Pound for Pound Page 23

  This description was also a summary of Sugar’s condition at the time. By now, his once fabulous café was called the Gold Lounge, and under new ownership. The place where his office, Sugar Ray Robinson Enterprises, used to be was now Mr. Benbow, a women’s dress shop. Perry’s Cleaners and the Playboy’s Barber Shop stood where his cleaners and barbershop had once thrived. On the corner at 124th Street, a beauty parlor, the House of Beauty, was busy, with women under hair dryers sitting where Edna Mae’s lingerie items had once been displayed. Today, this block is taken up by the Ennis Francis apartments. To the right of the front door, embedded in the brick wall, is a plaque that commemorates Sugar’s magnificent feats in the ring. Some friends and family members are still waiting for the sign to go up on the corner in his name.

  Sugar had no savings, few prospects, and with each succeeding week was becoming more and more destitute and desperate. He began to borrow money from friends and associates, even hitting up the former mayor Impellitteri, now a judge, for a few thousand dollars. His rent alone, at $365 a month, kept him on the prowl for handouts and loans. Sugar had established an extravagant lifestyle, and he felt compelled to keep his “front up,” to use the vernacular of the day. Keeping his hair processed, his suits cleaned and pressed, and his station wagon—the days behind the wheel of a flamingo Caddy or Lincoln were a fading memory—gassed up were once chump-change expenses but were now things he could hardly afford.

  “My father was good at knocking people out in the ring, but as a businessman, well, he left a lot to be desired,” Ray II has offered. “He accumulated a lot of money and he bought things. He bought his mother a house; he bought Mom a house; he liked being on Seventh Avenue, so he bought a bar; he liked getting his hair done so he bought a barbershop; since he had acquired some real estate he opened a real estate office; he had to have his clothes cleaned, so he bought a cleaners; and to keep my mother busy, he bought her a lingerie shop. True, he was a self-made man, and I don’t want to downplay that, but he didn’t have money sense.”

  Sugar considered going back in the ring, which would have meant going back on his word, but he concluded that fighting exhibitions wouldn’t be the same as taking on professional bouts. Gainford, who like trainer Harry Wiley had been with Sugar throughout his boxing days, shot the idea down. And the “Emperor” was right again: It would not be fitting to see this glorious gladiator hauled from the arena on his shield.

  With few options available to him, he went back into show business. He still had his looks, those great legs, and a decent singing voice. He decided to produce another album, as he had done back in the early sixties. His second one was appropriately titled I’m Still Swinging and was completed in 1964, according to an article in a Harlem weekly.2 It was recorded on the Continental label, whose president was Donald H. Gabor; Continental also produced albums by Charlie Parker and trumpeter Hot Lips Paige. Featured on the album are tunes composed by Don Gernigan, and the music was arranged by Danny Small and Jack Hansen for a twelve-piece band. If the “Robinson” listed on the compositions is Sugar, then he helped write some of the lyrics, which aren’t bad, but not exceptional, either. Trumpet master Kenny Dorham and trombonist Benny Green are listed among the performers, though neither offers a solo. “Sugar, working in his undershirt and pants in the hot (Regent) studio, had a large clientele with him who nodded with approval at the playbacks. His biggest fan was, as usual, his sister, Evelyn.”3

  “There wasn’t a wide distribution of the album,” said Ray II. “I have no idea how many were printed or whether it was ever reviewed.” Sugar’s vocal range was limited, but he had a relaxed style, which worked best on snappy, up-tempo numbers like the album’s title song. The liner notes by Pete Hamill say little about the recording date or the musicians, so there is no verification that Dorham or Green was in the band.

  Sugar also tried his luck in Hollywood. He picked up a few bucks from acting in a number of television dramas starring Ben Gazzara, Danny Thomas, Mickey Rooney, Tony Randall, or Gary Crosby, mainly cameo roles. “When the movie The Detective was shot on location in New York, Frank Sinatra got me a bit part as a cop,” he said. He had a much larger role with Robert Conrad in a Mission: Impossible segment that focused on the underworld’s grip on boxing, a fitting theme for the ex-champ. Ed Asner was one of the stars of The Todd Killings in 1971, and if you didn’t pay attention you might have missed Sugar’s spot. In Candy, a 1968 film based on a book by Terry Southern, and featuring such actors and musicians as Richard Burton, Marlon Brando, James Coburn, and Ringo Starr, Sugar makes a brief appearance at the film’s beginning, where he is Burton’s chauffeur. Burton plays a poet who sweeps onto campuses like a pied piper and lures away infatuated female students, including a naive Candy. Sugar is his aide-de-camp, and is named “Zero,” which just about sums up his performance. Thankfully, the brevity rescues him from the embarrassment the others endured in this campy, spoof-driven sexcapade. Sugar had gone from being virtually a matinee idol, a cherished icon, to becoming a second-rate bit player in B movies. Once more his life mirrored the misfortunes of his longtime friend Joe Louis, who during this same period of time was wearing a uniform outside Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, greeting high rollers and big spenders.

  Ironically, a fighter who had probably fought and raised money for more charities—the Cancer Fund, the Infantile Paralysis Foundation, the B’nai B’rith, et al.—than any other boxer was now in need of assistance himself. His situation resonated with the same sadness as that of Joe Louis, who through exhibitions had raised so much money for the government during the war years, only to later have millions of dollars stripped from him by the IRS.

  To help pay some of the bills, Millie took a job as a receptionist at the National Broadcasting Company. Sugar was so upset at seeing his wife struggling to work through a terribly cold winter that he insisted she quit. He was able to borrow some more money and they tucked away a few dollars, so much so that one day Millie surprised Sugar with a piano she had purchased at bargain rates. (Years before, Edna Mae had also surprised him with the gift of a piano.)

  Once upon a time, when the cash was almost literally leaping out of his pockets, Sugar would see something he liked, nod his head, point, and instruct the merchant to charge the item to him and ship it to his home. Now, there were moments of solitude and reflection when he would try to calculate how much he had fretted away; it must have been more than four million dollars, he surmised. The cost of taking a group of people to Europe several times had left a gaping hole in his savings, he reflected. But there had always been more money on the horizon. Now the spigot was tight, the Midas touch had turned to pewter. But, as he said on many occasions, there were no regrets. “If I had a chance to do it all over again, I’d do it the same way…To be a champion, you have to believe in yourself when nobody else will.”

  “The same way” would mean 202 total bouts; 109 knockouts; 65 victories by decision; 6 draws; 18 losses by decision; 1 defeat by a technical knockout; 1 no-decision and 1 no-contest. “He created a new place for the imagination of a fighter,” said Jack Newfield in the HBO special he produced in 1998 on Sugar’s life, Sugar Ray Robinson: Bright Lights and Dark Shadows of a Champion, “the way Louis Armstrong or Frank Sinatra or Marlon Brando opened a new room in their art form.” Another distinction for Sugar was being named Ring magazine’s Fighter of the Year almost ten years apart, in 1942 and again in 1951. No other “lord of the ring” can make such a claim.

  Sugar was eventually diagnosed with a number of crippling ailments, including diabetes, hypertension, arteriosclerosis, and Alzheimer’s disease. Each illness had its own way of ravaging his once glorious body, robbing him of his strength, curtailing his prodigious appetite for life, even removing the memory of his greatest triumphs before thousands of cheering fans.

  There is no way to determine the degree to which Sugar was aware of his steady physical decline, how he dealt with the irony of his name and the debilitating diabetes, and the arteriosclerosis
, which hardened vessels that used to supply the blood flowing to his magnificent legs, destroying their once enviable elasticity. And he may have been spared any full realization of the Alzheimer’s, given its slow but steady erosion of one’s faculties.

  Despite the setbacks, in later years there were a number of significant triumphs for a man who was used to basking in the spotlight, to being the main attraction. In 1967, he was elected to the Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, New York. The moment must have been ironic for Sugar, since this was the hometown of Carmen Basilio. After he and Millie moved to Los Angeles in 1969, he founded the Sugar Ray Robinson Youth Foundation, and, on occasion, when he felt up to it, he would drive over to its Main Street Gym and spar a few rounds with Danny Lopez, Armando Muniz, or Carlos Palomino, just to keep his trim figure toned. Each year since its inception in 1969, the Foundation has provided thousands of underprivileged youth in the Los Angeles area with social, sports, and other recreational activities. However, the Foundation sponsors no boxing programs.

  Working out at the gym was an ingrained habit to Sugar—so was his womanizing, which he continued until his physical deterioration made it no longer possible. In 1981, when Gainford died, Sugar took a trip to New York for the funeral. Millie wasn’t with him, and he was accompanied by a bodyguard. “After the funeral service,” author Ralph Wiley wrote in an article for Sports Illustrated, “Ray met Edna Mae and suggested they go to his hotel together. ‘I told him I couldn’t do that; we weren’t married anymore. He got very upset. I had to tell his bodyguard to please take him away, because I didn’t want to get hurt.’ Robinson remained a womanizer until the diabetes, hypertension, and Alzheimer’s began to take their toll.” But this would be the last time he and Edna Mae would ever see each other.4

  For her part, Edna Mae applied her usual energetic resolve to a number of activities—a little acting, some charitable work, a monthly round of civic and social affairs. In the middle and late eighties she made frequent appearances on various television talk shows. She was a guest on David Susskind’s show in 1985 with Vikki LaMotta and the wives of two other boxers. In contrast to the bitterness between their ex-mates, Edna Mae and Vikki were quite cordial as they recalled their lives with Sugar and the Bull. “They looked forward to fighting each other,” Vikki said. “They were perfect for each other.” Among Edna Mae’s most telling comments was one regarding the horde of hangers-on who swarmed around Sugar at every opportunity. “Sugar thought it was better to give them a job than a handout,” she said.

  A few years later she and Kitty Carlisle Hart were among several senior women on Joan Rivers’s show. And when Edna Mae was asked what made her feel most glamorous, she said it was when she could get all dressed up in her furs. “Especially my chinchillas.” The worst thing about getting old, she said, was “memory, both the good and the bad parts.” Indeed, memory would be something lost to both Sugar and Edna Mae in their final days. She often spoke of how painfully aware she was of Sugar’s rapidly changing mental status, but how she’d never thought it would grow so severe and one day claim his life. Nor did she think Alzheimer’s disease would also claim hers, as it did.

  Several performances kept her spirits up and her hopes alive. In 1994, Edna Mae was a featured performer with David Margulies, Anne Pitoniak, Jerry Stiller, and Fritz Weaver in a musical program entitled In Words and Music. The program was sponsored by Stanley Eugene Tannen’s FREE Theatre Project and was held at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. Tannen later would rent a room from her in her spacious apartment on 90th Street.5

  “My mother was involved in all kinds of social and political activities, including fund-raising campaigns during the civil rights movement,” Ray II recalled. “She once worked with Carly Simon’s mother, raising money for various political causes. It was perhaps from all of this activity that we ended up participating in the March on Washington in 1963.”

  As she struggled to keep her sanity, she wished the same for Sugar. “I suppose I wanted to really believe that the former days of plenty were going to return to Sugar,” Edna Mae reflected toward the end of her memoir, “so I ignored the obvious decline of his empire and kept praying and hoping God would remember how Ray had always loved Him and thought of Him as number one, with himself a little lower. At least he now was away from all the problems and pain of this merciless town (Harlem) that had raised him to its pinnacle and graced him with unlimited power and fame. Sugar had always led the parade while thinking he was clothed in brilliant and costly robes.”

  But now, she lamented, the party was over: “Suddenly there was no more applause and all doors were closed to him.”

  All doors except those to boxing immortality.

  * About the various weight divisions, something more should be said. It was not easy for Armstrong to meet these requirements without losing strength and stamina. In the days when Sugar and Armstrong were taking on all comers, there were only eight weight divisions. (Today there are seventeen, including the recently added cruiserweight, super-middleweight, light-middleweight, light-welterweight, super-bantamweight, and minimum-weight.) The smallest of the fighters were considered flyweights (112 pounds); when Sugar began as an amateur, this was his weight. Then there were bantamweights (118 pounds), featherweights (126 pounds), lightweights (135 pounds), and welterweights (147 pounds). Many ring authorities feel that it was as a welterweight that Sugar was at his best. Others argue that it was as a middleweight (160 pounds) that he was truly incomparable. When he took on Joey Maxim for the light-heavyweight (175-pound) title, the opinion among many was that Sugar didn’t take enough time to beef up or to fight less talented light-heavyweights before taking on the champion. Moreover, the weight differential between a middleweight and a light-heavyweight is the greatest of the lower divisions, fifteen pounds. Back in the day when Joe Louis wore the crown in the heavyweight (190-pound) division, there were no limitations, and that, for the most part, remains the standard today. So, for Armstrong and Sugar to make those weight adjustments—often within weeks—was absolutely phenomenal, and only the very best could have done this successfully at such a high level of competition.

  THE FINAL BELL

  Between his last appearance at Madison Square Garden in 1981 and the time when he was saluted in 1988, Sugar and Millie settled into a quiet life in Los Angeles, with occasional trips to Las Vegas to attend a big fight at Caesars Palace. He also spent some time at his Foundation, mainly to meet and greet celebrities and potential donors. A number of organizations and institutions invited him to participate in their events, capitalizing on his power to still attract crowds. During these appearances he was rarely ever to do more than wave to well-wishers, given the degenerative impact of Alzheimer’s.

  The last few months of his life found him in seclusion, save for the presence of family and close friends. When he was in public, he was impeccably dressed and always managed to summon that famous smile. Toward the final days of his life, Sugar’s battle against several ailments, including diabetes and hypertension, escalated. It was as if for every lethal punch he’d delivered, he was getting back two in return. That matchless stamina of his was finally down to the last breath.

  Eight days after Sugar Ray Robinson died on April 12, 1989, more than two thousand mourners attended the memorial service for him at the West Angeles Church of God in Christ in Los Angeles. It would be the first and last time they would see Sugar flat on his back and not getting up. Whether it was an accumulation of punches, diet, or old age, the coroner’s report said Sugar had succumbed mainly to arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, compounded by Alzheimer’s, hypertension, and diabetes. The Reverend Jesse Jackson delivered a eulogy that captured the pathos and bathos of Sugar’s adventurous life. “He was part of the American quilt,” Jackson said of him. “His patch of the quilt had nonnegotiable integrity. He was born on the bottom but he left on the top. He went from guttermost to uttermost.” The erudite minister’s reflections caused even Edna Mae to shiver, remembering the go
od times she’d shared with Sugar. She had been reluctant to attend the funeral, but did at the insistence of her son. In a distant pew from Sugar’s “immediate” family, she grieved silently, absorbing the eulogy in a private fashion.

  Even a fighter/celebrity as coddled as Sugar had been for more than a quarter of a century would have called a halt to the flow of postmortem encomiums, which rivaled even the cluster upon cluster of flowers that crammed the church. To Mike Tyson, then the heavyweight champion, Sugar was an inspiration. “I had the opportunity to meet him once,” he told Michael Connelly of the Los Angeles Times. “He had a great impact on me with very few words.”