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  Big paydays and reminiscing with his father made Detroit doubly attractive for Sugar, but Philadelphia was soon just as rewarding, since it was closer to New York City and there were several influential promoters on the scene promising lucrative dates. One of Sugar’s first major fights was set for July 21, 1941, in Philadelphia against Sammy Angott at Shibe Park, which would later be renamed Connie Mack Stadium. Angott was not going to be a walk in the park; he had a reputation of being a real battler, and indeed the title he held as National Boxing Association lightweight champion was indicative of that ability.

  However, Sugar was told that this wouldn’t be a title bout; Angott, though confident he could take Sugar, didn’t want to risk losing his crown. It was agreed that they would fight over the 136-pound limit for lightweights, thus making it a nontitle bout. Gaining weight was always difficult for Sugar, so to get a few pounds on his frame before the official weigh-in Gainford ordered him to stuff himself with bananas and milk. He was advised not to move his bowels until after the weigh-in. Promised a six-thousand-dollar purse, Sugar was prepared to hold his bowels even during the fight. When told of the amount, he put a call in to his mother and told her that if he won this fight she would never have to work again.

  Sugar’s preparation for a fight followed a set routine. To keep his skin tough, he didn’t shave on the day of the fight. There was tea and toast for breakfast. There was quiet meditation and an afternoon nap. His evening meal consisted of a steak, which he consumed a couple of hours before the fight. Later, prayer sessions with his trainers would be added, along with light workouts to build up a sweat. When he arrived in the dressing room, he could expect that his trainer had unpacked his bag, spread a clean linen sheet over the rubbing table, and laid out clean woolen socks. Neatly folded were the boxing trunks, sometimes white, sometimes purple, with either Trager or Everlast emblazoned at the center of the waistband. His boxing shoes were usually freshly laced and spit-polished. Then came the rubdown with Gainford’s special oils and massage to relax the muscles. A few minutes were spent going over the strategy for the fight, and then, after a little pounding of the flat pads worn on the hands by the trainer, Sugar was ready for the walk to the arena.

  Angott’s name should have been “Ingot,” or “Anvil”;

  throughout the sluggish ten rounds he was like a cast-iron barnacle, clinging to and clutching Sugar. When the decision was announced, Sugar was glad to have won and even gladder to be rid of the human anchor. Angott proved to be a tough customer throughout his career, and in 132 fights only the fabulous Beau Jack was able to knock him out. “Angott was a real good boxer,” Sugar told a reporter at Sport magazine, “and Fritzie Zivic was a real good fighter. There’s a difference.” Sugar considered himself a good boxer, not a fighter.

  Sugar also considered himself a good and dutiful son, always attentive to his mother’s needs and feelings. He couldn’t wait to tell her about his recent victory and the money he had earned. When he arrived home, his mother was up waiting for him. “No use of me going to bed,” she said with a smile. “I don’t have to get up early.”4

  Indeed, she would never work another day in her life, and moreover, Sugar had enough money to move her into a new and nicer four-room apartment at 940 St. Nicholas, at the rate of sixty-three dollars a month; get her some new furniture; and purchase his first car—a 1941 blue Buick convertible. He had won twenty-one straight bouts and was already being touted as the “uncrowned lightweight champion.” To solidify what the sportswriters claimed, he needed a major bout at the Garden, not more preliminary fights.

  With a promoter such as Mike Jacobs manipulating things, Sugar didn’t have to wait long to see his name lit up on the Garden’s marquee. On September 19, he stepped into the ring with Maxie Shapiro, then right out of it less than nine minutes later. It was an easy main event for Sugar, much easier than his next encounter, with a young lady sporting long legs, lustrous hair, and an incandescent smile.

  CHAPTER 7

  SUGAR RAY AND EDNA MAE

  On June 16, 1941, Sugar was once again in Philadelphia, pulverizing Mike Evans’s head and putting him away in the second round. Thus far, it had been a very busy and successful year for him, with an impressive string of twelve victories, including seven first-round knockouts. In only the second year of his professional career, Sugar had lived up to even the most glowing reports of his ring prowess. Sugar was not one to look too far down the road, anticipating a fight or a particular opponent, but there was a real test waiting for him at the end of October: Fritzie Zivic. Sugar’s training sessions became strenuous. His body was soon as taut as a piano wire, and he was as focused as he could be. There would be no distractions—except one.

  The workouts leading to the bout with Zivic were grueling, but there were moments when he needed to tone down the adrenaline and to allow his steel-coiled tension some relaxation. Such a moment of release happened one hot day in the summer of 1941 at Lido Pool, not far from Coogan’s Bluff and the Polo Grounds.

  Often after a hard workout Sugar would go to the pool, more to take a dip and cool off than to swim, though he was smooth off the diving board and an adequate swimmer. One day, to get the attention of a gorgeous young lady with a pair of amazing legs, he pushed her in the pool. She was furious as she climbed out of the water. Her long shiny black hair heavy with water, she glared at Sugar, took his measure, and stormed off in a huff. (Sometime later, when asked to recount the incident, Sugar said he dived into the pool and apologized.) There was no way she could have known that this gentle shove for recognition would one day evolve into physical abuse. Nor could she have predicted the glamorous high life they would lead as the Prince and Princess of Harlem.

  “That walk of hers was something else,” Sugar recalled. Later, some of the Sugar’s gang told him that the pretty lady’s name was Edna Mae Holly, a dancer at the Cotton Club and other popular nightspots in Harlem. Sugar made a mental note when informed that she was currently performing at the Mimo Club on 132nd Street. A week later, accompanied by his usual rowdy entourage, Sugar invaded the club and took a table near the stage. For the next several weeks, the club would be Sugar’s nightly haunt, though Edna Mae, still bristling from the shove and splash, kept him on a string, playing him like a yo-yo. Her continued rejection of his advances only fueled Sugar’s determination. At last she relented, and the aggressive Sugar, just as he did with opponents in the ring, took full advantage of her dropped guard.

  Dining, dancing, and romancing Edna Mae throughout the summer did not interfere with Sugar’s ring domination. During this phase, he recorded his longest string of consecutive knockouts, nine in a row beginning with Gene Spencer in Detroit in February and ending with Pete Lello in New York City in July. Edna Mae attended some of these fights, and Sugar often threw her a kiss while the referee was raising his other hand in victory.

  Their courtship continued when Sugar went to Greenwood Lake to train for his fight against Zivic, who had battered Henry Armstrong into submission the year before. “All that year,” Sugar said, “I had thought about Zivic every so often and about how someday I wanted to humiliate him for Henry.”1 Sugar would call Edna Mae every night “just after bed check at the camp,” Edna Mae wrote in her unpublished memoir. “I guess you can say that was the beginning of our love story.” On some of the calls, which caught Edna Mae between shows at the Mimo Club, Sugar would serenade her as though he were Billy Eckstine or Herb Jeffries, crooning “I’m just a prisoner of love,” his voice still soft and mellow and without the nasality it would acquire in the later stages of his life.

  Before Sugar’s star rose and he was anointed the “pound for pound” best boxer on the planet, that accolade could have described Armstrong. In several ways, Sugar was just a taller, faster replica of Armstrong, as Muhammad Ali would represent a larger, stronger, more powerful version of Sugar. A measure of Armstrong’s character and stamina surfaced very early when the boy, born Henry Jackson, had to fend for himself following the
deaths of his father and mother. In 1929, he was seventeen years old, living with his grandmother, and working for the railroad company in St. Louis, but rather than ride the handcar that picked up workers for the ten-mile trip to their destination, Armstrong chose to run. One day he read an article about the Cuban fighter Kid Chocolate making seventy-five thousand dollars for a half hour in the ring, and felt he could do the same. He teamed up with a trainer named Armstrong, adopted his surname, and compiled an enviable amateur record, winning all but four of his sixty-two fights. (It was fairly common in those days for a fighter to accumulate a large number of amateur fights before embarking on a professional career.)

  Armstrong, like Sugar, had more amateur fights than most boxers of his day had professional bouts, and one is left to wonder what impact this might have had on the two men’s longevity in the ring. Armstrong’s beginning as a pro was not as auspicious as Sugar’s, but by 1936 he had dethroned the California and Mexican world featherweight champion, Baby Arizmendi. They had fought twice before, with Armstrong being cheated out of his victories both times. Entertainer Al Jolson, famous for smearing burnt cork on his face and singing “Mammy,” witnessed the third fight, bought his contract, and became his manager. Under Jolson’s front man, Eddie Mead, Armstrong won all twenty-seven of his bouts in 1937, twenty-six of them by knockouts. Then his managers concocted a plan for him to hold three championships in different weight classes simultaneously. Step one for “Hammering Hank,” as he would be universally called, was a breeze, as he stopped the world featherweight champ, Petey Sarron, in the sixth round. Unable to get a match with the lightweight belt holder, Lou Ambers, Armstrong leaped to the welterweight division to challenge the champ, Barney Ross. Doing this required making the weight, which meant he had to put on twelve pounds. With a regimen of beer and glass after glass of water at the weigh-in, he had the added pounds. But it was a good thing that rain delayed the fight, Armstrong told the press, “because one punch in the belly and the ring would have been flooded.” By the time the rescheduled fight occurred, he was twenty-seven pounds lighter than Ross. It was a lopsided fight, and Armstrong mercifully carried the fatigued champ the last four rounds. Now Armstrong had two belts, and within ten weeks a date was set for a showdown with Ambers for the lightweight title.*

  The contest with Ambers was furious, and Armstrong spit so much blood on the canvas that the referee warned him to stop or he was going to have to halt the match. Rather than spit any more blood from his busted lip, Armstrong asked his cornermen to remove his protective mouthpiece, and for the last five rounds of the fight he swallowed his blood. At the end of the bout, Armstrong had achieved his mission—for the first and last time, one fighter held three championships at once. And, even more astounding, he came close to winning a fourth one, but his 1940 match with middleweight champion Ceferino Garcia was ruled a draw. The glorious run came to an end with two defeats to Zivic, and it was the last one, in which he was kayoed in the twelfth round, that was the source of Sugar’s lust for revenge.

  Sugar’s showdown with Zivic was set for Halloween night. Joe Louis, in a column in the New York Post written with a reporter, predicted that Sugar would win in a decision over Zivic. “Robinson will probably be bobbing around Zivic jabbing that snaky left hand of his into Zivic like a rapid-fire rifle,” he wrote. “I think Robinson’s youth and speed will turn the trick for the Harlem flash.” Edna Mae was again at ringside, and recalled the fight: “They battled on fairly even terms for most of the bout but Sugar was clearly ahead…and took the win in ten.” Just as the Brown Bomber had predicted.

  Hammering Hank had been avenged, and Sugar was fifteen thousand dollars richer. After the fight, a large suite at the Hotel Theresa, Harlem’s most prestigious hotel, was the site of the big victory party, Sugar’s first. A member of his coterie was sent to fetch Edna Mae from the Mimo Club. Once more the fighter and the nightclub dancer were planning to meet—to the chagrin of Sugar’s mother, who wanted something better for her son than a cabaret dancer, and to the disgust of Edna Mae’s aunt Blanche, who felt that a fighter was below the station of a young woman from such a prominent and highly educated family.

  As Sugar had heard repeatedly from Edna Mae’s guardian—her mother died of tuberculosis when Edna Mae was three—“Edna Mae is the fourth generation of college-bred members of our family, which includes doctors and lawyers. And her great-grandfather came out of slavery and graduated from Harvard, studied for the ministry, and was the first Negro to be consecrated a bishop in the United States: the Right Reverend James Theodore Holly, an Episcopal bishop.” Holly was the first black Episcopal bishop in America. Edna Mae, who was born in Miami and attended Hunter College, had followed the family tradition of getting a higher education.

  Blanche almost had it right. The Holly family tree is not a simple chart of genealogy. Edna Mae’s great-grandmother, Emma Webb, gave birth to a daughter, Lucia, who was fathered by a married white man, her employer. “Emma had left to keep anyone from learning about the child, but the news reached her employer’s ears,” Edna Mae noted. “It seems it didn’t stain a white man’s honor or his life to father a black woman’s child. It was dealt with as a necessary evil, tolerated and then ignored.”

  Later, Emma would marry a Mr. Poitier and they would have three children, the youngest of whom was Reggie, who would father Sidney Poitier. “He was my cousin and so was Lincoln Perry, later to be better known as Stepin Fetchit, the actor, who was the exact opposite of the image he projected through his movies,” Edna Mae wrote.

  Edna Mae’s grandmother, Lucia, would first marry Erskine Edden, and four children came from this union, including Vernon Rose, Edna Mae’s mother. Lucia’s second husband was Alonzo Potter Burgess Holly, the son of Bishop Holly; he studied four years in England and subsequently took a medical degree from New York Homeopathic College.2 Dr. Holly was divorced and had children, one of whom, James Theodore Holly, Jr., would later marry Vernon Rose, Edna Mae’s mother.

  Another Holly of future prominence was Ellen Holly, Edna Mae’s younger cousin, a critically praised actress who would be among the first blacks to appear in a regular role on the television soap operas. The bishop was her great-grandfather. “My maternal Uncle Bill’s father-in-law was William Stanley Braithwaite, one of the extolled poets of the [Harlem Renaissance],” Holly wrote in her autobiography, One Life. She had a small role in Spike Lee’s School Daze in 1988.

  If Edna Mae chose not to elucidate to a great extent on her most famous relative, others, including a contemporary of her great-grandfather’s, the venerable Alexander Crummell, did. Crummell extolled the virtues of Reverend Holly and remarked on the contributions he made to black nationalism. No one spoke more fervently about emigrating to Haiti in the 1850s than Reverend Holly, the essence of which was published in 1857 and dedicated to Reverend William C. Monroe, rector of St. Matthew’s Church in Detroit. Arguing for the inherent capabilities of black people and their civilized progress, with an emphasis on the Haitian revolution, he wrote: “I have summoned the sable heroes and statesmen of that independent isle of the Caribbean Sea, and tried them by the high standard of modern civilization, fearlessly comparing them with the most illustrious of men of the most enlightened nations of the earth, and in this examination and comparison the Negro race has not fell one whit behind their contemporaries.”3

  While Edna Mae could boast of a lineage with an abundance of accomplished men and women, Sugar had only his prestige as a boxer to offer. He was also blessed with a gift of gab that had often bailed him out of sticky situations. Now his words would get him around the barrier of class and pedigree, and nail the alluring lady. He tactfully sweet-talked and charmed Aunt Blanche, and then set out to convince Edna Mae to give up show business. Soon, the two lovers were inseparable, careening through Harlem in Sugar’s manager’s car or his own, sharing drinks at the swanky Smalls’ Paradise, where the waiters zipped about on roller skates, or holding hands during long walks in the Catskill Mountains wh
en Sugar was in training. “We saw each other as often as we could with his busy fight schedule,” Edna Mae said. “He carried me with him on as many trips as could be arranged; they included Philadelphia, Washington, and Baltimore, and when I could not go he’d manage to get George’s car and come to my house, pick me up, and we’d drive through Central Park, which was only a few blocks from my house. We’d go into small restaurants to eat sandwiches or Chinese food. He’d use these warm loving outings to assure me of his love before leaving me.”

  On October 30, the day before Sugar edged Zivic, the U.S. destroyer Reuben James was torpedoed and sunk off the coast of Iceland by a German submarine. It was the first American warship to be sunk in the emerging war, and over a hundred lives were lost. A little over a month later, on December 7, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, sinking four battleships and incapacitating several others. Overall, some nineteen ships were damaged and 2,388 military personnel and civilians lost their lives. For two months, as the nation grieved and geared up for war, there was a lull in Sugar’s fight schedule. Still, a number of fight fans desired a return match between Sugar and Zivic, and the bout was arranged for sometime near the top of the new year. Meanwhile, Sugar took it easy, spending much of his free time with Edna Mae.

  By 1942, Sugar was back in action, dispatching with relative ease a roster of forgettable fighters. The fighters may not have been ranked contenders, but they couldn’t be taken for granted, and Sugar had to be focused, though like many Americans he was occasionally distracted by the war raging in the Pacific, where the Japanese were demonstrating their military might, taking one island after the other—Manila, Bataan, Corregidor. Meanwhile, Sugar and the Brown Bomber were on similar paths of conquest with their gloves on, though their personal lives took divergent paths. While Louis, with an incredible number of romantic liaisons to account for, was divorcing Marva Trotter, Sugar was contemplating marriage to Edna Mae, wooing her with expensive gifts like a $650 mink coat.