this period, Sugar came down wit
h a virus, and everybody around him begged him to postpone the fight. Even Frank Sinatra, in Las Vegas, had heard about the rumored virus. When he visited Sugar he told him the smart money was going with Basilio. “You’re my friend,” Sugar told Sinatra, “and I’d like to see you win your bet, and maybe you ought to bet with the smart money.”
“But the smart money isn’t going to be in the ring,” he said. “You are.”
“Let me tell you something, Frank,” Sugar replied honestly. “I’m going in there to get that title, and I don’t care what anybody says, or what the smart money thinks.”
“That’s all I wanted to hear, Ray,” Sinatra said.
In preparation for the fight, Sugar was given two injections. One shot was penicillin for the virus; the other shot was B-12 for strength. Maybe he consumed a couple of glasses of beef blood, too. In any event, he was plenty fortified. By the fourth round the scar tissue above Basilio’s vulnerable left eye was open and bleeding. Two rounds later, Sugar’s blows had closed it completely, and it puffed up like an onion bulb. Soon, Basilio was practically blind and was groping around the ring trying to find his swift, crisp-punching adversary. “It was a fight between a mole and a hawk,” Bob Considine wrote in the New York Journal-American. Edna Mae was equally colorful in her description of Basilio’s eye: “That eye swelled like baking powder was in it. It was the size of a golf ball.”
Despite being as sightless as Samson, Basilio plodded on, using one hand like radar and pounding away with the other. “He hit me right in the eyebrow,” Basilio offered, “and broke the blood vessels…and blew my eyelid up. My eye shut. This was about the middle of the sixth round. And I fought the next nine rounds with one eye. It was a grueling fight.”
Both fighters were on the verge of collapse, but they continued to slug it out. Neither would back off; neither would go down. They went the full fifteen rounds, and in the end, Sugar, though he had taken his lumps, triumphed. He was so exhausted that he could barely stand and wave to the crowd. For the fifth time, he had won the title, an unprecedented feat. Two hours later, in his dressing room, he felt faint and had to be carried up to his hotel room. He was, as he said, “beat but not beaten,” with every bone in his body sore. It was as if he had been “fighting ten men.” But it was all worth it, because now he was a celebrity again. The first one to his door was Walter Winchell; then came Redd Foxx, his head shaved, with only a large letter “R” of hair adorning the top. Sugar had no way of knowing it, but this would be his last great victory in the ring, and his only fight that year.
When he was younger, especially at the start of his career, Sugar didn’t wait too long between fights. He didn’t need time to wallow in victory or to lick his wounds after a defeat, which was rare on his remarkable résumé. But as he got older, it took increasingly longer for him to recuperate, to get his juices boiling again. After the Basilio bout, he took it easy, pondering business options, spending time with his family, taking out his aggression on a worn drum set. But beating a drum only reminded him of pounding the bags, of working over a torso, of drubbing an opponent into total submission, like Carmen Basilio. Some of Sugar’s fans said he was insane to be pursuing another fight with Basilio. These sentiments were shared by Edna Mae, and she quietly hoped it wouldn’t happen.
Several things interfered with the possibility of a return match between the two fighters, none more exasperating than the money demands they both made. The promoter, IBC, was in trouble. And there were all kinds of business finaglings surrounding Madison Square Garden. When Teddy Brenner was named the new matchmaker by Harry Markson, who gained control of the famed arena, he was just one of many promoters eager to get Sugar back in the ring with Basilio. Some of them even threatened to strip Sugar of his title if he didn’t comply. But until Sugar got what he wanted in terms of money, he had no intentions of complying.
Meanwhile, Sugar was trying to cut a deal with light heavyweight champ Archie Moore for a bout. “Sugar invited Mr. and Mrs. Moore to our home for dinner so that he could talk to Archie about a plan for them to fight,” Edna Mae recalled. Milton Gross, in his column in the New York Post, reported on their meeting, recounting how Sugar sent his car to the Hotel Warwick in midtown Manhattan to fetch the Moores. Gross said Sugar told him, “Archie and I were never on a social basis, but we’re both businessmen and certainly there was nothing wrong in our planning to fight each other for a million-dollar purse that we’d share equally.”1 Nothing wrong with it at all, even though Moore had scored more knockouts than any other fighter in history.
However, Sugar’s plan to fight “The Ol’ Mongoose,” as Moore was called because of his sly ring tactics, fell through. Instead, the ageless Moore (he said he was forty-four but many believed he was older) met a crude, rugged Canadian, Yvon Durelle, in December 1958 and punished him severely before decking him for good in the eleventh round. The same fate might have awaited Sugar.
On May 4, 1959, the National Boxing Association vacated the middleweight championship after Sugar refused to meet Basilio in a return match, which left Sugar holding the title in only two states—New York and Massachusetts. This setback had followed even more distressing news two weeks earlier, when his sister, Marie Brewer, succumbed to cancer. Brewer, the wife of one of Sugar’s trainers, Clyde Brewer, was forty-one when she died at Francis Delafield Hospital in New York City on April 19. With his marriage as rocky as ever, his sister dead, and his title up for grabs, Sugar desperately needed to find some comfort and cheer. It seemed there was still a possibility of luring Moore into the ring, but once again the deal faded and the Mongoose fought Durelle a second time, this time knocking him out in the third round. Sugar’s disgust intensified when he learned that Fullmer and Basilio had signed for a bout to determine a new middleweight champion. Now, virtually broke, he regretted not having had a third fight with Basilio right after their crowd-pleasing second romp. “I made a big mistake,” Sugar would say in a later interview. He had been offered a guaranteed half-million dollars, but he’d declined, insisting on more money.
Fullmer stopped Basilio in the fourteenth round. Now Sugar pursued Fullmer, but the new champ was not interested; nor was Basilio. For Sugar the year 1959 was much like the preceding year—he managed only one fight.
Sugar was strangely invisible, but by the fall and winter of 1959 his oldest son, Ronnie, to whom Sugar had never been much of a father, was grabbing sports headlines as a member of the New York Chiefs roller derby team. Ronnie, twenty-one, said he became interested in roller derby after watching it on television. “I never cared for fighting,” he told a reporter. Perhaps his distaste for the sport stemmed from the distant relationship he had with his father. “My dad was Dad to lots of children, except his own,” he said. He also recalled how his father had once knocked him down. “I looked up at him and said does that make you feel like a champion now?”2
Meanwhile, Sugar continued to lie low when it came to boxing, though he was diligently pursuing other interests. He was studying for the role of Jim in Sam Goldwyn’s version of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Jackie Robinson discussed this involvement, which had been going on for several weeks, in his column in the New York Post. “I think Ray wants very much to get out of the ring, once and for all, and apparently he feels very strongly that this may be his big chance,” Robinson wrote. “He admitted to me that he would really like to do this role, and revealed he has been working very hard in coaching sessions for it. Of course, this is not the first time that he has sought his fortune outside the ring. But Robinson is not as young as he once was, either, and he knows that label ‘old-timer’ is bound to catch up with him, too, sooner or later. But if this new career does come to pass for Ray, then boxing will have lost its most colorful performer to the Hollywood screen.”3
He may have also been in hiding from the prying eyes of a ravenous press corps and their inquiries about a paternity suit that had been filed against him. A beautiful, olive-skinned Barbara Trevigne, a nightclub hostess, charged that
Sugar was the father of her six-year-old son. Sugar denied paternity of the child, claiming it was a “shakedown.” He did, however, admit that he knew the woman and had once given her money when she was in financial distress. “I met Barbara Trevigne in show business, and she appeared to me to be a nice girl,” Sugar said. “She visited my bar a number of times.” Mrs. Trevigne had no comment to the press, directing all questions to her lawyer. She promised to tell her version of the affair in court. A “No comment” was also Edna Mae’s response when asked if she was going to stand by her husband through the ordeal.
An affidavit filed by Mrs. Trevigne’s lawyer, Thomas Roberts, charges that Sugar had in effect admitted paternity by having contributed to the child’s support. Furthermore, the lawyer said that Sugar had been lax in his payments and had not made any recently. Mrs. Trevigne, according to a story in the Amsterdam News, a onetime nightclub singer, was married and the mother of three children, one born before Paul, the child in question, and one after.4
By January 1961, Sugar had admitted having been intimate with Mrs. Trevigne over a number of years, but continued to deny that he’d fathered the child. He told the court he couldn’t have been the child’s father because at the time she said the child was conceived he was in training at his Pompton Lakes camp, getting ready for his fight against Joey Maxim in 1952. His statements were later supported by Gainford and Charles Austin, his office assistant. The testimony brought a loud gasp in the courtroom from an astonished Mrs. Trevigne.5
A panel of special sessions judges ruled two to one in favor of acquitting Sugar of the paternity charge, despite his admitted intimacies. It appeared the judges decided on the basis of the child’s having been born between two other children by her husband. In October, the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court dismissed an appeal by Mrs. Trevigne. Sugar had slipped the yoke again. None of this had been decided on December 14, 1959, when Sugar—in his only fight that year—was in Boston, knocking out Bob Young in the second round.