Sweet Thunder Page 15

  By now the young musician was residing in Los Angeles, blowing his trumpet up and down fabled Central Avenue, playing with Lucky Thompson’s band. “They were some country motherfuckers,” he would conclude about the blacks who caught the band’s Los Angeles performances, “but they used to like the music we played because they could dance to it.” Miles Davis thought Los Angeles was too slow; he missed the frenetic pace of Manhattan. He had Bird to keep him company. Bird was shooting heroin and gulping huge quantities of whiskey, in between the brilliant playing. When Davis began making his way back East, he was floored by some sweet news: “Esquire magazine had voted me its New Star award for trumpet, I think because of my playing with Bird and B’s [Billy Eckstine’s] band.”

  The starlet, the poet, and the trumpeter were forcing cracks in the world around them—just like the club-owning pugilist.

  There were more than a few boxing writers who referred to Tommy Bell as “one of the great welterweights” of the early 1940s. In 1943 he had registered ten knockouts in the ring; a year later eight opponents suffered the same fate. It is—with rare exceptions—the poor man who fights and the well-to-do man who watches from ringside. Tommy Bell’s background was a symphony of hard labor, more Woody Guthrie than jumpy-sweet Charlie Parker. In his youth Bell wound up in one of those FDR-inspired Civilian Conservation Corps camps in Georgia. Working in the outdoors, sleeping in barracks. He sometimes ran the barracks card games, which could turn into emotionally charged and rowdy affairs. There were fights over winnings. One night he saw a fellow camper jumped by other campers while he was sleeping. With his winnings one night—figuring he’d be jumped too—Bell snuck off toward the woods to sleep. Then he left the camp altogether. He returned to the North, where he worked at Republic Steel, shoveling ore. He worked inside a foundry, putting clamps on molds. He turned to boxing, picking up matches where he could. Once a fight manager stole his winnings and left him stranded.

  The day before his bout with Robinson, Tommy Bell was spotted in New York’s Central Park, getting in some light work. Passersby stared and gawked; wisps of frost floated from his mouth.

  Tommy Bell always looked forward to that moment before the start of any fight when the lights were turned off and “The Star-Spangled Banner” played. He’d move his head just a little, left to right, and he’d stand there, thinking, becoming emotional. He was alone, but he wasn’t sleeping in the woods anymore. He actually felt himself to be a lucky man, who made his living in a dangerous avocation.

  One of the Manhattan cartoonists weighed in on the looming fight: “Tommy Bell’s Right Threatens Ray’s Title Dreams!!”

  More than fifteen thousand fight fans hustled into Madison Square Garden on the evening of December 20, 1946. The weather outside was awful, soggy snow turning to rain, and yet they kept coming. Sportsmen in long wool coats and fedoras; women fussing with their hands to clear snowflakes from their collars. Promoter Mike Jacobs—now ill, having suffered a brain hemorrhage—shouldn’t have worried: The gate receipts would exceed a healthy $82,000. Robinson was the sentimental favorite. A good many in the crowd had followed him since his local Golden Gloves days. There was also another reason for the excitement he elicited: The mighty flame of Joe Louis was flickering. He had fought just two times that year. His followers were reduced to figures not unlike subjects worrying after their king. But now another flame was flickering, and they decided to cross the valley where the flame of Robinson had begun to shoot upward, claiming their attention.

  As the musical strains of the national anthem faded, photographers jostled for position, reporters flipped open notebooks, radio announcers checked their microphones. Among the throng in attendance—turning to the music of their names being yelled and the popping camera flashes, squinting and scanning the Garden, which on so many nights had been their Garden—were Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, and Joe Louis.

  George Gainford told his fighter to beware of Bell’s right. In his corner, Bell was being reminded of Robinson’s speed.

  The vicious punch—described as “a sizzling left” delivered “like a cobra striking”—arrived in the second round, not from Robinson but from Tommy Bell, and the gasps heard throughout the arena seemed to portend an unexpected struggle for Robinson. He tumbled to the canvas with referee Eddie Joseph circling—and the muscled Bell sneering. “My face was on the floor before my ass was,” Robinson would remember. James Dawson, the New York Times writer, sensed danger for Robinson: “The Harlemite was hurt by the blow,” he knew. The champs—Louis, Tunney, and Dempsey—all made animated movements in their seats as Robinson struggled on the canvas. He willed himself up from a seven-count knockdown. Bell hardly let up, constantly pummeling Robinson in his midsection and the jaw. Toward the last seconds of the fifth round, Bell landed another vicious right to Robinson’s jaw, which, the Times man noted, “staggered Robinson.” Bell—who appeared to be in better shape than his opponent—meant to tire Robinson quickly. Leading up to the fight, Tommy Bell had had no distractions; there had been no nightclub opening to worry about; no worries about selecting a particular type of wood for a bar; no pondering over the size of a mirror to stretch along the wall behind it. Gainford’s cries from the corner seemed to meld with all the other cascading voices near ringside. And then it happened—a Robinson left, followed by a Robinson right; a wobbly Bell suddenly wide-eyed; the Robinson followers twisting in their seats, sensing something; Gainford leaning over the ropes. If there had been a feeling, beyond the sixth round, that Robinson was in an uphill battle, by the ninth, he had clearly turned it around. In the tenth, Bell went down for an eight count. And in the eleventh came the feared right-left Robinson combination, an exchange that clearly hurt Bell and seemed to starkly alter the momentum. Robinson was relentless in rounds thirteen through fifteen, and when the bell finally rang—the crowd hissing and rocking in anticipation of the final decision—Robinson leaned into Gainford, his own voice filled with emotion, and told him he had won; he just knew he had won; the crown was his. Seconds later, when the official announcement poured from the center of the ring, Robinson was declared the victor on points. But there was some booing from those who believed the Ohioan Bell deserved better. “For Bell made a fight of it all the way,” as Dawson of the Times would write. But the pandemonium began to rain down, as the decision confirmed what so many had for so long predicted: Walker Smith Jr., Sugar Ray Robinson, was a champion fighter; his moment of glory had long been inevitable; now it was upon them, having arrived on a cold December night in 1946, and it sent the reporters fleeing for the phone booths and back to their offices, just as they had done on those history-making nights of Louis, Tunney, and Dempsey.

  Gainford turned on his heel, looked out over the crowd, and figured it best to get his newly crowned champion away from the throngs of people.

  “Clear that aisle,” he snapped, leading Sugar Ray through the outstretched hands and the thunderous noise and the flashing camera bulbs—a New York policeman parting the way for them—to the dressing room. Strangers pushed close enough to catch the whites of Robinson’s eyes, but Gainford kept moving forward with the authority of a Roman general, as the vanquished Tommy Bell receded into the shadows. It was a telling scene, however, and it had a little of the character of a drama acted in pantomime. Robinson and Gainford’s cool disposition gave the moment a look of inevitability, suggesting that the slow start and the fierce battling in the late rounds were simply Robinson’s assertion that a champion must find ways to come back; that champions are defined by artistry—and guts. It was as if Robinson had merely dropped by the Garden to pick up something that had been rightfully his for years now; something he was forced to wait to claim because of the racial dramas and politics of his sport. The next day the newly crowned champ was game enough to pose sitting down and holding aloft a copy of the New York Daily News with the resounding headline: ROBINSON OUTPOINTS BELL. He was dressed in silk, his face looked baby-smooth despite a noticeable cut above the left eye, and his hai
r gleamed in waves.

  The respected New York sportswriter Dan Burley was quick to recall that his own earlier predictions had come true on the wintry night before: “From the beginning, way back in the days when nobody actually knew the kid was a potential all-time great, this column was plugging for Ray Robinson,” he wrote. He went on to say of Robinson: “He’ll reign the welterweight king as long as he wants to, or until he can get a middleweight title match with Tony Zale, which he asked for back in 1941 when Cochrane started running out on him.”

  Yes, the entire night had merely been a delivery on all those long-ago expectations, held by so many, that he’d be champ someday. They had gotten accustomed to his lightning punches—the hook that seemed to arrive so powerfully that it was like something crashing through a locked door. They had gotten used to the way he would strut away from his opponent after a bout-shifting left-right combination that delivered his opponent to the mat. It was a matador’s strut—his back arched with ramrod discipline, hands at his side—as he shifted his gaze to the fans, and then back to his prostrate opponent and finally into the glittering light of the Speed Graphic flashbulbs. The men who wrote about the sport in respected publications had imagined this moment. It was back in June 1942 that Nat Fleischer had put Robinson on the cover of Ring magazine. The issue boasted a headline—“Ray Robinson—Colored Welterweight Champion of the World”—that was more a benediction than reality, given that Robinson’s crowning was four years away. In 1942 Robinson had not quite been two years removed from amateur status. But Fleischer was such a known authority on the sport that his opinion carried a powerful cachet. Fleischer did, however, express one concern about Robinson, and it came to him after witnessing Robinson’s March 20, 1942, bout against Norman Rubio: “The stringy colored sensation showed in his fight with Rubio, a tough, two-fisted clouter, that he possesses everything, even an abundance of cockiness that some day is likely to bring deep regret to him and his followers.”

  Fleischer’s sentiment was articulated well enough, but it was given in an old-fashioned key that was not in Robinson’s register. His cockiness was merely another manifestation of artistry. Charlie Parker skipped notes and found his own rhythm in compositions, bending the jazz to his tone. (“We heard him and knew the music had to go his way,” Dizzy Gillespie said of Parker, adding, “He was the other half of my heartbeat.”) The Charlie Parker fans out there, in the cities—in the gallery—relished something new: that cockiness, that break from tradition. Style—Sugar Ray Robinson in his one-button-roll suit, waving his felt fedora, smiling beautifully and softly following another ring victory—spun cockiness in a different direction. By the time he had evolved that signature style of the Esquire man with a touch of Harlem, his followers and admirers simply allowed themselves to be awed. He had given them echoes of jazz from within the twenty-four-foot-square ring, which comprised enough space for a tight big band—or a soloist. He spoiled them to the point where they expected nothing less from him.

  The timing of Sugar Ray Robinson’s coronation dovetailed so perfectly with his nightclub dream that it smacked of a Hollywood movie—the crown, then the champ’s name in neon lights on 124th and Seventh.

  Less than a week after his championship bout, the first ads heralding Robinson’s club began to appear. He had ventured outside with his club’s work crew one evening, and they treated him to a moment that made him giddy when they flicked the lights on outside. The red cursive lettering above the awning, cast against the darkness, gave it a theatrical glow: Sugar Ray’s.

  They came on opening night, and they seemed to be spellbound. It was the décor, and the music, and the champ himself, smiling and smiling (LaMotta or Jackie Wilson or Sammy Angott—no one could diminish the wattage of that smile), and the twinkling of champagne glasses, and the long mirror behind the long bar. Vertner Tandy had built the interior of the club to resemble the first-class quarters of the Twentieth Century Limited express train. Shortly after its opening, a Harlem publication expressed ecstasy over the club: “Nothing like it in town, in fact, not in the country …” Robinson meant to be a presence on the premises, and loved slipping in—those words champ champ champ floating around him like feathers—then gliding behind the bar, reaching for a bottle, taking an order. One reviewer talked about “Sugar Ray Robinson’s cleverly designed bar … doing about the best business in town.” It went on: “Maybe because Sugar himself gets behind the bar and mixes the drinks with his own famous hands.” There were other nearby nightclubs to compete against—the Shangri-La, Small’s Paradise, Frank’s, Joe Louis’s and Henry Armstrong’s places among them—but Robinson’s establishment had something the other establishments didn’t have: “They didn’t have Sugar Ray,” says Charlie Rangel.

  Because of his presence, Sugar Ray’s club would become, through the years, a touchstone, a place for downtown sophisticates and European tourists alike; a spot for Harlem sportsmen and gorgeous women and jazz musicians. (Robinson was often seen in the company of Billy Eckstine and his wife, June, another dazzling beauty.)

  If jazzmen were, through their extraordinary music, confounding their listeners—and Sugar Ray was giving his admirers the type of boxing they’d never seen before—it is little wonder the landscape of the fighter and the jazz players intersected. “He was a wonderful person for them to know,” Robert Royal says of the jazzmen who roamed in and out of Sugar Ray’s club. “He was a gentleman.”

  Robinson had handpicked his nightclub staff. Mike Hedley took the position of day manager. Hedley possessed some charming qualities in Sugar Ray’s mind: He was a bandleader, and also a singer with a lovely falsetto. Gus Levine was Robinson’s host—the gentleman who’d meet you at the door, who’d tell you if the owner himself was on the premises if you hadn’t spotted him and you just needed to know. Gus also happened to be one of Sugar Ray’s sparring partners.

  It didn’t take Robinson’s club long to acquire a certain lure in Manhattan circles—not unlike Jock’s, Toots Shor’s, El Morocco, or the Stork Club. His was certainly a club for the nobility, not for the peasantry. On his fight nights in succeeding months and years, his admirers would celebrate his victories by hustling over to his club, where Mike Hedley and Gus Levine were waiting to grin them right through the doorway. During out-of-town bouts, Robinson, of course, couldn’t be there, but they didn’t seem to mind. They converged on the club anyway. The revelers were the anonymous souls of Harlem: transplanted Southerners, unknown musicians, Pullman porters as far away from the train whistle as they’d like to be; hospital workers, subway workers, factory workers. Now and then a crowd of them would gather outside the club to pose, men in fedoras and long wool coats with happy smiles on their faces, the cacophony of worship in the air. “You’d ask yourself after a fight, “Where was Sugar Ray?” “remembers Arthur Barnes. “And you’d know he was going to his bar. And you’d take your girl.” And he adds: “Sugar Ray’s place didn’t get the intellectuals. Sugar got the ‘players.’ They would go there looking for the good times.”

  The truth of the matter was that every big city where blacks had settled after the Great Migration of the 1920s would come to have one: a Negro nightclub on the Negro side of town. In Cleveland it was Gleason’s; in Atlantic City it was the Harlem Club; in Columbus, Ohio, it was the Trocadero. They dotted the country from coast to coast, modest in size but often host to outsized plots, political ruminations, dramas, and dreams. They were like little Negro-populated movie sets, dark and glittery and full of perfumed women and men flashing bills; others whispering in corners beneath the spilling low-wattage lightbulbs; a half dozen or more souls seated at the bar and alternately nodding to the music and peering over their shoulder to catch the passing image in the mirror; saucy barmaids and gin-and-tonics coming right up; that bell ringing only the cash register at the end of the bar; that stack of flyers by the door just the latest advertisement and plea for participation in the next antidiscrimination rally; and the knot of whites from the brave hipster set across
town, always catered to with overdone kindness so they’d be sure to come back, to spread the word about the tasty chicken and lima beans and peach cobbler. For a few hours each day, the Negro nightclub was a place free from the turmoil of the outside world; its denizens breathed of freedom and the lush life. And on those Gillette Blue Blade fight nights, the clubs jumped with a special kick.

  To own a club like that, a club that hummed, with an allure that spread beyond the local zip code, was like magic.

  As Joe Louis had stood in the glow of admiration, now stood Sugar Ray.

  Sugar Ray Robinson had rushed with unstoppable force—even if in fits and starts—toward his own glory. He never doubted it would come. His talents and gifts were now undeniable. His stylized sense of self and business acumen—for now at least—mocked both Jack Johnson and Joe Louis. White sportswriters looked upon him with a squint on their face: They had never seen anything like him. Jack Johnson had toyed with sportswriters; Joe Louis could never find the right words for them. Robinson displayed a cocky flourish with artistry in the ring, but outside of it, he offered a hypnotic humility. He had chosen economic justice—which he construed as financial independence—over the cry for social justice. Civil rights organizations pleaded with him to join their cause in public. Instead, he donated money and welcomed them into his nightclub, where they might lull their heartache over food and drink.

  The turn of events—unable to get championship fights for so long, but now the undisputed champion, now the fighter with a swanky nightclub—left Robinson exultant: “And now the lights were flashing on Seventh Avenue, my name in lights.”

  He moved through Manhattan like a man of destiny. The Negro baseball players, the actors and actresses in the barely respected but pride-swelling Negro cinema, the poets and writers—they all recognized him and waved in his direction.