He put the ‘sweet’ in the sweet science

In one of his fights with Jake LaMotta back in the 1940s, Sugar Ray Robinson did something uncharacteristic. First, he let LaMotta back him into the ropes. There, Robinson dropped one hand to his side and draped the other across the top strand and allowed LaMotta to throw punches at him without throwing anything back.

I saw this at Madison Square Garden, and although I had often seen Robinson fight, this was something new and very dangerous. He had always fought daringly but never stupidly. LaMotta was tough and brutal and the only fighter to have beaten Robinson. He was a true middleweight at 160 pounds. Robinson was a true welterweight at 147. You did not give away 13 pounds and let Jake LaMotta swing at you without at least trying to make him pay for it. But all Robinson did was make him miss. LaMotta swung and Robinson ducked and bobbed and weaved and slipped the punches without ever moving his hands. The crowd roared when they thought LaMotta had him in trouble -- mostly they disliked Robinson, who was arrogant and seemed disdainful of them and often stood in his corner between rounds instead of properly sitting down -- and they jeered at what they saw as his showboating. But finally the sheer effrontery of what he was doing got to them, and then the artistry of it, and they began to cheer and applaud. Then Robinson brought up his hands and fought his way back to the center of the ring and continued the fight.

Herb Boyd does not mention this incident in his sympathetic biography of Robinson (written with Robinson’s son, Ray II), but he captures other vagaries of this mercurial character who was, as the title says, pound for pound the best fighter of his, and maybe any other, time.

Boyd, author of “We Shall Overcome: A History of the Civil Rights Movement as It Happened,” is aware both of the brilliance in the art and the flaws in the character. He is particularly strong in placing the life in a social context. Robinson was born Walker Smith Jr. in 1921 in a part of Georgia that was “well-known for three things: cotton, the Ku Klux Klan and lynching.” To escape the last two, the Smiths, like many black families, moved north -- first to Detroit and then to New York. There was an increase in black consciousness and militancy up north, but the Smith family was not militant. Walker did his fighting in the ring, starting as an amateur. Because he did not have the required card certifying his amateur status, his trainer gave him a card belonging to a retired fighter, and Walker Smith became Ray Robinson. The “Sugar” came after people saw him fight.

Robinson had 85 amateur fights and won them all. He turned pro in 1940 and kept on winning. He fought often in the early 1940s, with 20 bouts in 1941 alone. Sometimes he fought twice in one week. But World War II had come and in 1943 he was drafted. Just before his unit was to be sent overseas, Robinson was taken, disoriented, to a hospital. He said he had tripped in the barracks and hit his head. There were rumors that he had faked the episode to avoid going overseas. Some sportswriters called him unpatriotic, a deserter, for leaving his company before it went into battle, but after several tests he was given an honorable discharge.

The gyms were soon full of talented fighters coming out of the war, battle-hardened, eager and hungry. Robinson beat them all. He was a boxer-puncher, deadly with both hands. He was so good that fighters in his weight class wisely avoided him. He had to go out of his division, giving away weight to find fights -- which was how he was beaten by LaMotta, who also had trouble finding fights in his own class. He beat LaMotta four times after that loss, knocking him out in their final encounter, possibly in exasperation at having had to deal with him yet again.

It took him six years to get a title shot. Boyd says that major promoters, such as Mike Jacobs, tried to placate Robinson by telling him he would make more money without the crown, because he would then get more fights. They also disliked negotiating with him. He was too difficult at the bargaining table. He had no manager; he made his own deals. To the white promoters, he came across as uppity. But there might have been another reason he couldn’t get a title bout. In those days, boxing was controlled by two gangsters, Frankie Carbo and Frankie “Blinky” Palermo. They decided who would fight whom, for how much and how the purse would be split. They had their own reasons for disliking Robinson -- he refused to be mobbed up.

But he wanted to be champion; he deserved to be champion; and he finally went for help to Walter Winchell, a powerful columnist with close ties to the gangster world. Whatever Robinson had to do is not a matter of record, but eventually not just one but two title bouts were arranged. He beat Tommy Bell for the welterweight title in 1946 and Jake LaMotta for the middleweight crown five years later. He was finally where he belonged: at the top.

By that time, his private life had also soared. He was married to Edna Mae Holly, a dancer at the Cotton Club. She was almost as pretty as he was. He bought property in Harlem and opened several stores, and a bar on Seventh Avenue called Sugar Ray’s. There were always crowds outside waiting to get in. He bought a flamingo-pink Cadillac and drove it around Harlem with the top down, picking up women. He was a serial philanderer. He was also a wife beater, and the marriage began to fray.

Robinson boxed from 1940 to 1965. Out of 202 fights, he had 175 victories and 19 defeats. (It’s hard to imagine a current fighter with even half that number of bouts.) Six of the defeats came in the last two years, when he was over the hill, fighting ham-and-eggers who earlier could not have carried his gloves. He was a sad memory of what he had been, but by then he needed the money. Like too many fighters, he’d made a lot and blown even more; the stores, the bar, the Cadillac were gone. Edna Mae divorced him. Investments soured. He retired and moved to Los Angeles, where he founded the Ray Robinson Youth Foundation. It provides recreational activities for inner-city kids. (Boyd notes that the foundation “sponsors no boxing programs.”) There was talk of a movie career, which never took off.

The last time I saw Robinson fight was in 1952, for the light heavyweight (175 pounds) title against Joey Maxim; he was still giving away weight. The bout was held on a stifling summer night at Yankee Stadium (not Madison Square Garden, as Boyd has it), so hot under the lights that the referee had to be replaced during the fight. Maxim was a classic New Orleans-trained fighter, a clever boxer with no punch. Robinson easily dominated him. And then the heat got to him. The fight was to go 15 rounds. By the 12th, a dehydrated Robinson (he had refused to drink water between rounds) had begun to wobble around the ring. He threw a wild punch and fell to the floor. It was nothing you wanted to see. At the end of the 13th round, he had to be dragged to his corner. He failed to come out for the 14th. It was the first and last time he was ever stopped.

He died at age 67. He had diabetes, hypertension, arteriosclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease. More than 2,000 mourners attended the memorial service in Los Angeles. The Rev. Jesse Jackson delivered the eulogy. He called Robinson “part of the American quilt.... He was born on the bottom, but he left on the top.” Joe Louis called him “the greatest fighter ever to step into the ring.” But the ring was where the beauty and courage were, not in the other parts of his life. Boyd, at the end of his book, confesses an inability “to get to the man beyond the smoky arenas and shadowy dressing rooms. Paradoxical? Bipolar? Dual personalities? A dissembler? ... Sugar remains a cipher.”

Yet to watch him fight was to watch an artist: secure in his craft, bold in his decisions, always taking chances, often on the cusp of disaster. He fought exposed, which was one of the things that made him so exciting and so memorable. And how many anywhere, in whatever they do, can claim to be the best -- pound for pound? *