Sweet Thunder
Also by Wil Haygood
In Black and White:
The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr.
Two on the River (photographs by Stan Grossfeld)
King of the Cats: The Life and Times of
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
The Haygoods of Columbus:
A Family Memoir
Watertown, NY, 1937: Sixteen-year-old Walker Smith Jr. so dazzled the audience that Jack Case, the legendary local sports editor (holding cigar) became an instant admirer. Case saw to it that Smith left town with a new name: Sugar Ray Robinson.
for Phil Bennett, Peter Guralnick, and Greg Moore—
cornermen supreme
contents
list of illustrations
Prologue: Round Midnight
1921–1942 Say Goodbye to Walker Smith Jr.
1943–1944 Sugar Ray’s Uniform
1945–1946 Esquire Men
A Lovely Setup for the Old Man
1947 Killer
1942–1951 An Opera in Six Brutal Acts
1951 Around (a Part of) the World in Fifty Days
1952 Dreams
1953–1954 The Very Thought of You Onstage
1954–1956 Greatness Again
1960–1962 Battling
1963–1966 Autumn Leaves
1967–1989 Saving All Those Walker Smith Juniors
Epilogue
acknowledgments
source notes
selected bibliography
notes
illustrations
Young Sugar Ray standing in boxing pose with reporters (COURTESY WATERTOWN DAILY TIMES)
Sugar Ray in uniform (COURTESY BOXING HALL OF FAME)
Langston Hughes (GETTY IMAGES)
Jimmy Doyle (REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION FROM THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
Robinson-LaMotta weigh-in (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
LaMotta knocking Robinson through the ropes (CORBIS)
Lena (PHOTOFEST)
Robinson-LaMotta 1951 (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Time cover (TIME INC.)
Robinson at a table in Paris with Georges Carpentier and others (COURTESY MEL DICK)
Robinson at Pompton Lakes pre-Turpin rematch, feet up (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Robinson, Edna Mae, Jeff Chandler, and Sammy Davis Jr. (COURTESY JESS RAND)
Robinson with poster of himself in tails (COURTESY MEL DICK)
Miles (GETTY IMAGES)
Robinson-Maxim (TIME/LIFE)
Robinson at the sink (GETTY IMAGES)
Robinson and Millie (COURTESY MEL DICK)
Robinson and polio kids (COURTESY THE WASHINGTON POST)
All his life the great prizefighter would stare with deep wonder and searching upon this constantly moving cavalcade. It was that world outside the ring that snared Sugar Ray Robinson, the world where beauty and grace held a potent sway. He leaned into Lena’s voice and studied Langston’s poems. He tried explaining to Miles that their respective artistries had much in common, believing that the trumpet and fighting gloves shared similar mysteries.
As the American calendar kept rolling over the emotional headlines of the forties and the dangerously quiet fifties, a part of the world was spinning in a singular rhythm all its own. From private home to nightclub, from lodge to auditorium, there was a gathering of caramelized and brown and black faces. Sepia dreams—lovely, spilling forth at night—were everywhere, thousands captured in their net. These dreams could not escape segregation, or the laws of the land. But still, art poured from their conditional existence, like music lyrics written on a windowpane.
That would be Billy Eckstine (“the sepia Sinatra,” they called him) sitting in the chair at Sugar Ray’s hair salon. The salon sat next to the prizefighter’s Harlem nightspot, called Sugar Ray’s. His name glowed in red neon cursive lettering atop the awning. The long mahogany bar hosted the famous—starlets, comics, jazzmen, politicians, crooners. The gangsters behaved themselves. And Sugar Ray loved every minute of it. Tapping his feet, fingering his money clip. Why, he loved this world so much there were times he wondered if it just might overtake his primary line of work. Which was delivering pain and causing blood to flow.
prologue
round midnight
HE IS SUCH A NOCTURNAL FIGURE. Rarely does he rush about—moving, instead, as if in some kind of ether. Even on those days when thousands upon thousands leave their Manhattan homes for Madison Square Garden to see him under the klieg lights or for Yankee Stadium to watch him beneath moonlight, the great Sugar Ray Robinson stirs gently. His work evenings begin around nine o’clock. By midnight he is finished with his work inside the ring, though sometimes, of course, it ends much sooner—a first- or second-round knockout. In Boston in 1950, at the end of the fifth round in a fight with Joe Rindone, Robinson turned to Nat Hentoff, a young reporter at ringside, and mentioned that he hoped the TV audience was enjoying the fight.
“This fight isn’t on TV,” Hentoff told Robinson.
“What?” Robinson snapped, disappointed.
“And so,” recalls Hentoff, “he went and knocked the guy out the next round.”
Time to stir.
Huge crowds gather to see him after the fights—after yet another great battle with Jake LaMotta, Carmen Basilio, Gene Fullmer. But he is known for lingering in the dressing room. He travels with a personal valet. Appearance is everything to him: His suits are hand-stitched on Broadway by tailor Sy Martin. (Sy does tailoring for Duke Ellington and a lot of Hollywood stars.) Finally, there he is, and the members of the crowd reach out to him—newsmen, autograph seekers, gangsters. Only after he has satisfied them is he free to take to the night, authoring a style—cosmopolitan, jazz-touched, elegant—unique to the midcentury fight game. In France they respect his power, but truly love his style.
Scores of admirers—many of them habitués of Broadway and Manhattan literary salons—will trek to his rural training camp at Greenwood Lake, New York. He often runs alone, mountains in the distance, a solitary figure sweeping across land once trod by the Iroquois. He looks good in the morning light. Vermeer would have loved him. His nightclub was on 124th Street in Manhattan. That boozy and golden Hollywood couple, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, would sit for hours sipping champagne, devouring heaps of collard greens. (In 1968 Burton starred in a movie, Candy, a sexual satire noted for nothing in cinema history save its eccentric cast: Burton, Marlon Brando, Walter Matthau, James Coburn, and a cameo by Robinson. Burton cast Robinson because he respected legends; Robinson did it for the money.)
Those who have watched him in the ring get as much pleasure, it seems, watching him outside of it—alighting from his flamingo-colored Cadillac down at the Manhattan pier, embarking for Europe on the Liberté ocean liner, smiling from the pages of Life magazine in white tie and tails. Because it is America, and he is a black man, and it is a time of fierce segregation and racial polarization, there are always two drama-laden ghosts—Jack Johnson and Joe Louis—looming up at him. The public acclaim for heavyweight champions Jack Johnson and Joe Louis had often been seen through the splintering and consuming twentieth-century prism of race, but it was not so with Robinson. He declined that war and enlisted in cultural enlightenment, laying claim to a different piece of cultural terrain. He sought to force a new sensibility in the way we view athletic accomplishment and society. He was the first black athlete to largely own his own fighting rights, and the first to challenge radio and TV station owners about financial receipts. Unlike Johnson and Louis, he negotiated his own independence, constantly battering back the belief that the athlete—especially the Negro athlete—was an uninformed machine. He simply wished the world to see him as larger than the contours of the ring. So while the champagne slid down his throat, he measured the barriers he’d slip through and p
lotted his entrée into high society.
He believed business acumen would make him whole. But there was something else—style. His name pops up on best-dressed lists; he is a pal to jazzmen—Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Nat King Cole, Billy Eckstine among them. In the autumn of 1952, he will abandon boxing and turn to the world of entertainment. He will headline his own stage show, traveling with the likes of Count Basie and Cootie Williams; Cootie is an old Ellington standby. Sugar Ray plays piano and drums, and practices his tap dancing until drenched in perspiration. Style is as much a mystery as the cosmos.
Sugar Ray Robinson was the first modern prizefighter to take culture—music and grace and dance—into the ring with him. He had convinced himself that style was as much a discipline as boxing. That he dominated both, for so long, causes the world to marvel. Before the headlines of Selma and Montgomery and Little Rock—he followed the Little Rock crisis that day in 1957, full of pain at reports of the little Negro children being verbally assaulted and pelted with rocks; he’d suffer a rare loss that very night—before all the marches, before it seemed as if a new America had just dropped from the sky right onto the old one’s front porch, there was another America and it swirled in its own lovely mist. And a good amount of that swirling could be seen in the long glass mirror of Sugar Ray Robinson’s nightclub. A jazz-age architect designed the place. Its red neon lettering out front allowed the name of the club—Sugar Ray’s—to fall, at night, right onto the hoods of the long automobiles. It was hard to imagine the proprietor did not plan it that way.
But stare into that mirror and there they are too—songstress Lena Horne, poet Langston Hughes, and trumpeter Miles Davis—habitués of the place. They were becoming seminal figures in their own right, and they swayed as a kind of cultural chorus of the 1940s and 1950s alongside Robinson. Their lives intersected; but more than that, they were Robinson allies, themselves in the vanguard of a certain kind of style. The singer, trumpeter, and poet were not unlike cultural attachés, swooning their music and prose out into the world with elegant defiance, commiserating or celebrating at one of Robinson’s dining tables inside his club. They all wished to push back the curtain onto mainstream America. Robinson long feared being trapped in the ring, being webbed in the American imagination merely as an athlete. He would tell acquaintances, at the height of his worldwide fistic accomplishments, that the sport actually bored him, that there were other venues to challenge his creative prowess. He marched and listened as a Renaissance man might. Art enveloped and seduced him. So, as we follow him in and out of the ring, in and out of his midnight sonatas, across America, to and from Europe, we will intermittently follow the poet, trumpeter, and songstress, watching the spells they weave, the battles they fight, against the backdrop of Sugar Ray Robinson’s times.
For so many years he has stood as the golden figurine of boxing. Newspapermen and promoters were bewildered by him, believing him uppity and arrogant. He simply would not bend or yield his stature. After leaving the ring, he refused to do boxing commentary, leaving many to wonder if he thought the sport foolish—or sacred. But his image glowed in the fantastical ruminations of children, and they scampered after him, truly feeling his generosity. His link to them was deep. Because this saga begins like that of so many who fight for food and glory—in the eyes of a desperate and hungry child.
Sitting in their church pews gave them time to ponder. They knew that one of the greatest battles they’d have to wage—plotting a way to beat the devil who worked hard to capture the attentions of many in their flock—was upon them. The streets of Manhattan and Harlem were shadowy and menacing; the Depression of the 1930s was unforgiving and could cause young minds to totter in misdirection. The city’s tabloids, playing up the morbid crime sagas, told the price of inattention to juvenile vices.
So the ministers and deacons of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church—with the important support of their wives—listened up when they heard of an unusual manner in which to fight back. This mix of Bibles and boxing made sense to them: It required energy to fight sin. They agreed to the creation of the Salem Crescent Athletic Club—a boxing team.
When young Walker Smith Jr., with his long arms and sweet smile, joined the crusade, he proceeded to deliver the church’s name and image into a different realm of appreciation. They found themselves saluted, admired, and envied for reasons other than the strictly biblical. Old has-been fighters slipped into the basement to watch the boy, their heads rolling like hurt plums. The boy was special and the ministers knew it. Told from the pulpit of his near-mythical exploits, which had been achieved in small towns up and down the Eastern seaboard, the congregation would utter the same word over and over: Amen. And then they would drop coins and small bills into a basket, so that the Walker Smith-led club might continue its crusade.
1921–1942
say goodbye to Walker Smith Jr.
THE CITY OF DETROIT was founded by French slaveholders. They suffered a political rebuke in 1837 when the Michigan legislature opted to join the United States. State officeholders then rose up and outlawed the so-called peculiar institution of slavery.
In the coming years, escaped slaves would rush into the city. Many were delivered by daring operatives of the Underground Railroad. Northern-based organizations, many on job recruiting missions, also sent representatives into the Deep South—preachers prominent among them—to urge the disenfranchised to come North. Negro newspapers displayed flashy advertisements—“The Flight out of Egypt” one slogan trumpeted—telling of jobs in factories and steel plants. Pullman porters slyly handed out leaflets on train platforms and inside rail stations, with curious passengers folding the material into their purses and wallets. A representative of a Detroit organization, preparing to go South on a recruiting mission, certainly felt the emotion in a letter from a semiliterate man who wished to escape Georgia: “I am Sick of the South and always has been, but the opertunity has just come our way so by God healp and you I will soon be out of the South. I was just reading in the morning Beaumont Enterprise Paper where thay Burn one of the Race to Stake for God sack please help to get me out of the South.”
In time, the flow of migration into Detroit seemed unstoppable. Germans were joined by Irish, who were joined by the French. Few, however, were as starved for social acceptance as the Negro. Between 1910 and 1930, the number of Negroes in Detroit swelled from 5,000 to 120,000. The population jump gave the impression that the metropolis was a kind of mecca. In addition to its progressive mindset, there was a constant motion and energy about 1920s Detroit. And Henry Ford’s mechanical machines played a huge role in the bustle.
Auto magnate Ford, who said his ideas often came to him while rocking in a rocking chair, had unveiled his Model T back in 1908. He constantly pondered ways to speed up production. He knew he had hit upon something with the idea of an assembly line: Workers placed at one end of the plant would pass an assembled chassis up the line; axles would be added, then wheels, then the body. In 1913 the process could be completed in twelve hours, thirty minutes. Ford wasn’t satisfied, though; the following year the time was down to ninety-six minutes. It was taxing work, but the jobs were coveted. The carmaker—himself of Irish immigrant stock—offered a forty-hour workweek at $5 a day. It was a handsome wage. And Negroes were hired in appreciable numbers at the Ford plant. Mindful of the social dynamics, Ford even employed a couple of Negro personnel officers. The legend of Henry Ford quickly grew; it could be heard in a 1920s ditty: “I’m goin’ to Detroit, get myself a good job,/Tried to stay around here with the starvation mob./I’m goin’ to get me a job, up there in Mr. Ford’s place,/Stop these eatless days from starin’ me in the face.”
Walker Smith Sr. was a farmer in rural Georgia. He toiled raising peanuts, corn, and of course cotton. He was small in stature—five feet seven—and possessed a powerful work ethic. He imagined, however, that the $10 a week he was averaging would keep him and his family swallowed in poverty forever. In 1920 relatives in Detroit boasted of “goo
d salaries” there, coaxing him to join the great exodus and come North. Smith announced to his family—wife, Leila, daughters, Marie and Evelyn—that he would venture there alone first, and if the city was to his liking, he’d send for them. There was immediate concern among family members: They’d be alone; the Southern rural darkness could be full of foreboding to a lone woman and her daughters. Smith tried to stifle his family’s concerns. He was determined to go.
Once in Detroit, it took Walker Smith little time to find employment. He found a job in construction; he began bringing home $60 a week—six times his income as a farmer! The Georgia immigrant could only smile at his good fortune. The clothing stores in downtown Detroit dazzled Smith; he purchased new clothing—tweeds, two-tone shoes, straw hats. Because of Prohibition, the city was dry. But Walker Smith knew just where to go to get himself a drink—the darkened speakeasies in the heavily populated Negro area of the city, along Hastings Street, an area known, coarsely, as Black Bottom, though its social milieu in fact included various ethnic groups in addition to numberless Negroes. (Rumrunners also slipped into the city from Canada and sold their home brew from glass jars. The rum-running was abetted by illegal gambling and prostitution, giving the city, come nightfall, a rather dangerous vibe. A feared police unit known as the Black Hand Squad patrolled the area.) Confronted with the teeming nights, Walker Smith rubbed his hands together and proceeded to shuck off his country upbringing: A construction worker by day, maybe, but by night a wiry dandy who had already made enough to purchase himself one of Henry Ford’s Model T’s. Walker Smith didn’t miss the Georgia fields at all.
Months after his arrival in Detroit, he had saved enough money to send for his family to join him. Leila Smith and her daughters boarded a train, and as it chugged forward—their own family’s flight out of Egypt—they bid rural Georgia farewell. Leila Smith was happy.