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  By the fall of 1946, Sugar was not in the best of moods. He was getting tired of the on-and-off-again discussions about a possible championship bout. Talking over the topsy-turvy developments with Edna Mae often cooled him down; otherwise, he was increasingly bitter and ready to take his disgust out on just about anyone.

  Though Sugar had racked up an impressive number of victories against top contenders, one mishap after another prevented him from getting a chance to fight for the welterweight title, which by now was held by Marty Servo. After Servo lost to Rocky Graziano in a nontitle fight, Sugar was signed to fight Servo for the crown. Sugar was in training at Greenwood Lake one day when he was approached by two seedy-looking men who wanted a word with him. They offered him twenty-five thousand dollars if he wouldn’t fight Servo. Sugar thought they were out of their minds. “Man, all I want to do in the world is fight Servo,” he told them.3 They persisted, asking him not to make the weight requirement. At last, Sugar told them to get out of his sight. Nothing was going to stop him from taking on Servo, he told them. But something did intervene. While in training, Servo’s damaged nose was busted further by a sparring mate, and the fight was postponed. The injury was enough to force his retirement.

  Fortunately for Sugar, the boxing commission insisted that another challenger be found to fight Sugar, with the victor claiming the vacant title. That eventful day finally came on December 20, 1946, when Tommy Bell arrived at the Garden to challenge Sugar. Physically, Sugar and Bell were almost mirror images of each other with their taut, slender bodies. And Bell, too, had been waiting for an opportunity to showcase his skills in a championship bout. Sugar was confident he could take him, since he had done so in an earlier fight in Cleveland in January 1945. Sugar appeared sluggish during the first seven rounds, as if he were sleepwalking.

  But he was rudely awakened in the eighth when Bell’s left hook found the mark and flattened him. “Twice Bell ripped Robinson with staggering shots, even dropping him to one knee once,” Bob Roth reported in the Youngstown Business-Journal. The punches were coming so fast that even radio broadcaster Don Dunphy, with his quick tongue, was having trouble keeping up with the pace of the fight, and Bill Corum, who provided color, was unable to use his droll expression about “it not being a very interesting round.”

  “But Robinson wasn’t recognized as the best-ever without reason,” Roth continued. “As the fight got tougher, so did Robinson. From the 12th round on he was a combination machine. When the bell ended round fifteen, a Garden crowd of more than 18,000 stood saluting both fighters. A decision gave Robinson the championship he had long coveted.”4

  “I was at that fight,” recalled Langley Waller, who often printed Sugar’s posters and flyers. “And after Bell knocked him down, that’s when Gainford, his trainer, began telling Sugar Ray to slow down, take it easy, and let the fight come to him. Sugar was good about listening to his cornermen, and with Bell he made no more mistakes.”

  Though it was a championship fight, Sugar didn’t earn as much money as he would have against a top white contender, despite his singular, take-no-prisoners style of brinkmanship in negotiating a contract. David Remnick noted as much in his book on Ali, King of the World. “Sugar Ray Robinson fought one white after another—Bobo Olson, Paul Pender, Gene Fullmer, Jake LaMotta, Carmen Basilio; the promoters rarely offered remotely the same money for bouts against equally tough black challengers,” he asserted, having made the same point in Ali’s case.

  For the first time, Sugar held a championship, the welterweight title, and it came at the same time Louis was heavyweight champ (an eventuality that seemed quite probable, since Louis held the belt for twelve years, from 1937 to 1949). Wearing the crown, however, didn’t bring all the things Sugar desired.

  A few months before the fight with Bell, Sugar had scouted Harlem for investment property, including several buildings on Seventh Avenue, next to the Hotel Theresa. One of the buildings was terribly dilapidated, and it was here he wanted his centerpiece, a café. The contractor had promised him that the work would be finished by the time he won the title, that his “throne room” would be ready to accommodate the champion. But there were delays in getting the wood and paneling that Sugar had specifically requested. He had hired Vertner Tandy, one of the best architects in the city and the designer of many of the luxury buildings in Harlem, but the work crew had fallen behind schedule. Even worse, he was told the work might not be finished until Christmas Eve. He had invested nearly a hundred thousand dollars in purchasing the site of the café and the two flats next to it, with an additional ten thousand for renovations.

  “About two hours after I won the title, I drove up outside my café,” Sugar recounted. “Inside, the workmen were installing the lights behind the bar. I had them working almost around the clock to finish it by Christmas Eve.” One of the workmen told him the lights were working. “Hey, champ,” the workman called to Sugar, “the sign’s hooked up. Turn on the sign. It lights up like Coney Island.” And it did. The neon glow from Sugar Ray’s lit up the avenue. Unlike Jack Dempsey’s Restaurant downtown and Joe Louis’s ill-fated restaurant on 125th Street, Sugar had kept his café to a modest size. He wanted an intimate spot, with patrons elbowing each other for space. “The best advertising is to keep the place packed,” he often explained.

  Edna Mae was by his side when the neon lights bathed the street, and some of the glow fell on them as they embraced, then concocted a toast from a couple of Cokes and paper cups. For several hours they celebrated the new café, and Sugar admitted, “It was one of the nicest celebrations I’ve ever had.”5

  As the new champ, Sugar wasn’t one to rest on his laurels. He eagerly followed Gainford’s advice—keep busy, to keep sharp. Edna Mae was keeping busy too, overseeing their property and its development, now and then supervising the workers. Their new enterprise was the talk of the town. Unlike so many stars who had emerged from Harlem, Sugar was looking for ways to give back to the community, and at the same time make a little more money. “Eventually, Sugar ran a number of businesses,” Edna Mae explained. “There was his café, a dry cleaners, and the Golden Glovers barbershop. All of them were right next to each other and took up the entire west side of Seventh Avenue between 124th and 123rd Streets. The last storefront was to be ‘Edna Mae’s Lingerie Shoppe’ and was on the corner of 124th and Seventh Avenue. Sugar’s ownership continued around the corner onto 124th Street for one more building. One of those tenants made a hair straightener and ran his business in his apartment, which he made into his laboratory and his office.”

  Edna Mae was made a full partner in the business, but Sugar kept her in the dark about most of his transactions. It would prove a mistake, given her eye for details and bookkeeping abilities. She kept copious notes and accurate records of each fight, the gate receipts, expenditures, and the percentages for each of Sugar’s cornermen, handlers, and sparring partners. Her records showed, for example, that in February 1945, when Sugar fought LaMotta and won a unanimous decision, they earned $93,100. It was one of Sugar’s largest paydays to date. (Later he would earn $250,000 from his two fights with Randy Turpin and a consolation payoff of $150,000 from his fight with Joey Maxim.) According to her records, their personal expenses for the LaMotta fight were $672.48, Gainford received $2,500, and for their work on fight night six handlers divvied up $750. An inveterate collector, Edna Mae saved everything: bills, ticket stubs, matches, programs, posters, photos, and nearly every item on which her husband’s name or face appeared. In the end, she saved everything—but could she save their marriage, which, even as they celebrated their new businesses, was on shaky ground?

  CHAPTER 11

  A BROWN BABY AND A PINK CADILLAC

  Sugar doesn’t report whether or not he was at the Garden the night Joe Louis successfully defended his title on June 25, 1948, against the ageless Jersey Joe Walcott, but it’s a good bet that he was. And whether he was there or not, he must have been immensely pleased to see that his old friend, at thirty
-four, still had some warrior left in him before intimating that this might be his last fight.

  Three days after Louis beat Walcott, Sugar eked out a fifteen-round decision over Bernard Docusen in Chicago to retain his title. Docusen had presented more of a contest than Sugar anticipated, and he knew he had to be in better condition and have sharper punches against Kid Gavilan, whom he was set to tangle with on September 23, 1948. Back at Greenwood Lake, he began to prepare for a tougher engagement with the crowd-pleasing Cuban.

  Gavilan, born Gerardo Gonzalez in Camagüey, Cuba, was, at twenty-two, five years younger than Sugar and an extremely flashy, versatile fighter. According to several experts on Cuban fighters, Gavilan, who was called “The Hawk,” after the Spanish equivalent of his chosen name, was considered the latest edition of Kid Chocolate. Chocolate was Cuba’s first world champion boxer, winning the junior lightweight title in 1931. He beat the best fighters of his era, including Tony Canzoneri. Like Henry Armstrong, Kid Chocolate was one of Sugar’s favorite fighters, and many of his moves in the ring were patterned after Chocolate’s repertoire. Sugar was also rumored to have adopted Chocolate’s penchant for brightly colored, luxury sedans.

  Until 1946, most of Gavilan’s fights took place in Havana, but once he hit the mainland his reputation soared, and by 1948 he was taking on top contenders in the welterweight division. He fought Gene Burton, Sugar’s stablemate, to a draw in January 1948, and it is very likely that Burton prepped Sugar on how to combat Gavilan’s artful style, which bordered on the poetic. It would be poetry in motion versus the complexity of the sweet science reduced to fundamental coordinates of speed and power when he stepped into the ring with Sugar.

  In their September thriller, Sugar was rocked several times by the gallant Gavilan, but when it counted, in the last few rounds, Sugar cut him down like the cane of his island nation; each time Gavilan tried to launch his menacing bolo punch, Sugar bobbed away and quickly countered it with rapid jabs and left hooks. The power of Sugar’s punches snapped like a jackhammer, and each dazzling punch reconfigured Gavilan’s face. They landed with such force that the Hawk’s processed hair stood straight up as if electrified. The Hawk would have to wait until the following summer for revenge.

  Energized by his victory over such an awesome challenger, Sugar stepped up his boxing routine, knocking Gene Buffalo unconscious in the first round in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on February 10, 1949, and fighting Henry Brimm to a draw in Buffalo five days later. It was around this time that Sugar and Joe Louis, who would officially retire from the ring on March 1, were seeking to go into business together. Their first project was to secure a liquor distributing license. While they had been involved separately as entrepreneurs, they felt their combined celebrity and their connections would be enough to get them the license, which was by no means easy to come by. To this end, a meeting was arranged between Sugar and Louis and their company, World Champions, Inc., with the New York State Liquor Authority (SLA). They wanted the Authority to grant them a wholesale beer license in New York City. Raising the specter of racism, the treasurer of World Champions further complained that no license had been granted to any “Negro distributorship in New York City for any alcoholic trade, beer, wine or whisky. They’ve got a pattern in New York that doesn’t look too good,” he added. On the other hand, he continued, the Illinois Liquor Control Commission had fewer qualms with the application.1 They were denied, the SLA basing its denial of application on the grounds that the Canadian Ace Brewing Company was one of the principal stockholders in World Champions, Inc., and that the brewing company was controlled by Harry Greenberg, a former associate of Al Capone.

  They never got the license. However, there were companies such as Joe Louis Straight Bourbon Whiskey and Joe Louis Milk that capitalized on the Brown Bomber’s name. Louis also owned a small interest in Joe Louis Punch, a soft drink that never quite found an audience.

  Neither Sugar nor the Brown Bomber sulked very long over the setback; they each simply looked for other ways to make some money. And when they were together it was a matter of who came up with the scheme first. Both were avid golfers, so it could have been a mutual agreement to sponsor a golf tournament. Their maiden voyage in the summer of 1948 went very well, Edna Mae remembered, during a period when she and Sugar were trying to patch up things. “It all went well except for one thing,” she recounted. “I was duped into thinking a young lady there was interested in Joe, but I learned later that she was my husband’s guest.” The tournaments would continue for a few years, with Sugar’s friend Teddy Rhodes the resident pro.

  Sugar had a string of six fights through the spring and early summer of ’49, not one of them of any real significance. They were, to a large degree, paid sparring sessions in preparation for a return match with Kid Gavilan in July. This title scrap was slated for Municipal Stadium in Philadelphia, where both fighters were extremely popular. Sugar knew that the Kid was brimming with revenge, so he put in quality time at Greenwood Lake, and he even curbed his extracurricular activities.

  Bettors at ringside in the jam-packed stadium—nearly twenty-eight thousand strong—were demanding more odds as they plunked their money down for Gavilan, many of them believing Sugar would be weakened after struggling to make the weight, the gaining of which was never easy for Sugar. During the middle rounds, the two fighters stood toe-to-toe, and in the eighth Sugar was staggered by a Gavilan combination. But he recovered before the round was over and completely dominated the second half of the fight. “It was anticipated that Sugar Ray would struggle, and trainer George Gainford had kidded about covering him with ‘reducing salve.’ Robinson was still a welterweight, and for that, every contender had to toast him—preferably with a high-calorie milkshake.”2

  What they didn’t know was that Sugar had received an injection of glucose from Dr. Vincent Nardiello, the onetime state boxing commission’s doctor. This provided him with extra pep after the struggle to make the weight, though the glucose was known to dehydrate and reduce salt content. When the sweat dripped into your mouth, as Soldier Jones had taught him, and tasted stale and not salty, it meant your sugar content had also dropped.

  Gavilan was crestfallen and angry. “I didn’t see too many rounds for Robinson,” he said in his broken English, as reported by James Dawson for the New York Times. “The judge who gave him twelve rounds, he crazy. He hit me hard several times, but I was surprised at the decision and would like to make one more fight with heem.”3

  Sugar was training for his rematch with Gavilan, and trying to reconcile with Edna Mae. Whether intended or not, as a result of their reunions, Edna Mae was impregnated. In one way Sugar was excited to hear that he was going to be a father again, but he also worried that a child might affect his on-again-off-again relationship with Edna Mae negatively.

  By now his oldest son, Ronnie, whom he saw only on special occasions, was almost ten years old. Sugar had no more of a father-son relationship with him than he had with his own father, Walker, Sr. Sugar promptly moved back in with his wife. There is no way to know how his mother felt about the new development, but intuitively Leila must have known that Sugar would probably never live with her again.

  Having defeated Gavilan in a return match in July, Sugar prepared for a fight with Steve Belloise in August. The fight was really a makeup date for their cancellation of a fight the previous December. According to a story in the Boston Post, Sugar had postponed the fight because of an injury while sparring. The injury may have been the result of a punch from his sparring partner, the paper continued, but that punch was delivered on the street, not in the gym. When Tiger Wade, a hard-hitting light heavyweight whom Sugar was using to acclimate him to his fight with Belloise, demanded all of his money after being told he would have to take a cut in pay, Sugar resisted. Wade insisted on all of his money or else. Sugar was defiant. “Robinson started to tell his broken-down sparring partner that he would be lucky to get anything—but he didn’t finish,” wrote Gerry Hern. “Wade fired his
Sunday punch that knocked Robinson to the sidewalk and then gave him a brisk going over.” An hour later the fight was postponed. In years to come, there would be other rumors of Sugar’s stiffing his sparring partners, refusing to pay them what he’d promised.

  When Sugar and Belloise finally squared off in August, “it wasn’t too much of a fight,” recalled political activist and jazz impresario Hilly Saunders, who was a spectator at this and many of Sugar’s fights. “I think he knocked the guy out in the sixth or the seventh round.”4 He did it in the seventh. “Honest to God, I don’t know what happened,” a beaten Belloise told Bill Mardo of the Daily Worker. “I remember being in a flurry but I don’t remember the punch that ended it. I don’t remember the punch, the bell, nothing, except somebody picking me up and the next thing I know I’m sitting back in my corner and somebody is saying don’t get up, Steve, it’s all over.”5

  With fights scheduled for Chicago, Omaha, Houston, and Denver, Sugar was taking the long route to New Orleans to take on Vern Lester. He was in New Orleans on his way to the arena when Edna Mae called to tell him he had a son. Sugar was so excited that he knocked out Lester in the fifth round. “My son,” Sugar said proudly. “My second son really, but somehow this was different. When my other boy was born, more than a decade earlier, I hadn’t really known what it was all about. I was just a kid then myself. I wasn’t able to appreciate the miracle of a birth. To be honest, that first child had created more problems than happiness for me, and for Marjie [his first wife]. But this time it was different. We had a name all picked out if it was a boy: Ray, Junior.”6