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  Along with his pay, Sugar was able to pick up additional change whenever Bojangles came to town and appeared at the Tree of Hope or the “Wishing Tree,” which was located on Seventh Avenue between 131st and 132nd Streets, near the Lafayette Theatre. Black performers believed the tree to be the purveyor of good luck to those who stood beneath its branches. “It was their totem pole of hope. More than that, the immortal Bojangles Bill Robinson used to pay a weekly visit to the tree, which had been there when he was a kid with dreams of greatness. Young Sugar and the other boys would wait for Bojangles. When he arrived, he would have the kids dance for him, rewarding the best ones with a handful of coins. It was no contest. Sugar always won. With his natural grace and lithe, limber body, he would tap his way to a perfect imitation of the grinning Bojangles.”2

  Sugar did not grin, though, when he was provoked by the neighborhood bullies. One day while they were playing a game of racing from sewer to sewer, about a twenty-five-yard dash, “Shake” (Samuel Royals), the fastest kid on the block, challenged him to a race.3 When Sugar won the race, Shake challenged him again. Sugar told him he didn’t want to race anymore because he was too tired. The boy offered another sort of challenge to the fatigued Sugar, and threw a punch at him. Sugar showed Shake that he was just as fast with his fists as he was on his feet, and bloodied Shake’s nose. Soon, he had a reputation both as a fast runner and a hard puncher. Then he learned the fine art of defense, at the Police Athletic League.

  A PAL supervisor, Benny Booksinger, heard about Sugar’s talent and invited him to participate in one of his tournaments, held in a “boxing ring” whose perimeters were marked off by orange crates. In Sugar’s first bout with gloves on, he won a three-round decision. The loser’s big brother stepped in front of Sugar and demanded the next fight. Booksinger4 was coaxing them on when, out of nowhere, Leila appeared. All the while she had apparently been watching the matches from their apartment window. She pushed Sugar out of the makeshift ring, turned to Booksinger, and commanded he get off the block and leave her son alone. Booksinger didn’t move fast enough, and Leila slapped him. He never came around again, but he knew how to find Sugar—and Sugar knew how to be found. He became a regular in Booksinger’s bouts.

  Sugar at thirteen stood about five feet eight inches and weighed around eighty-five pounds. Lean as a whippet, he won all of his fights except one. His one loss was to a tough Irish kid named Billy Graham, who would one day be a top welterweight contender. Although they never fought as adults, they had several common opponents, including Carmen Basilio and Kid Gavilan, and Graham held his own against both of them. Sugar’s early neighborhood bouts didn’t mean much in terms of money or prestige, but he began to turn heads with his ability after he defeated a boy who was considered the best in his weight division. Boxing was now Sugar’s passion, and it took up most of his time. His interest intensified when a classmate at Cooper Junior High School, at 116th and Madison Avenue, convinced him to stop by the Salem Crescent gym, located in the basement of the Salem Methodist Church on Seventh Avenue at 129th Street.

  Back in those days, bootleg fights were matches in which boxers were paid under the table. They were quite common. One of the fighters told Sugar the bouts were staged in upstate New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. For the payoff, each fighter was given a watch, then had it bought back from him. If a boxer won, he was given fifteen dollars for the watch; if he lost, he got ten. To participate, Sugar was told, he had to do roadwork—laps around Central Park—as well as workouts at Salem under the guidance of George Gainford. Gainford, who had a growing reputation as a trainer, had fought under the name of Kid Ford as a middleweight back in the late twenties. Like any good coach or manager, Gainford could give a boxer the once-over and determine almost immediately if he had what it took to be a good fighter. Sugar had never done roadwork and didn’t know who Gainford was, but he understood the value of the money. No further inducement was necessary. After several months fighting with Booksinger, he was ready.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE CRESCENT’S STAR

  Sugar was nearly fourteen in March 1935 when a riot raged through the streets of Harlem. A Puerto Rican youth, a year older than Sugar, was caught stealing at the Kress department store on 125th Street and was subsequently beaten to death by the store manager. Mobs quickly gathered on the street corners of Harlem. Mayhem was inevitable, and it exploded, and for one furious night 125th Street was torn apart—it was, according to Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the first race riot started by black people. When it was over, three blacks were dead. Some two hundred stores were plundered and looted, and property damage was estimated in the millions of dollars. Sugar never said where he was during the riot, but it’s a good bet he was in the basement of the Salem Methodist Church, working up a sweat pounding a punching bag, or doing hundreds of sit-ups to toughen his still developing stomach and back muscles, or above all, absorbing the sage advice of William “Pops” Miller, who had managed and trained middleweight champion Theodore “Tiger” Flowers in 1926. Miller was the dean of the Salem Crescent gym’s coaching staff, and he taught Sugar the combination punches that would make him so formidable with his fists.

  The boxing team at Salem was managed by Peter J. White, and George Gainford and Miller were the top trainers. Each night the fighters trained in the basement gym, encouraged by the church’s pastor, Reverend Cullen, whose adopted son was the famous poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Countee Cullen. “The church was open to the boys of the community and even though the boys were rough, the congregation tolerated them because they believed it was better to have them under good and wholesome supervision rather than on the street,” wrote Linda Reynolds in her history of the church based on Reverend Cullen’s memoir. Among the team members were Gus Levine, Danny Cox, Cedric Harvey, Spider Valentine, Buddy Moore, Junior Burton, and Coley Wallace, who eighteen years later, in 1953, would portray Joe Louis in a movie based on the Brown Bomber’s life.

  “I knew a lot of the fighters that came out of Crescent,” said Sigmund Wortherly, a former boxer and ring authority. “Spider Valentine was every bit as good as Sugar Ray; they had similar styles. He was trained by the great Al Smith, who was also my trainer. Smith was a legend in the Harlem boxing circles and he has not received the recognition he deserves. Yeah, Sugar was good but there were several fighters around at that time who could take him out.”1

  When Sugar came under the wing and the close scrutiny of Gainford, he was told to add a few pounds, to drink more milk, and to “put some meat on those bones” (at that time, Sugar weighed only a little over one hundred pounds). Gainford’s reputation as the kingpin of amateur boxing in Harlem was legend. Never much of a fighter himself, he knew exactly what it took to become a Golden Gloves champion, and when he barked out his commands he loomed even larger than his hulking six feet two, two hundred and fifty pounds of pure intimidation. Each time he heard Gainford’s powerful voice or had to endure his imposing presence, Sugar would tremble. A native of Charleston, South Carolina, Gainford had come with his parents to the United States from British Guiana, now Guyana. He was a no-nonsense guy who expected his orders to be followed without any back talk. But talking back to him was the last thing on Sugar’s mind.

  As a tiny flyweight (a boxer under 112 pounds), Sugar fought other PAL fighters his age and weight. When Sugar began boxing, he adopted a flailing, windmill style of moving his arms, but Gainford gradually developed him into a more polished boxer, adding technique to Sugar’s natural speed, balance, and endurance. During this period, while Sugar was processing Gainford’s lessons, developing a snappy jab and a solid two-punch combination, his idol, Joe Louis, was destroying every opponent he faced in his climb to the top of the heavyweight ranks. Sugar would later recall Louis’s encounter with Max Schmeling on June 19, 1936, at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, forty some blocks uptown and across the Harlem River. Just about everybody in Harlem had their radio on that sultry evening, tuned to the fight. “I was outside, sitting on ou
r gray cement stoop,” Sugar wrote in his autobiography, “listening to all the radios around me, but I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My man Joe couldn’t stay away from Schmeling’s right hand.” Sugar and the rest of Harlem—and millions of Americans—were stunned to hear that Louis had been knocked out by the German. It was his first defeat as a professional fighter.

  Sugar was so devastated by his hero’s defeat that he took all of the equipment Gainford had given him to the pawnshop and hocked it for three dollars. When Gainford’s nephew told him what Sugar had done, the trainer demanded that Sugar return the equipment to him. Eventually, after getting reports that Gainford was looking for him, Sugar returned to Crescent and begged for a second chance. Only after severely chiding him did Gainford relent and allow him to return to the gym. Leila dropped by the gym one day after hearing her son was learning to box. She con-fronted Gainford and told him that she didn’t mind her son spending time at the gym because it kept him off the streets and out of trouble, but that there would be no fighting.

  Both Gainford and Sugar kept this bargain for several months, with Sugar just tagging along to the bootleg fights. But when a promoter of fights in Kingston, New York, informed Gainford that he needed a flyweight for one of his bouts, Sugar begged the trainer to give him a shot. Gainford hesitated for a moment or two, and then gave his consent. There was another problem, however. Sugar didn’t have the required AAU card, certifying his amateur status. Gainford remedied this situation by giving the promoter one of several cards he carried in his wallet of fighters in his stable at the Crescent. The one he offered belonged to a fighter named Ray Robinson, who had stopped boxing.

  As he was about to enter the ring, Sugar—now Ray Robinson—was half terrified and half excited at the prospect of being the center of so many people’s attention. It would be like performing outside the Alvin Theatre, he told himself, while mumbling a silent prayer. Gainford slapped three sprays of water from a sponge over his head as if he were anointing him. Sugar had no idea that this would be the beginning of a ritual that would be carried out before each of his fights in the future.

  After three frantic rounds, Sugar was declared the winner by a unanimous decision. This bout had been an easy victory. Gainford pointed out to him that some would not be so easy. But the young man had no thought about rough fights to come; he just wanted to enjoy this one—and get the gold watch that he was promised. As per the custom, Sugar gave the watch back to the promoter and received his fifteen-dollar payment in return. For the first time in his life, Sugar had real money in his pocket. But how would he explain this windfall to his mother? He knew that if he told her, it would end the possibility of future fights, and he was eager to return the following week. Luckily for Sugar, his sister Marie agreed to hide the money.

  Meanwhile, over the course of several weeks, Sugar continued to pile up victories and money. Boxing and training were soon consuming most of his waking hours; either he was working the bags at Crescent, jogging around the north end of Central Park, or hanging out at Grupp’s Gym—where the legendary Jack Dempsey learned how to throw a double left hook off a jab—on 116th Street Street near Eighth Avenue (Grupp’s was the premier gym in the city until it was supplanted by Stillman’s, which was located on 125th Street near Seventh Avenue before moving to its final, more famous location on Eighth Avenue between 54th and 55th Streets). Even before he was sixteen, Sugar was beginning to demonstrate his skill on the speed bags and in skipping rope, which at first he disdained, believing jumping rope was for girls. At Grupp’s “College,” as Sugar called it, the professors of the “sweet science” were such ring veterans as Kid Norfolk, Panama Joe Gans, and the indomitable Harry “Black Panther” Wills, whom Jack Dempsey refused to fight. They, along with Soldier Jones, who would be a mainstay in Sugar’s camp during his professional career, supplied the bantering remarks that were history lessons of the fight game, and Sugar was all ears. From Wills he learned the importance of balance. Jones gave him lessons in basic anatomy. He would take his finger and swab a bit of sweat from Sugar’s body and taste it. If it was salty, he would smile. “When it’s not salty,” he told Sugar, “it means you’re stale.” Gans, Wills, Norfolk, Jones—the black “professors”—and an old Irishman named Kelly were like surrogate fathers to Sugar, teaching him the manly art, but Gainford was “Big Daddy,” or “The Emperor.”

  Gainford delivered the lectures in strategy and psychology. Once Sugar was slated to fight a pug with loads of scar tissue, a flat nose, and cauliflower ears, and he was leery of him. But Gainford explained that the reason the opponent appeared so menacing was because he had been beaten so many times. If he were any good, Gainford told Sugar, he wouldn’t be so scarred and battered. Sugar won the decision without breaking a sweat.

  Sugar’s skill and precision were improving at such blinding speed that he was matched in just a few weeks against seasoned amateurs, including one tough Italian named Willie Papaleo. Sugar beat him in a close decision in a bout in Hartford. That fighter would later be called Willie Pep, and would rule the featherweight ranks for years.

  Sugar’s next big fight was against another unbeaten bruiser, from Canada. The bout was set for Watertown, New York, a stone’s throw from the Canadian border. Sugar and Gainford had just been released from a night in jail, having been detained when someone had accused Sugar of being a professional because he had defeated Papaleo. Sugar’s status was verified after a call to the AAU the next morning. But the fight was delayed a week as Gainford negotiated for more money. The delay also allowed the anticipation of the fight to build, and for Sugar to catch up on his homework, though by now he had practically stopped going to classes.

  But finally the bout was held. Concerned about being cut in the face, which would certainly be noticed by his mother, who still didn’t know he was boxing, Sugar quickly moved to put the Canadian on the defensive. The tactic worked, and a blistering left hook dropped his opponent for the full count. It was the first time Sugar had ever scored a knockout.

  When it was over, as Sugar was leaving the ring, a sportswriter told Gainford: “That’s some sweet fighter you’ve got there.” A woman at ringside heard the comment and added: “As sweet as sugar.” In the paper the next day, the sportswriter called him Sugar Ray Robinson, and “Sugar” was born. From that day forward, he had a moniker that, like the Babe’s, was distinctly his. Now, the Crescent had a real luminary, a true star.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GLOVES

  In 1939, the pinnacle of amateur boxing was the Golden Gloves tournament. Like minor league baseball in relation to the majors, the tournament, which began in Chicago in 1923, was the stepping-stone to the big time, to the big bucks. While the bouts were held in several of the major cities, the best crop of fighters tended to come from Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and New York City. (For years there had been a bitter rivalry between the Windy City pugs and the stylish boxers from the Big Apple.) Winners of regional matches would fight the other regional winners, bouts from which national champions were crowned. To fight for a tournament championship was the dream of every amateur fighter, and it was a plateau that Sugar felt he could easily reach. And indeed, everybody in the basement of Salem Methodist Church knew that in Sugar they had a fighter of great promise.

  Hearing about promising fighters was nothing new for the great trainer Ray Arcel, so he was only mildly interested when Gainford invited him up to check out his latest prospect. Arcel had seen all of the great fighters from the 1920s on. In his career, he would train such champions as Benny Leonard, Barney Ross, Tony Zale, Kid Gavilan, and Ezzard Charles. When the genuine article came along, Arcel didn’t have to take a second look; he’d know right away. “George and I were good friends,” Arcel recalled in an interview with writer Ronald K. Fried. “I said, ‘What? You got another bum you want me to look at, George?’ He says, ‘Come on up and look at this guy. This guy’s gonna make me a millionaire.’ I went up there, and I saw a fighter. I sa
id ‘You got something…Where d’ya build this?’”1 He would get an even longer look at Sugar at the Golden Gloves tournament.

  As always, there were a number of promising young amateur fighters on the bill, including Spider Valentine and Sugar Ray Robinson from the Crescent gym. Unfortunately for Valentine, he was matched in the same 118-pound featherweight division with a now heavier Sugar, his best buddy. Other than this dilemma, Sugar entered the tournament having overcome many personal problems. One of the major changes in his life had come to him quite suddenly when his girlfriend Marjie jolted him with the news that she was pregnant.

  He couldn’t believe that his affair with Marjie had reached such a point. For several months he had admired her from afar. She lived in the neighborhood, and she had no idea how often he imagined being with her. After ignoring his attempts to sweet-talk her, she gave in one evening and they began to date, often snuggled up in a 1928 Ford, one of the cars Gainford used to transport his boxers to the bootleg bouts.

  Sugar had all but stopped going to school, since he was doing so well on the boxing circuit—having accumulated close to a thousand dollars, which he was still giving to Marie to stash away from his mother’s prying eyes. Marjie, or Marjorie Joseph, was a gorgeous, dark-skinned beauty with long legs, and Sugar loved to go out dancing with her at the Savoy and other ballrooms where there was a live band. Sugar was as nimble on the dance floor as he was in the ring, and Marjie was one of the few women who could match him step for step in the lindy hop or jitterbug.

  Eventually, she surrendered her virginity, and it was the beginning of many afternoon sessions on her couch. A few months later, Marjie told Sugar she’d missed her period. The inference was wasted on him, since he had no idea what she was talking about. When she made it plain, he was momentarily stunned, as if he had been hit by an uppercut. Hearing the news, Leila was equally shocked, and began to arrange a marriage. Her parents agreed. The marriage would give the baby a name, though Sugar was not to live with Marjie.