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  Another gnawing financial matter involved his agent, Joe Glaser. Glaser had brought nearly a $100,000 judgment against him based on Sugar’s failure to pay off a loan. According to Glaser’s attorney, Emil K. Ellis, Sugar had borrowed the money and used his property as collateral. Sugar’s real estate firm, R.G.S. Realty Corporation, had defaulted in its payment on the mortgage by failing to meet installments that were due in July 1959. A foreclosure order was signed in Supreme Court in March 1962, and three of Sugar’s buildings on Seventh Avenue had to be auctioned off in order to pay the debt. “Tenants living in the buildings, who have been paying rents to the receiver, attorney Harold Lipton, for several months, were notified…of the pending foreclosure sale to satisfy the judgment with costs and expenses.”1 Sugar had apparently embarked for Europe with this among the other burdens on his mind.

  Among Sugar’s troubling concerns, as he and Millie toured Vienna, was how to propose to her. They had become officially engaged on their way to Lyon. His victory over Infantes, whom he’d sent to the canvas for good in the second round, reassured Sugar and boosted his flagging confidence after he had for the first time in his brilliant career suffered back-to-back losses, to Phil Moyer in Los Angeles and Terry Downes in London. Oddly, Sugar didn’t make an appearance in Paris during this trip. Months before he’d begun to plan this European tour, his resourceful promoter there, Charlie Michaelis, was drumming up a possible match for him with an opponent to be chosen by a poll and fought in Paris. The poll ran for weeks in a French paper, and did a good job of inflaming passions. There seemed to be a definite thirst for Sugar to return, no matter who would be selected to fight him. But nothing much came of this publicity stunt, and Sugar’s next fight in France was eventually in Lyon.

  In Lyon, on November 10, he knocked out Georges Estatoff in the sixth round. But Sugar’s European conquests barely got a mention in the press, even in boxing magazines that had followed his movements like a bird dog. As Sugar’s star began to wane, many boxing pundits turned their attention to other developments on the boxing horizon, in the heavyweight division. In one thudding round and after one thunderous punch in Chicago at Comiskey Park, Floyd Patterson was on his back as his conqueror, Sonny Liston, pranced and glowered nearby. It had taken the powerful Liston only 122 seconds to do away with Patterson, who was outweighed by more than twenty-five pounds. Two months later, on November 15, before more than 16,000 spectators at the Sports Arena in Los Angeles, twenty-

  year-old Cassius Clay smashed forty-eight-year-old Archie Moore with such menace and mayhem that the referee had to step in and call a halt to the evisceration. For once the cobra had bested the mongoose. The audacious Clay also had some fighting words for Liston, who was at ringside: “You go eight seconds with me and I’ll give you the fight.” The die was cast, the gauntlet thrown, and the pretty boy from Kentucky was ready to do some “bear hunting.”

  Freed from Sugar, Edna Mae returned from Mexico to face an avalanche of bills. The house note was overdue, the money she had expected each Friday as part of the divorce settlement had not come, and during a cold spell that gripped the city, there was no oil. When she called the oil company to find out why none had been delivered, she was told that the bill had not been paid. “I had to call my grandmother and have her send me money for house and living expenses,” Edna Mae recorded in her notes. Ray II recalled how outdone his mother was about not being able to pay the bills and take care of herself. “One day my mother went to a major department store to make a purchase and was told that a stop had been placed on her credit card. Soon, even her charge cards at the food store were stopped; everything now had to be C.O.D.,” he said.

  Added to these bills, the landscaper wanted his back payment before he would do any more work around the house, and a sundry of other invoices jammed her mailbox. She had no money to defray any of them. In one way she was free of Sugar, but in another way he was very much on her mind and in her curses. There was no alternative but to take him to court. “After many months passed we obtained a thirty-thousand-dollar judgment against Ray in the Bronx court,” Edna Mae wrote in her memoir. “But it was never paid.”

  Having to endure the humiliation of family court unnerved her; she looked at all the other battered women with crying children and almost walked out of the waiting room before picking up the necessary paperwork and meeting with a clerk. Her lawyer persuaded her to stay and confront Sugar, who arrived late and sashayed into the courtroom like he owned it, as Edna Mae recalled. The female judge asked Sugar why he hadn’t been paying child support. Sugar said: “Darling, you must know that if I didn’t pay it, I didn’t have it.” The judge bristled at the comment and responded: “Mr. Robinson, in the first place I’m not your darling, and you are entirely out of order.” Sugar apologized immediately and was told he had a few hours to get the money and return to court. He obeyed the order and promptly returned with the money.

  Meanwhile, much to Edna Mae’s dismay, Sugar had put all of his businesses in his mother’s name in order to protect his earnings from the court. Despite spinning deeper into debt, Sugar continued to live in the lavish way to which he had grown accustomed, directing bill collectors and the IRS to his ex-wife’s door. To get some relief from her awful misery and to earn some money, Edna Mae enrolled in Wilfred’s Academy of Hair and Beauty Culture to become a licensed cosmetologist. She was even able to convince Sugar to finance her in a business venture as a way to pay back some of the money he owed her. He agreed. But then came a major setback.

  One day Edna Mae came home to find Sugar waiting at her doorstep. It was not a good sign, and it was even worse than she thought. As she entered the house, the mess she saw told her immediately what had happened: The house had been burglarized. “All my furs and jewels, plus all my son’s jewelry, was gone,” she said. Among her furs had been a full-length ranch mink coat, a Russian lynx coat, a Persian lamb broadtail coat, a platinum mink jacket, a platinum mink stole, and a silver-blue mink stole, in all totaling about thirty thousand dollars’ worth of furs. “All the beautiful leather folding doors in our home had been slashed open and the thief had gone through them. The pity of that was that the doors were not locked.” The valuable ermines and minks that she wore with such panache, glamorizing cocktail parties and nightclubs from coast to coast, were gone forever—even the mink she’d worn in 1951 when she was the cover girl on the premier edition of Jet magazine.

  Gone too was the possibility of getting any compensation from her insurance company, Lloyd’s of London. “The renewal time came just after Ray and I had legally separated,” she continued, “and he refused to renew my premiums, telling me that it made no sense to him to pay Lloyd’s costly premiums when we were no longer together. I surely could not pay it, so the burglary was a total loss for me.”

  CHAPTER 26

  ALI

  Edna Mae was gone, his flamingo Continental had been sold, and his café had been closed for several months because of his inability to meet payroll. Everything was gone but Millie. And soon he realized that to keep her, he might have to try matrimony one more time. Yes, he had proposed to her in Vienna, but he’d planned on delaying the marriage as long as possible, while he concentrated on a series of fights from the end of January 1963 to May 5. Only Ralph Dupas in Miami Beach gave him any real trouble, lasting ten rounds but losing the decision. Ferdie Pacheco, popularly known as “the Fight Doctor,” was invited by Sugar to work in his corner, and he noticed that though Sugar looked sensational, his boxing skills and reflexes had diminished. “It was almost immediately apparent that in the ring was a boxer who appeared identical to Sugar Ray Robinson but was an impostor,” Pacheco related in his book. “I looked at Sugar Ray’s trainer, who just shrugged. A feeling of sadness and despair crept over me. Robinson won that fight, although the outcome didn’t really matter.”1

  Sugar may have been for many a mere shadow of his former self, but after Dupas he convincingly toppled three nondescript fighters like bowling pins without brea
king a sweat. In June, however, he had a bout with tough Joey Giardello from Philadelphia. Giardello in his hometown could present a bloody problem for the aging Sugar. If he could get by Giardello, he thought, he had a chance to do what he had done five times before—regain the championship. To look past Giardello to get to Dick Tiger, who had taken the belt from Fullmer, was not very prudent of Sugar, but was a common practice for him. Boxing matches were like chess tournaments to Sugar: Giardello was just a meaningless pawn blocking the path to checkmating the king. It never dawned on him that he was washed up, that the party was over, that he was nothing more than a once glamorous champ who should have hung up his gloves several fights ago.

  On June 24, Sugar stepped into the ring in Philadelphia against Giardello. Checking Giardello’s record, Sugar must have felt a bit ambivalent about his chances. On the one hand he was encouraged to see that in a recent fight Giardello had lost to Ralph Dupas, whom Sugar had recently defeated. But on the other hand, Giardello had fought the tough Gene Fullmer to a draw (as of course Sugar had done in December 1960). Giardello, at thirty-three years of age, was a gritty, hard-nosed veteran who relished an opportunity to slug it out in the center of the ring. Sugar knew he was up against a real warrior and that he would be taking on a hometown favorite. Rocky Balboa was a fictional character, but if there was prototype for the film fighter’s saga, Giardello’s climb to the top, his life story would have been ideal. Sugar and Giardello banged each other with such ferocity that it was amazing that one of them didn’t collapse from the accumulation of punishment. In the end, with both men standing, it could have been called a draw, but the decision went to Giardello. Sugar had known that he wouldn’t stand much of a chance if the fight went the distance and it was left to the referee and the judges to make the call. To win he’d have had to put his opponent away, but Giardello’s jaw was not made of glass, nor was he reluctant to trade punches with Sugar.

  There was but one recourse for an ex-champion running out of top contenders in the States: head overseas—which Sugar did. “In the fall, I went to Paris, where Charlie Michaelis booked me,” Sugar recalled. “In five fights, I didn’t lose. Two of my victories were over Armand Vanucci.” None of the fighters he met offered any real threat, and certainly not Vanucci, who according to Sugar was a guard for the painting Mona Lisa at the Louvre. This was Sugar’s fourth tour of Europe, where his name had once been magic. There had been a time, whether in London, Paris, or Rome, when his appearance was guaranteed to draw thousands of spectators, each one of them clamoring to get near him, to luxuriate in the wattage of his iconic radiance, hoping it would brighten his or her own bleak life.

  But after back-to-back defeats to Paul Pender in January and June of 1960, the excitement and surprise of his previous visits, when he was as much a rave as the jazz musicians had been during the twenties, was missing. He and his entourage were no longer besieged by the media; he had clearly lost some of the irrepressible charm that, at its peak, could leave his worshipers overcome by paroxysms of joy. The glitter and glamour that seemed inseparable from his special aura were diminishing with each fight, with each embarrassing decision to some unknown pug trying to make a name for himself.

  Sugar’s kinetic verve, especially to millions of Parisians, had rivaled that of the dazzling Josephine Baker, of another age. At the top of his game, he radiated a presence that suggested everything that was fresh, vital, audacious, and sexual. All the stereotypical connotations about the persona of the black “primitive,” the animal sensuality, and the sheer power of his celebrity were enough to give him, in his prime, the appeal of a rock star or a Hollywood matinee idol. On the way home from possibly his last tour, he looked out over the ocean as the liner plied the Atlantic, and he had to know that it was getting near the end, that the final bell was about to sound.

  Meanwhile, Edna Mae had completed her course work at Wilfred’s. Now, with her license in hand, she was ready to open her own shop as a beautician. But Sugar welched on his promise to stake her once she finished the school and had her license. Unable to start her own business, Edna Mae considered working with another Wilfred graduate, but working a full-time job meant there would be no one to supervise her child. “I had to abandon that idea of being a beautician,” she said. “I then desperately decided to try to return to the theater. I’d had such success with the leading role in Born Yesterday and believed that with help from the right source I could be on the Broadway stage again and be able to support my son and myself.”

  One option she toyed with was to contact Frank Sinatra. The crooner had once given her his private number and, at her suggestion, had been considerably charitable to the Links, a black women’s organization that conducted fund-raising events to assist those in need. After several days of leaving messages for him, there was still no return call from Sinatra. Edna Mae concluded that he probably didn’t want to jeopardize his relationship with Sugar, and therefore chose not to respond. Sinatra wasn’t the only mutual friend the Robinsons shared who was forced to choose sides when they separated and eventually divorced. “Some feared losing their jobs,” she assumed, “and others feared losing Sugar’s friendship, which would mean being left out of the glamorous festivities that revolved around him or the distinct notoriety of being a close friend to one of the world’s greatest champions.”

  For the first five months in 1964, Sugar took a sabbatical from battle, spending a good amount of his time with Millie or helping Cassius Clay get ready for his fight with Sonny Liston on February 25. He had not forgotten his first brush with Clay outside his café four years before when the “Louisville Lip” had been preparing for the Olympics. By now Clay had grown in stature, and his influence was no less seductive as he convinced Sugar to come to Miami and be in his corner, or at least by his side. During the weigh-in ceremony, Sugar was part of Clay’s gaggle, which included trainer Angelo Dundee and Bundini Brown, who’d worked as a second in Sugar’s corner for seven years. (Brown died in 1987 after a fall down the stairs of a cheap motel in Los Angeles. He was found paralyzed on the floor.) “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” was Bundini’s advice, which Clay made famous. It took all of them and two or three others to keep Clay, whose pulse rate had climbed to 120, from tearing into his opponent. This bravado, which worked to intimidate his adversary and to cloak his own fear, would be standard fare for Clay. But on this early occasion, he was fined twenty-five hundred dollars for his taunting.

  At the memorable fight, Sugar sat at ringside near Malcolm X and singer Sam Cooke. Sugar must have been pleased to see a replica of his fighting style and grace in a bigger man. Right down to the rapid prancing on his toes and the left hand hanging freely uncocked by his side, Clay had copied his idol. Sugar had told him to box Liston like he’d boxed LaMotta in their fights. He told Clay he had to be the matador to Liston’s bull. “You can’t match strength with Liston, just like I couldn’t match strength with LaMotta. He was the Bull, but I was the matador and I outsmarted him. You can beat Liston the same way.”

  Clay followed Sugar’s advice to perfection. His quick, snappy jabs kept Liston off balance and prevented him from unleashing his lethal power. At the end of round four, Clay was rubbing his eyes and complaining that they were burning and he couldn’t see; his eyes were aflame with the ointment that had been used on Liston’s cut. For half the fifth round Clay’s vision was impaired, so he danced until he heard the bell.

  When Liston heard the bell in the eighth round and remained on his stool, the referee signaled that the fight was over. Liston later said he had no feeling left in his left arm. Clay’s feelings, meanwhile, were apparent to every spectator at the Miami Beach Convention Hall as he leaped for joy. “I shocked the world!” he screamed, pointing at all the sportswriters at ringside who’d had Liston beating him at seven-to-one odds. A bet on Clay that night would have resulted in a handsome payoff; indeed, wise gamblers who bet on Clay—or Muhammad Ali, as he would announce himself to be soon after the fight—would end up o
n the winning side, and in the money, most of the time. At twenty-two, the colorful young fighter had shocked the boxing world and a few mumbling scribes—and it wouldn’t be the last time.

  In February 1964, shortly after dethroning Liston, Clay announced that he had converted to Islam. Sugar had seen Malcolm X with Clay in Miami, and it was rumored that he was going to join the Nation of Islam. Sugar presumed that Malcolm X had induced Clay to join the Nation, and since he’d never felt comfortable with Malcolm, Sugar decided to put some distance between himself and the two men. Ali had idolized Sugar as a fighter, but now he had a new hero, one who would give him greater cachet in the political realm.

  CHAPTER 27

  UP AGAINST THE MOB

  Ever since the 1940s, when Sugar turned pro and demonstrated that he was championship material, the mob had been trying to get a piece of him. They had tried threatening and bullying him, and blocking his opportunities for major bouts, but they couldn’t get him to bend to their will. Sugar was a hard nut to crack, they had conceded, though underworld types and bosses such as Frankie “Blinky” Palermo and Frankie Carbo were still after him right through the 1960s. Carbo, born in 1904, was a precocious criminal and already had an extensive rap sheet by the time he gained nationwide notoriety after being indicted for the slaying of a member of Murder, Inc. This information alone would have been enough to make most fighters break out in a cold sweat, but Sugar only laughed at such disclosures.