Some of Sweetest Days Came Late for Sugar Ray

He was one of the most amazing athletes of the century.

And like Muhammad Ali, it seemed for several years late in his career that the older he became, the better he was.

Early in his career he was considered history’s best welterweight, losing only once at 147 pounds between 1940 and 1951. He held the welterweight title from 1946 to ‘51, when he took Jake LaMotta’s middleweight crown.

Forty-one years ago tonight in Chicago, Sugar Ray Robinson, at 37, won the world middleweight championship an unprecedented fifth time, on a split decision over a craggy-faced, rock-hard champion named Carmen Basilio.

Robinson, like Ali, had exceptional athletic skills, a special sense of grace and balance. Unlike Ali, he had the strength to render an opponent unconscious with one punch from either hand.

Like Ali, Robinson seemed able to draw on deep reservoirs of courage and stamina, a trait that allowed him to be at his absolute best in his toughest battles.

How else to explain beating Basilio, an ex-Marine and an upstate New York onion farmer who, at 31, was a 2-1 favorite?

To make weight, Robinson went without food for 20 hours before weighing in at 159 3/4 on the morning of the fight. Basilio weighed 153.

It was a classic matchup: Basilio, the crude, plodding slugger who never backed up, and Robinson, the classic boxer, spearing the champion with unerring left jabs and combinations, keeping his distance.

In the early rounds, Robinson’s jabs first shut then blackened Basilio’s left eye.

Robinson, who had lost the title to Basilio the previous year, never reached such heights again. He lost his championship to Paul Pender in 1960, then began a long, steady slide into mediocrity, not retiring until 1965.

Wrote Jim Murray of those years: “It’s sad-- like watching Beethoven write beer commercials.”

Also on this date: In 1967, UCLA won its third NCAA basketball crown, beating Dayton, 79-64. . . . In 1972, the Bruins won their sixth consecutive NCAA title and eighth overall, 81-76, over Florida State. . . . In 1983, legendary UCLA and Los Angeles Rams quarterback Bob Waterfield died at 62. . . . In 1951, Eddie Collins, a lifetime .333 hitter and considered the best second baseman of the first half-century, died at 63.