Pound for Pound Read online

  “When my mother told me I would have to marry (her), I began crying,” Sugar told a reporter from Time magazine. “She screamed at me and said, ‘Junior, if you don’t marry, you’re going to get a record against you. You’ll go to prison and that’ll be on your record for the rest of your life. You got to get married.’ I agreed.” Sugar had no idea she was underage. On September 25, 1939, Ronnie (Smith) Robinson was born. (Sugar, in his autobiography, remembered the year as 1938.) The marriage was annulled shortly thereafter.

  A few weeks before the eighteen-year-old Sugar was to enter the Golden Gloves tournament, his picture appeared in the Daily News as part of the promotion for the event. His mother saw the photo and almost collapsed. By way of explanation, Sugar gave her the stack of money and watched as she ran her hands through the bills of various denominations, a smile slowly replacing her scowl. It must have crossed her mind that it would take her almost a year to earn comparable money on her job sewing at the Champion Coat and Apron Company. “I guess it’s all right, but if you start to get cut up, I’ll have to ask you to stop,” she said. “Don’t worry about that,” he replied. His secret out, Sugar no longer had to hide his money from his mother.

  Sugar felt good that all his secrets were now out in the open. No longer was he worried about Marjie, the marriage, or hiding the fact that he was boxing full-time. Earlier he had settled the issue of attending school—he had officially dropped out, much to his mother’s dismay. She had been convinced by Dr. Vincent Nardiello, then affiliated with the New York State Boxing Commission and Madison Square Garden, that Sugar would probably never be much of a student but could be a world-class fighter. She acceded. Sugar’s mind was clear now to focus on winning in his first Golden Gloves tournament.

  Langley Waller was familiar with the contests and had witnessed the progress of many top fighters through the amateur ranks who’d gotten their start as Golden Gloves titleholders. Like Dr. Nardiello, he felt that Sugar had all the skills needed to win a championship. “It was at the Salem Crescent gym that I first met Sugar Ray in 1939,” said Waller, who had been brought to New York City from Chicago by the owners of the Amsterdam News, Dr. P. M. H. Savory and Dr. C. B. Powell, to do the engraving work for the paper. “Dan Burley, a writer for the Amsterdam News, took me there to meet him. He was then training for the Golden Gloves, so he wasn’t a professional yet. But you could see right away that he was bound for greatness.”2

  Sugar’s friend Spider would be the recipient of this emerging greatness during their match for the New York title. They had both romped over their opponents, and now the two friends would have to face each other for the Golden Gloves featherweight title. He had mixed feelings about fighting his best pal, but when the bell sounded they tore into each other like bitter strangers. Sugar soon cornered Spider with a flurry of punches. A furious left hook stopped his friend in his tracks, and he crumbled to the canvas. Looking at a helpless Spider, Sugar leaned over and picked him up. The referee waved him off, at the same time chiding him for assisting his opponent. Similar admonishments came from Harry Wiley, who had replaced Gainford in Sugar’s corner, Gainford having stepped aside because he trained both Sugar and Spider. “Next time you knock him down, let the referee pick him up,” Wiley said, wiping the sweat from Sugar’s brow.

  The next round witnessed a fully recovered Spider, and he slugged it out with Sugar, neither of them giving any ground. At the end of three rounds, Sugar was declared the winner. Just four years after he’d started boxing, he was a Golden Gloves champion, and he glowed in the spotlight, bowing to spectators in each sector of the arena. His fans and friends tried to leap into the ring with him, chanting his name and jostling each other for a chance to touch their hero.

  A week later, Sugar would experience exultation again when he won the Golden Gloves Eastern finals and then, two weeks later, the twelfth annual Intercity title at Chicago Stadium, before a sellout crowd of twenty thousand. Going into the fight, all the talk had been about Bill Speary, a classy boxer out of Philadelphia, but when it was over Sugar was the new rage. Throughout his career, Chicago Stadium would be a good-luck charm for him. The program for the event, which included his photo and praised his skills, listed his age as nineteen and his birthplace as Virginia. They were wrong on two counts, but right about his talent.

  In 1940, Hollywood produced Golden Gloves, starring Robert Ryan, in which a crook bribes a professional fighter to join the ranks of a sportswriter’s newly established boxing league. In contrast to that fictitious plot, Sugar’s bouts were real. And one year after his first Golden Gloves victory, a year older and ten pounds heavier, he went through the lightweight division without a hiccup, winning the Golden Gloves title again. And this time he didn’t have to face Spider, who, in 1940, matched Sugar’s feats by winning the Eastern finals and the Intercity featherweight belts.

  With two Golden Gloves titles in successive years—one as a featherweight and one as a lightweight—Sugar began to seriously consider turning pro. An invitation to participate in the Olympics would have been the only temptation to delay such a decision, but the advent of World War II precluded that possibility.

  From 1936 to 1940, Sugar won all of his eighty-five amateur contests, sixty-nine by knockouts. It was time to stop taking all the blows for little or no payoff. If he was going to get hit, he pondered, then why not get paid for it? And there was another reason to quit the amateur ranks and earn some money: The landlord had given the Smith family a dispossess notice—either they come up with the back rent immediately, or they would find their belongings outside on the sidewalk. Luckily, Sugar had a stash to take care of the arrears, but the landlord was tired of the family’s delinquent payments, and asked them to pack their things and move. They found an apartment at 264 West 117th Street that was within walking distance of the Crescent gym.

  Although their new home was a bit of an improvement over their previous apartment, it was still a long way from the big house that Sugar now fantasized buying for his mother. To make that dream come true, Sugar would have to keep to Gainford’s demanding regimen, sharpen his skills, and gain the confidence to overcome foes no matter how menacing they appeared, and no matter their reputation. As a fighter, he knew, he must not show fear or feel the least bit intimidated. During the walk home from working out at the gym, pondering his prospects of turning professional, Sugar often created his fantasies, plotting a way to get Curt Horrmann3 to manage him, having seen Horrmann pursue Buddy Moore, the promising heavyweight on their team. It was widely known that Horrmann, whose fortune was the product of a brewery he owned on Staten Island, was interested in managing a topflight boxer. Whenever he came around the gym, cruising up to the church in his sixteen-cylinder maroon Packard, sporting his English-tailored suits, and handing out twenty-dollar tips like they were dimes, Sugar watched him with envy.

  In many ways, Horrmann was as elegant and imposing as St. Thomas the Apostle, a huge neo-Gothic, Roman Catholic church on the corner of St. Nicholas Avenue and 118th Street, just around the corner from where Sugar lived. Somehow, Sugar mumbled to himself, he had to get the rich man to notice him, to pull his eyes from Buddy Moore. Horrmann knew all about success, and Sugar believed he had the Midas touch, the pathway out of the squalor that engulfed his neighborhood, with its alarmingly high incidence of crime, infant mortality, and syphilis. Horrmann was the key to escape from a vicinity where more than 25 percent of the residents were on relief. All around him, as he trudged home from the Crescent, was the evidence of unrelieved poverty; beggars on the verge of starvation, rats scampering from dilapidated building to dilapidated building.

  While he wanted a nice place for his mother, one that was a long way from the ghetto, he knew that he aspired to the finer things for himself as well. He often dreamed about being the best boxer in the world, with enough money to buy some of the apartment buildings where he and his family had to pay rent. Rather than taking his clothes to somebody else’s cleaners, Sugar dreamed of owning one. And why
not a barbershop, a restaurant, a clothing store? He was tired of handouts, of payments made under the table because of his amateur status. These payoffs were much too small and irregular; he needed the big paydays to match his big dreams.

  In Gainford, Sugar knew he had the best trainer in the business. Now, for his manager, he set his sights on Horrmann, a man of exceeding wealth who could lead him from the Golden Gloves to a gold mine as a professional.

  CHAPTER 6

  PUNCHING FOR PAY

  While the United States sought ways to prop up democracy in Europe and simultaneously to avoid getting involved in the growing conflict, Sugar Ray Robinson prepared for his first professional battle at Madison Square Garden, against club fighter Joe Echeverria. With Gainford in his corner, and Horrmann as his new manager, Sugar’s adrenaline was soaring. It didn’t take Horrmann long to recognize the talent Sugar possessed. He knew that the small amounts of money he gave Sugar to sustain him at the start of their relationship would bring in huge dividends in the future.

  Echeverria turned out to be an immobile pinata, and Sugar knocked him out in the second round on October 4, 1940. Except for a knot of boosters, dressed in blue and white jackets, a few monogrammed with “Crescent Gym,” there were few spectators to witness his debut as a pro. “But the next time I fight here I’m going to fill this place up,” Robinson muttered to himself as he waved to friends in the Garden’s ringside seats. “In those days you didn’t get a fight on any Garden card unless you had a number of fights before that, and a good manager. Sugar Ray Robinson turned pro on the undercard (a preliminary match) of a world title fight in Madison Square Garden. True, it was only a four-rounder, but still, he would not have gotten that berth had he not been a topflight amateur,” said noted boxing historian Herb Goldman.

  Sugar’s take from the fight was $150, far more than he earned, off the books, as an amateur, and he was surprised when manager Horrmann said he could keep it all. It was a sizable sum during a period when the annual median income for a Harlem family barely exceeded two thousand dollars. Since it was Sugar’s first payday as a pro, Horrmann and Gainford decided to forgo their usual percentages. They could see the future hurricane of dollars.

  In one easy fight, Sugar told his friends, he had pocketed the equivalent of three months’ rent for a three-room apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue.1 Already he was earning more than the jazz musicians he idolized at Minton’s Playhouse in the Cecil Hotel, which was near his home and just across the street from St. Thomas the Apostle Church, whose architecture Sugar admired. Sugar could boast that he earned per fight more than Dizzy Gillespie, one of the stalwarts at Minton’s, made per arrangement, though it wouldn’t be long before the twenty-two-year-old trumpeter’s career matched Sugar’s in its acceleration to the top.

  After disposing of Echeverria, Sugar was so caught up in the euphoria that he forgot that his idol, Henry Armstrong, was also on the undercard. Armstrong, known as “Hammering Hank,” was the welterweight champ. But Sugar knew Armstrong had his hands full with a tough Croatian named Fritzie Zivic. After his victory over Echeverria, Sugar rushed back to the arena with his entourage to see Armstrong in the main event against the rugged Zivic. At times the two fighters stood at the center of the ring and battered each other mercilessly. Sugar winced with each punch Armstrong took, and there were quite a few, causing him to lose the fifteen-round decision. “I want Zivic,” Sugar told his mother, who had come to see her son’s professional debut. She voiced her objection, pleading with him not to pursue a fight with him. “He’ll gouge your eyes out,” Sugar remembered her telling him. But Sugar was determined to avenge his hero’s setback, and continued to pester Gainford to get the match.

  The pestering gradually became an obsession. Gainford heard so much about Zivic that he had trouble keeping Sugar’s concentration on his next fight, scheduled for Savannah. This would be Sugar’s first trip back to the state where he was born. While still an amateur, Sugar had handily whipped a white fighter from Georgia, and now that both were pros, the loser wanted a rematch. There was one problem, however. In Georgia and other places in the South, blacks and whites, whether amateur or professional, were not allowed to fight each other. So, to get a measure of revenge, the white fighter’s promoter contacted the toughest black fighter in the state to challenge Sugar. He was a deaf-mute named Silent Stafford. Four days after he had vanquished his first professional opponent, Sugar outpunched Stafford, knocking him out in the second round. Sugar didn’t dally too long in Savannah. Joe Louis, now the heavyweight champion, had invited him to train with him at Greenwood Lake back East. They hadn’t been together since Louis had won the title over James Braddock in 1937. Louis had been on a mission since his loss to Schmeling in the summer of 1936, and Sugar kept tabs on each of his friend’s victories over the next four years. When Louis avenged his loss to Schmeling in 1938, Sugar was ecstatic. He was equally overjoyed when the heavyweight champ beat “Two Ton” Tony Galento and twice conquered the tough Arturo Godoy. Sugar’s excitement was uncontained when he learned later that Horrmann had arranged for him to be on the same schedule of bouts with Louis in the Brown Bomber’s defense of the crown against Red Burman at the Garden. This was certainly a step up in his professional career.

  The area around Greenwood Lake, half of which is in New Jersey and half in New York, was picturesque and serene. Pine trees filled the sloping valleys and thickly covered the Ramapo Mountain range. There was no Highway 87 then, as there is now, so the trip from New York City took more than two hours, winding through many small towns in New Jersey. Most people ventured there to fish; the lake was known for its enormous basses. But while Louis was out at the lake, his trainer, Jack “Chappie” Blackburn, saw to it that he worked out in a rowboat in order to strengthen his arms. He required the same of Sugar. Blackburn, as Louis knew, was a taskmaster when it came to training. He had come by it honestly during his own career, one that included matches in which he more than acquitted himself against such all-time greats as Joe Gans and Sam Langford. “Blackburn was a stern trainer, and he looked the part,” Barney Nagler observed in Brown Bomber, his biography of Louis. “A bony face, marked by a scar on the left cheek and set off by beady eyes that peered out of angular slits, he appeared as an instrument of discipline. Usually taciturn, he was informative and kindly where Louis was involved. He knew boxing as a serious business and instilled in his pupil an early devotion to the course…”2 It could have been Melville describing Queequeg, the harpooner, in Moby Dick.

  Although Louis was in his “Bum of the Month” phase, where his competition was notable for not being notable, Blackburn still made sure he prepared him rigorously, as if he were going up against a top contender. Sugar got the same treatment, and this included hours of roadwork, a nutritious diet, and plenty of rest. In his autobiography, Sugar recalled: “I was up at dawn with Joe for roadwork. At that hour, the lake was even more beautiful. The morning mist was hanging over the lake and the sun was creeping up over the mountains, and the little boy from Brewster Center was really in his heaven, running on the road with Joe Louis. We ran every morning together, Joe and me, with a car crawling along a few yards behind us. In the car was a New York City detective hired by Mike Jacobs, the promoter of the Twentieth Century Sporting Club, to be with Joe before a big fight. Also in the car was Jack Blackburn.”3 The only break from the routine came in the late evening. That’s when Sugar would rush to sit at a card table and relax.

  When Sugar returned to the Garden with Louis on the last day of January 1941, he won a six-round decision. George Zengaras was the victim of the Greenwood Lake roadwork. Louis did him one better, knocking his opponent, Burman, out in the fifth round.

  By the end of February Sugar had a match slated for his hometown of Detroit. Naturally, the city still made some claims on him, and all the local newspapers gave him a big buildup. The gossip and fanfare attending Sugar’s match against Gene Spencer was reported in the local press in banner headlines such as “Local B
oy Returns Home After Making Good in the Big Apple” and “Former Detroiter Headlines at Olympia.” Given the publicity, Sugar’s father heard about the fight and gave his son a call. They hadn’t seen one another in the eight years since Sugar had left Detroit, and made plans to see each other after the fight. Perhaps eager to spend some time with his father, Sugar made short work of Spencer, putting him out of his misery in the fifth round.

  His father took him to the old neighborhood, and they drove by some of the places where they used to live. Black Bottom, in Sugar’s opinion, was just as wretched as ever. By this time, there was a little more action outside the Bottom, in a city that was now called the “Arsenal of Democracy.” The automobile plants had been converted into manufacturers of war machinery; instead of Fords, Chryslers, and Cadillacs tumbling out of the factories, tanks rumbled off the assembly lines.

  Sugar’s rendezvous with his father was short, because Gainford had Sugar on a tight leash, lest he fall in with the wrong crowd and disrupt his training schedule. Before they said their good-byes, however, Sugar’s daddy put the bite on him for a few dollars. The son almost relished the opportunity to show his father how successful he was. It wouldn’t be the last time Pop, as Sugar called him, would come looking for a handout. It was a clear case of the derelict father taking advantage of his famous son, but apparently this didn’t bother Sugar, though it mightily upset his mother when she heard about it. Sugar looked forward to fighting in Detroit or nearby; it gave him a chance to see his father, whose love and affection he still sought.