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  The young fighter had overtaken his idol. The New York Herald Tribune headline—ROBINSON OUTPOINTS ARMSTRONG IN GARDEN BOUT BEFORE 15,371—was far kinder than the Amsterdam News headline: OLD MASTER TAKES BEATIN’ LIKE MASTER.

  In his dressing room, Henry Armstrong, surrounded by admirers and furiously scribbling reporters, announced—yet again—his retirement. “I’m through,” he said, all the blood wiped from his swollen lips. He said he might try managing fighters himself. He said it all forlornly. He tried, in fits and starts, to explain what had happened this night, to utter words about Robinson’s speed, hardly a ring secret. “I know it looked bad,” he said. “It’s my style of fighting. If Robinson had come in, instead of staying away, it would have been different.” No one believed him, though no one challenged him on such a melancholy evening.

  In their dressing room, Sugar Ray Robinson and George Gainford took the position of paying nothing but full respect to Armstrong. Robinson said the pugilist was “the greatest I ever fought.” He added, not quite convincingly: “I never could get him in trouble.” Both fighter and manager were cautious in what they said, lest they tip someone off, such as the New York State Athletic Commission, as to what Robinson’s intentions had been all along. “At times Ray, failing to take advantage of openings that were obvious to the spectators in the second shelf, appeared particularly careful of Henry’s welfare,” said the AP report, which landed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch—giving Armstrong’s family and friends a chance to read about what had happened.

  With a day behind them to reflect on what they had witnessed, the New York sports columnists began to weigh in, analyzing the event from a different perspective than the beat reporters. And what they produced while bent over their manual typewriters was pointed—and cutting. “The New York press was pretty bitter about the Ray Robinson–Henry Armstrong fight,” the esteemed Stanley Woodward of the Herald Tribune offered after taking the measure of his colleagues. According to Joe Williams, of the New York World-Telegram: “It was highway robbery at $16.50.” In something of a backhanded compliment that might have come from an old showman himself, Woodward was more charitable toward Robinson and the fight: “The boxing clients for years have spent their money on baloney … They are experienced in the market. They do not need protection.”

  Robinson ignored the words hurled by the columnists. Sugar Ray Robinson never courted reporters—not in the way Jack Johnson or Jack Dempsey had courted them, not inviting them into his home or sharing intimate details. Reporters and columnists made him wary. He questioned the company (Frankie Carbo) they were sometimes seen around. Either they didn’t take him seriously enough, dismissing all of his complaints about having to wait and wait for a championship bout, or they took him too seriously: For what was the harm in going easy on an aging champion like Henry Armstrong in the ring! (Robinson’s relationship with the press was so testy that he would later hire PR agents to serve as intermediaries between him and reporters, ostensibly to foster better relations. But he used the third parties to widen his distance from the Fourth Estate, leaving them to label him, forevermore, eccentric and uncooperative.)

  “I couldn’t hurt an old man,” Sugar Ray would reflect years later about the bout, “but I couldn’t go through the motions either. I’d hit him enough to get him in a little trouble, but whenever I felt him sagging, I’d clinch and hold him up. I didn’t want him to be embarrassed by a knockdown.”

  It took the old fighter five months to break his retirement vow. He was back in January—the George Raft exhibition gig had ended—fighting out West again, in Portland, Oregon. Sometimes he averaged two fights per month. His opponents were unknowns. He was also, in a manner, fighting for his country: Now there were personal tax bills; he owed Uncle Sam thousands. So he fought all across the country through 1944, taking care of his debts. The last bout of his great and wondrous career took place on Valentine’s Day, 1945, against someone name Chester Slider. The bell rang in a ring in Oakland, California. After a full ten rounds, Slider had a victory notch over a former triple-crown champion. “The old speed was gone,” Armstrong had finally, at long last, come to realize.

  He made pipe-dream investments—motion pictures and restaurants. He never saw a dime’s worth of profit from any of his ventures. His Manhattan nightspot didn’t last long; many simply preferred Sugar Ray’s and the other livelier places.

  He tried managing, but too often there were loud arguments with the fathers of young fighters. They wondered if he knew what he was doing. He soon abandoned the manager’s dream and headed back to California.

  His thirst for beer turned to whiskey, which he drank and drank. In January 1949 he was tossed into the drunk tank in Los Angeles. He had been hanging out on Central Avenue, that hepcat stretch of the city, roaming in and out of the bars. He climbed behind the wheel of his yellow convertible and proceeded to crash it into a lamppost. He yelled to authorities that he was Henry Armstrong; reeking of alcohol, he reminded them of his fame and glory. They slapped on the cuffs and drove him off to jail. The story began making the rounds that Henry Armstrong was locked up. “You’re letting a million boys down,” the judge told him, her voice full of shame for Henry. He got out and walked the city, stared at like a bum, a Negro bum. He didn’t drown in the Mississippi River, but Rat was drowning on the streets of Los Angeles.

  He started reading the Bible, poring over its pages, reciting certain passages out loud. Unlike when he’d been a hungry youth at the dinner table back in Mississippi, evangelism now appealed to him. Former drinking buddies eyed him suspiciously; he didn’t care, and when a minister invited him to say a few words in his pulpit, his new career began to unfold. He spoke to men on the street, his Bible in the fold of his muscular arm. He spoke to hoboes, telling them, with a glint in his eye, of his own railroad journeys.

  He started a youth foundation in California. He got Sugar Ray Robinson, Barney Ross, and other notables to serve on its advisory board. (Robinson would long remember the joy it gave Henry to work with kids.) Henry Armstrong seemed happier than ever. The years moved on, but by the 1970s he had relocated back to St. Louis. He worked with pride at the Herbert Hoover Boys Club (Hoover being one of the heroes of the long-ago Mississippi floods) for more than fifteen years. “He had films of his fights,” an executive director of the Boys Club would remember of Armstrong’s work. “He’d get a bunch of kids up in one of the conference rooms and he’d give them a commentary on his fight films. The kids just loved it. He shared his moments. He shared his life.” He ate at the same Burger Chef every day for lunch. He didn’t at all mind playing checkers with the kids. He carried a briefcase around town. And he much enjoyed being known as a minister. As he walked home, men would see him and point him out to their sons, telling them about the great fighter, Henry Armstrong, and his ring accomplishments. Inner-city St. Louis was tough at the time, and Armstrong’s eyes were hardly what they once were. Two punks mugged him in 1978, leveling him with vicious blows. “To think that two guys would do this to me,” he said. “In my prime, I would have whipped both of them.”

  His third wife convinced him in 1982 to leave St. Louis and return to Los Angeles. It happened abruptly, and family members were distraught, but Henry loved his wife. “He had a lot of fantastic friends here,” his daughter Edna would lament about her father’s hometown. Months would go by and family members would not hear from him. They blamed his wife. The great fighter Archie Moore—like Armstrong, born in Mississippi but calling St. Louis home—was asked by the family to look in on Henry. Moore reported back to Henry’s family that Armstrong looked wan and seemed unhappy.

  Every now and then he ventured out in Los Angeles, wearing a suit and straw hat and leaning on a cane. He’d take in some of the pro fights. Mike Tyson pulled up a chair and took a photo with him while on a visit to LA. He was in and out of hospitals in the last months of his life. He suffered from malnutrition and anemia; his mind was slipping, along with his sight. He died October 22, 1988, in
Los Angeles. October was always one of those California months when the winds hummed down off the Santa Ana Mountains, passing over the masses of Los Angeles County residents—the well-heeled, the scuffling hoboes—and right out into the ocean. It was always a fine month for dreaming.

  Jim Murray, a Los Angeles Times columnist, was one of the few writers still around who had seen Armstrong in the ring: It was back in 1944 and he had caught Henry at the end in two Los Angeles bouts only ten days apart. “He’d charge a rhinoceros,” Murray would write a day after his death. “He made his fight like a guy running for a bus. He walked through people like turnstiles.” It was a lovely column, full of boxing knowledge and tenderness. “He got the position in history no man should get,” added Murray, “the part of the bill where they put bird calls—between the eras of Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson.”

  In those wondrous days when he first drove his shining Cadillac around 1940s Manhattan, you’d often see Sugar Ray pull over and stop upon spotting Henry Armstrong, climbing out of his car to chat. There they stood, two proud pugilists, idling, catching up on old times, which were still new times for Sugar Ray.

  It was there, hovering, like something unfathomable. Hardly anyone wished to talk about it; the possibility was kept out of sight like an old yellowing newspaper clipping, one that proved it had happened before. Sure as water rushing over Niagara Falls, some night in yet another arena it would happen again, and there would be those redundant gasps of horror and worry. There were always photos in the aftermath, showing the fighter in earlier times looking so lively and prepared. Tousle-haired Jimmy Doyle, grinning to beat the world. Hell if he’d turn down an eighteen-grand payday. No sir, not in hurting 1947 America. In 1947—never mind Sugar Ray’s reputation: the canonlike kick to his punch, already two victories against fearsome Jake LaMotta—that’s enough dough to buy a home, which is just what the grinning fighter aimed to do. Later, some of the ones who were there will rewind their minds: If only he’d ducked that punch, or that whistling bolo; yes, the bolo, because that thing looked as if it landed right on the skull. But that was wishful thinking: You never see the fateful punch coming.

  Forever after, the two—the killer and the killed—are intertwined and linked. Not unlike the great couplings from the world of entertainment: Astaire and Rogers. Burns and Allen.

  Robinson and Doyle.

  1947

  killer

  WHEN SUGAR RAY ROBINSON’S TRAVELING ASSEMBLAGE arrived in Cleveland, ten days before the scheduled title bout, it was hot and sunny. He was a little miffed because not all of his luggage had arrived on time. He and his willowy wife Edna Mae—she still had her dancer’s body—and his manager, George Gainford, took time out to visit some of their familiar haunts in the downtown area. They had friends on the East Side of the city, where so many of the black citizens resided. Fighters led nomadic lives; cities blurred, save for the faces of old friends.

  The punch that Jimmy Doyle never saw coming. The punch that would never be forgotten.

  Robinson had long conducted himself with the aura of a champion—making suggestions to those around him; challenging himself with his workout regimen; appearing unfazed by the flashbulbs going off around him. Not so George Gainford. Just months earlier George Gainford had been that anonymous Negro seen at the corner drugstore; looked at—and straight through, as if he were not even visible—inside yet another hotel lobby; passed by on the street without comment or nod. Now he was a fight manager who managed a world champion. Now newspapermen were sidling up to him for quotes and scraps of information about his fighter, Robinson. They’d ask him about the welterweight division, about the special gifts of other fighters. Now George Gainford had currency and armor. And when looking into the eyes of fight promoters, he was suddenly more determined. He could see a mighty bright future ahead. All these years rubbing down the shoulders and arms and back and fists of his fighter, Sugar Ray, and whispering instructions in his ears, over and over. He was the giant Negro in a white T-shirt in the dressing room with ointment on his fingertips.

  As soon as they arrived in Cleveland, Sugar Ray and Gainford scheduled a private meeting with fight promoter Larry Atkins. They wanted to talk to him about proceeds from the nationwide radio broadcast of the fight. Sugar Ray and Gainford both liked the feel of cash and knew of too many fighters not quick enough of mind to reap full revenue benefits from their fights.

  Whatever it is that fight promoters do in their spare time—scout new venues, slide their palms across the tops of new automobiles as they glisten on lots, sweat about money lost in recent contests, hum along to old jazz standards—they most assuredly dream. Larry Atkins was a dreamer. And for years he had dreamed of holding a title bout in his native Cleveland. By the time the news began racing around Cleveland, up and down Euclid Avenue, past the fight arena itself, out to Shaker Heights where the swells lived, then back to the East Side and past the barbecue joints and dilapidated homes and exhausted day workers, and over the phone wires, and into the shoeshine parlors and onto the lips of the shoeshine men themselves—before the moon began rolling across the darkened Cuyahoga River and the barstools were being claimed in the downtown drinking establishments—he was awash in pure joy.

  His dream had come true.

  The fight game in twentieth-century America required a huge stage, which is why so many championship fights took place in Manhattan, at Madison Square Garden. The Garden—like the Roman Colosseum–inspired Yankee Stadium, which lay far across the trees and rooftops of the city—was a perfect venue. It certainly helped—indeed it meant everything—that Manhattan had the kind of cast to augment the proceedings: high rollers, jaunty newspapermen, powerful fight promoters, entertainers, gangsters, showgirls. In Manhattan, even the not-so-old lions, Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney, could still be seen grinning in restaurants. And up in Harlem, around 135th Street, you could sometimes get a peek at the Brown Bomber himself, Joe Louis, in the flesh. As a fighter, he was in decline in 1947. But the legend, the cocoa-colored warmth and hugeness of it, was still something to behold.

  So when a championship fight found a home in another city, locals had a cause for celebration. It mostly happened because of the back-slapping and hustle and grit and wizardry on the part of that host city’s best-known promoter, whoever it happened to be. In some cases, though, it was due to the eagerness and gullibility of the town itself: On July 4, 1923, Dempsey fought a championship bout in obscure Shelby, Montana, against Tommy Gibbons. Dempsey’s manager, Jack “Doc” Kearns, sweet-talked the Shelby elite (cattlemen, bankers) into forking over a $300,000 advance to Dempsey. Dempsey won, but the crowd was smaller than expected and the town nearly went broke, angering many. Dempsey and company had to escape Shelby in a hurry by train.

  It was first announced in May 1947 that Sugar Ray Robinson would defend his recently won welterweight title, and do so in Cleveland. That in itself was news: There hadn’t been a championship bout in Cleveland in sixteen years, since 1931 when the German Max Schmeling knocked out Young Stribling, a handsome Georgia country boy who was as beloved by rural fight fans as he was by the Ku Klux Klan. This, then—the return of a title bout to Cleveland—was a wondrous moment for Larry Atkins.

  Atkins was a hometown promoter. Born in 1902, he had grown into a man with a huge lived-in face and deep-socketed eyes. He bore a resemblance to the comedian Jack Benny. Law school had bored Atkins, but not the fight game, nor the slapstick quality of wrestling, which he had promoted during the Depression after venturing to St. Louis.

  Atkins had begun hitching himself to boxing promoters in the early 1920s. Mostly, he did publicity work, elbowing his way into radio offices and newsrooms, reminiscing and jawboning into the wee hours with anybody willing to listen to him hold forth about his fighter. After a stint in Chicago—a rollicking and fight-crazy city—he got his dream job: doing publicity for his hero, Jack Dempsey. Atkins was in Chicago, at Soldier Field, on September 22, 1927, when champion Dempsey squared off against Gene T
unney, a cerebral fighter who had been reading Somerset Maugham’s novel, Of Human Bondage, on the eve of that fight. It was their second battle; Tunney had won the first a year earlier in Philadelphia. More than 145,000 were at Soldier Field; upwards of fifty privately piloted planes arrived, having flown barons, heiresses, and Rockefellers into town. Local denizen Al Capone had been skulking about, inquiring about fixes. The long count of that fight—Tunney knocked down by Dempsey and getting a reprieve due to a count mix-up, Dempsey lurking vulturelike and not retreating to his corner quickly enough—would be discussed for decades, spun so dizzily the loss would come to seem a kind of victory in the minds of Dempsey partisans. Late in life, Atkins would recall that 1927 bout: “I was Jack’s press agent for that fight. He was my idol and always will be.”

  His bona fide credentials in hand, Atkins returned to Cleveland in 1940. He meant to shake up the fight business in town. He befriended fighters, fight managers, newspapermen, boxing commissioners. Still, it would take seven years before he got the kind of glittery announcement he so often witnessed in Dempsey’s world—the title bout—and that he had dreamed someday, somehow, would be his very own event to orchestrate. He’d show the New York promoters that his heels clicked just as hard as theirs. Robinson’s challenger would be Jimmy Doyle, a young Los Angeles–based fighter, only twenty-two years old and a rising and fearless welterweight. Flush with the deal, Atkins found no problem getting anyone on the phone at the Cleveland News or Cleveland Plain Dealer to write up the announcement: He’d previously been employed in the sports departments of both publications.