The Real Sugar Ray Faces Toughest Fight

The night belonged to Sugar Ray. The saxophones played for him. The lights came on for him. Life was a neon boardwalk. He loved the noise, action. He had to have people around him. Everywhere he went, he looked as if he were leading a parade or riding in one in a shower of ticker-tape.

He was beautiful at what he did. He elevated the art. He brought grace, rhythm, style, even science to a cruel craft. It wasn’t a fight, it was a ballet. If Nureyev were a fighter, he would do it this way.

He was handsome, sleek, swift as a cobra. He made everyone he fought look as if they were encased in wet concrete.

He fought 78 fights before he got a title shot. Today, they get title shots after 7, as did Leon Spinks, or after 23, as did Sugar Ray Leonard.

If you think Sugar Ray Leonard is great, you should have seen the real one. He fought for 25 years in three divisions, 209 fights, yet he didn’t have a mark on him when he quit. He looked like a ballroom dancer, which he was, or the stage dancer, which he tried to be. He could have been Gregory Hines if he had shown up at a stage door instead of a gym, but the public couldn’t accept him dancing around anything but Jake LaMotta.

They invented the phrase uncrowned champ for him. They also invented the designation pound for pound. Pound for pound--or inch for inch, or punch for punch, you name it--Sugar Ray Robinson might have been the best there ever was. Or will be. He lost only one of his first 137 fights, that to Jake LaMotta, whom he promptly beat three weeks later. Ultimately, he beat LaMotta four times, altogether, and knocked him out the last time in 13.

He had fuchsia Cadillacs, nightclubs, fur coats, beer distributorships. He put the word entourage on the sports page. He came into town like the circus. Wherever Sugar Ray went, his hairdresser, chef, manicurist, chauffeur, chorus line, court jesters and just plain moochers went, too. When he arrived in Paris once, someone said that the last time that many Americans arrived in a body in the City of Light, they were riding on tanks.

The fights were kind of a nuisance, a useless interruption of a triumphant tour in which every day was New Year’s Eve. Sugar Ray was not a drinker, he had too much respect for his body for that, but he never wanted to turn the lights out if a band was playing or a song was being sung or the dice were rattling.

He ended his career fighting--and losing to--guys named Joey Archer in Pittsburgh and Stan Harrington in Honolulu, guys who wouldn’t have known where Sugar Ray went or who was knocking them out five years before. But Sugar Ray was 44 years old and he couldn’t hear the music anymore when a bell rang.

But he was an American artifact. Like the Battle of Bull Run, Grant’s Tomb, Little Big Horn--or like Dempsey, Ruth, Jones and Tilden, any President or Henry Ford--he was part of our history.

And he should be living in a big house on a golf course, or a lagoon, and have his own boat or plane, and dine at the same table at the club every day he isn’t at his banker’s in New York or at a state dinner at the White House.

He isn’t. He doesn’t. Life is 15 rounds and the colored lights have all gone out for Sugar Ray. The music has stopped. The entourage has vanished. He’s down to an audience of one, but one he’s terribly lucky to have.

Sugar Ray has Alzheimer’s disease. This is life’s last little joke, the humiliating, degenerative disorder that turns the man back into the child. It turns the mind back, not the body. The body continues to go the other way, more rapidly than ever. It is the final indignity, a cruel closing of the curtain.

Sugar Ray is not destitute. In one way, he is the richest of men. He has Millie.

Millie is the beautiful ex-showgirl who married Sugar Ray 25 years ago, for better or worse. It was after the ball was over and Sugar was losing to people like Denny Moyer and Memo Ayon. Now, the title’s gone and the money’s gone, but Millie isn’t, which has to rank her, pound for pound, as one of the great wives, and women, of the 20th Century.

The Robinsons live modestly in the center of Los Angeles in a two-story home with Millie’s octogenarian uncle.

For a man who once had complete floors at the George Cinq in Paris and suites at Claridge’s, it is as melancholy as a chorus of “St. James Infirmary” on a horn coming across a lake late at night.

Millie thinks it is nobody’s business, but a friend of the Robinsons, Phil Rosenthal, has come up with what seems to me an acceptable way to help a man who belongs to America as much as any ex-President or politician or movie hero. Boxing, you see, does not take care of its own like other businesses. Someone has to.

Rosenthal discloses that he has a number of prints--fewer than 1,000--of an oil painting by Ernie Fuchs of Sugar Ray in the Carmen Basilio fight. His proposal is to sell each for $250, proceeds to go to Sugar Ray.

It’s hard to see anything wrong with that. There’s $6 million of Sugar Ray’s money floating out there some place. Sugar doesn’t know where it went. Sugar doesn’t know where yesterday went.

Under the circumstances, a dinner, a testimonial, would seem to be out of the question. If you want to order a print, the money should be sent to Rosenthal at Suite 809, 10433 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles 90024, not to me.

Millie will be miffed. She can take care of her husband, she will protest. Of course, she can. She has. Can’t we help? Doesn’t he belong to us, too? Doesn’t he belong to the ages? Anyone who saw him would have to agree.