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  It was as if Cleveland—and Artie Levine—was Doyle’s Waterloo, as it had nearly been Robinson’s.

  Word seeped from his camp that Doyle would be showing a keen interest in the area around Robinson’s eyes, which the Robinson foe Abrams had injured in their last fight. A fighter with warped vision is a fighter in trouble and one who enters the ring with a telltale weakness. “All’s we gotta say is that it’s the big shot—the shot Jimmy has been aiming at so long, and we’re gonna give it everything we’ve got,” offered Doyle’s manager, Paul Doyle, on the eve of the fight. “And we’ve got a right to think that’ll be just about enough to do the trick.”

  So, with the ghost of Levine by the door then, the lights twinkled on inside the Cleveland Arena.

  Promoter Larry Atkins was clearly overjoyed with the cachet of hosting a championship bout. Along with more than eleven thousand other paying customers—Teddy Horne, Lena’s father, among them—he made his way to his front-row seat. A great many others, including the Stokes brothers, Carl and Louis, would listen on the radio. There was a sentimental factor mixed in with the excitement: Robinson was the reigning world champ and thus the beneficiary of instant respect, but both fighters had fought in and around Cleveland several times before and they both received generous and enthusiastic applause as they were introduced. Jack Davis would be the evening’s referee.

  Then came the ringing of the bell that set Sugar Ray Robinson and Jimmy Doyle in motion, toward each other.

  It was astonishing—there were gasps from the crowd—to see the quickness and sharpness of the punches Robinson threw. It took just a nanosecond of an opening and he was inside Jimmy Doyle’s arms, delivering punch after punch. He’d step back, like a man admiring the cut of another man’s suit, then step forward, right back into Doyle. Doyle had always been adept at knocking away punches, but these punches were coming too fast. Some of the Cleveland writers—leaning, scribbling—wondered when the Robinson knockout punch would come. Doyle had other thoughts, namely to survive round to round. He threw a litany of punches in the third round, and some of the onlookers howled that he had won the round. “A solid right cross to the head brought some respect from Ray in the third round,” noted a Cleveland Call & Post writer. Doyle had gotten off nice punches in that round, but they were not without consequences for him: A wicked Robinson punch in the fourth closed Doyle’s left eye.

  Then, in the fifth round, Robinson landed seven unanswered punches. Doyle suddenly began to show signs of exhaustion. His legs were heavy, far less springy than at the fight’s beginning. The reporters and the promoters and the fans wanted a fight, a long fight, something for their money. Robinson’s manager, Gainford, wanted his fighter to put the scrappy Irishman away. But Robinson couldn’t. He would later express wonder at the punches Doyle withstood. Jimmy could take a punch. He always could. He took punches from fighters who laughed at him in the early rounds of fights, only to find himself staring them down with his arms raised in victory. Some of the pre-fight reporting talked about how Jimmy Doyle was a slow starter, how he always required rounds to get himself angling toward peak performance. To get the adrenaline really going it seemed as if Jimmy Doyle had to be convinced he was truly in a big-time fight. In the sixth round, it came—a rock-solid Doyle punch, landing right where he wished it to land, above Sugar Ray’s eye. It stunned the fighter for a moment. The blow drew blood. But as quick as Doyle tried to follow through, Robinson tied him up, with referee Davis leaning into both. Nevertheless, Doyle had fought a cagey round, which Davis would later contend he had won. The men in Doyle’s corner were on their feet. Their thinking was, the longer Doyle remained in the fight, the better his chances of pulling it out. And there he was, in the seventh round, standing toe to toe with the world champion, taking hit after hit, and drawing more blood from Robinson’s cut. “Man,” Robinson would later sigh, “I threw everything at him but my brassie [a golf club] and he still wouldn’t go down.” It was as if Jimmy Doyle meant to prove to the crack Negro boxer from Harlem that he wasn’t anybody’s quitter.

  In the middle of the seventh, however, Robinson let loose with a barrage of fierce punches.

  When the bout was already under way, a telegram arrived at the main ticket window. It was for the Doyle camp. It came from a group of Doyle’s California friends: GOOD LUCK, JIMMY.

  Jimmy Doyle, who had tasted the sweat and spittle of Jim Jeffries, and of Jack Johnson, those two giants who had seen enough in him to tutor him, to inspire, had confided in relatives before coming back East that he wished to continue fighting long enough to help his family—he mentioned his mother specifically and purchasing her a house—and then maybe he’d find something else to do. He was a reader of books; he knew there lay a world outside of boxing. And yet, he was a dreamer. Some days he’d wake up and all he wanted to do was box, to be a world champ.

  Some black fighters out in LA sang his name inside those gyms in sort of a singsong, hipster manner: Jimmaay; Jimmaay Doyle. He loved it, the way it sounded, the way it cut the air, sailing on the respect he had earned.

  It was in the eighth round that Robinson saw his opening. Doyle had left his chin unprotected. The punch came before it came; it was just that quick. It landed in the dead center of Doyle’s chin. A bite of a sandwich, a long gulp of a drink, and you might well have missed it. “The left hook that lifted Doyle off his feet, crossed his eyes and turned his face gray,” wrote Bill Corum in the Los Angeles Herald Express, “must have been as clean and perfect a knockout blow as was ever landed. The writer can only say [what] must have been, for, truthfully, he didn’t see it. The round was drawing to an end and I had turned my head to pick up a piece of paper on which were scribbled some notes when that ripping left cut Jimmy down.” There was no need for a follow-up punch—Jimmy Doyle was already falling. His left leg remained straight, but there was a bend in his right leg. He instinctively reached his right hand out to catch himself on the ropes. A tuft of air rose inside his dark trunks as he was going down and it gave him the appearance of a man floating backward. Cameras flashed; lights blinked across faces at ringside; bifocals caught the illumination of light and flash. And as Jimmy Doyle was falling backward, into unconsciousness, Sugar Ray’s eyes were locked on his, with the kind of intensity someone has as they watch the hapless traveler tipping over the side of the ocean liner, into oblivion.

  He thumped onto the canvas, his head taking a hard bounce. His manager, the aging Paul Doyle, looked, swiveled around, lowered himself as he peered into the ring. He moved about in a small space like a hyperactive gnome, yelling for his fighter to rise. But he couldn’t. There were wheezing movements from Doyle as the count began. Referee Jack Davis—sensing something amiss—motioned for Doyle’s manager to come into the ring and get his fighter; Gainford leapt to his feet and protested, demanding the call for a knockout. Finally Davis went and held Robinson’s hand aloft. Doyle’s cornermen were now in the ring, because their fighter was not moving. They lifted him up but he was puppetlike; it was like trying to lift a sleeping person from a bed. Robinson’s cornermen, now sensing something wrong as well, quickly entered the ring to see if they could help. There was angst in the seats, rising up and into the farthest back rows, where the humming volume of the tense worry began to stretch. It must have reminded many of the Doyle and Artie Levine fight, the one in which Doyle had been knocked unconscious. It all seemed a spooky bit of déjà vu. In the ring a dozen men—two doctors among them—now stood over Doyle. More kept coming through the ropes. Boxing commissioners rose from their seats and made their way to ringside. Photographers checked the film in their Speed Graphics. They moved about to get better angles inside the ring. Five minutes turned to ten, which turned to fifteen, and Doyle remained quiet and unmoving.

  The cursory examination in the ring told the doctors that Doyle needed medical attention. An ambulance was racing out to the Arena from St. Vincent Charity Hospital. When the ambulance arrived, the attendants rushed the stretcher right into the rin
g—onlookers stepping aside, hands cupped over mouths—and lifted Doyle gently onto it. They lifted the stretcher up slowly. His right arm—his punching arm—dangled to the side until someone raised it.

  Manny Berardinelli, who would later serve as cornerman for his brother, Joey Maxim—a gifted Cleveland fighter destined in time to have his own classic confrontation with Robinson—was in the crowd that night. “I never seen anybody leave on a stretcher except for that night,” he would recall.

  Gainford and Robinson watched Doyle being taken away through the darkened arena. Then Gainford got his fighter to his dressing room. Robinson needed a bit of medical attention himself. Doyle had opened that nasty cut over his eye. In his dressing room, Robinson asked after his challenger; Gainford told him he’d find out as soon as he could. Cornermen rushed back out into the arena, trying to glean any news. “I didn’t think I hit him so hard with that left hook,” Robinson said, while being bandaged. “I threw a lot harder punches, and ones he didn’t catch with his gloves.”

  Jimmy Doyle lay silent in the back of the ambulance. Its siren blaring, it had to cut across the city, past Chester and Prospect and Carnegie avenues. Upon reaching the hospital at Twenty-second Street—they arrived in under seven minutes—doors swung open. It was against the glow of moonlight and with low-pitched voices that staffers rushed Jimmy Doyle inside.

  Doctors must work quickly when there is a serious head injury. It took Dr. William Miller, the chief of surgery at Charity Hospital, no time at all to order brain specialist Spencer Braden—revered as one of the best in the country, let alone Ohio—summoned from nearby Chagrin Falls to look at Doyle. Doyle had a blood clot on his brain. There would have to be surgery right away to release the pressure caused by the clot.

  It didn’t take long for word to spread from the hospital about the severity of Doyle’s injury. His manager was on the phone to California with Doyle’s family, trying to reassure them. Robinson and Gainford left the Arena and made their way to the hospital. Larry Atkins was already there. Public officials were demanding updates on the fighter’s condition; there were those already asking Atkins if Doyle—given his concussion from the Levine fight—should even have been allowed to fight. The questions and insinuation pained Atkins. He said he wouldn’t talk, not now, glancing around the hospital. But he did say that he certainly didn’t suspect “anything serious” wrong with Doyle leading up to the fight.

  The surgical procedure began at three a.m. Doctors made incisions on both sides of Doyle’s skull. Peering inside, Dr. Braden did not like what he saw; there was “extensive damage” to the fighter’s brain. Braden conferred with other medical experts on the premises; X-rays were pored over. Things looked grim. Time—measured in minutes—would tell the tale. At one point Doyle’s breathing stopped; then it was revived. But as minutes passed into half-hour increments, there seemed to be no overall improvement in his condition. The prognosis looked to be worsening. Medical staff, conferring with the Doyle camp, began thinking of summoning the hospital chaplain to his room.

  Doyle’s family phoned from California again, seeking another update.

  “I’m sure sorry,” Robinson murmured as the night deepened. “I didn’t have any idea he was seriously hurt when I left the ring.”

  Doctors and nurses kept a vigil around Doyle, moving him in and out of an oxygen tent to aid his breathing.

  Johnny Katcich, a Doyle friend who had come all the way from Los Angeles to watch the fight, was crestfallen: “He told me after the Levine fight that ‘If I don’t go back to Cleveland and fight in the same ring again I’m not a man’ and he meant it.”

  The morning after the fight, Jimmy Doyle was on the front pages of American newspapers—right up there with accounts of the mysterious murder of Bugsy Siegel on the other side of the country, in Jimmy Doyle’s hometown.

  By noon of the following day, his breathing grew weaker, then quite faint. Rev. James W. Nagel, the chaplain, arrived to read the fighter his last rites. A few hours later, Jimmy Doyle was pronounced dead. He had lived seventeen hours after being taken from the ring.

  Law enforcement authorities told Robinson and Gainford they could not leave the city. They informed Gainford that his fighter would likely be charged with involuntary manslaughter. It was a formality, they intoned. But the news rattled both Robinson and Gainford: In most cases the charge of involuntary manslaughter carries a penalty of between three and ten years in prison.

  Within hours, County Coroner Samuel Gerber was vowing a wide investigation. And with things now spinning at a rapid clip—both wire service reporters and local reporters were demanding answers to their questions about Doyle’s medical history—Gerber went on to make dark hints aimed directly at the city’s criminal and civic nexus. There had been “unholy pressure” upon him, he said, to forgo an investigation. (Apparently these individuals did their angling while Doyle lay dying.) He would not name the perpetrators, but the pronouncement cast sudden suspicion upon practically everyone connected to the fight. Gerber said he had told the individuals who had come to him that “no power whatsoever will prevent me going through with it.”

  Meanwhile, a moratorium was declared on all upcoming bouts in Cleveland until the completion of Gerber’s probe. That unnerved town fathers—and Larry Atkins—because fighting in Cleveland was big business.

  Doyle’s death marked the first time in modern boxing history that a fighter had died in a world championship bout. It was also the first professional ring death of 1947—although three nonprofessional fighters had died as a result of ring injuries.

  Robinson and Gainford made a trip to the morgue to view Doyle. Hours earlier he had been bouncing on his feet, swinging punches. Now this—his curly-haired head against a white sheet. They left the morgue in silence.

  Just before beginning his inquest, Gerber gave the public a more detailed description of the “unholy pressure” he had cryptically referred to. “Why not consider this an accidental death?” he said someone had whispered to him. “Why have an investigation? Why not just try to live down this unhappy incident as quickly as possible?” Rather than lower the volume on an already-brewing controversy, Gerber, according to The Cleveland Press, ratcheted up the suspense. It only made reporters hungrier, and they turned on Gerber and demanded to know the name of the person who had made the request. “I will not identify him,” Gerber shot back, “but I will tell you this much: It was nobody connected with Ray Robinson.”

  Gerber, a severe-looking but dapper man who wore his hair neatly parted on the right, then got his probe under way by summoning witnesses to his office inside the county morgue. His secretary adjusted the office furniture so that witnesses would be seated directly across from Gerber as they began to unspool their memories about the events that took place on the night of June 24. Each witness had to take a sworn oath that they were telling the truth.

  One of Gerber’s first witnesses was Edward Delaney, Jimmy Doyle’s brother, who had arrived in town a day after the fight. Gerber wanted to know about Jimmy’s condition in Los Angeles in the weeks following his fight with Artie Levine, when he had been hurt. Delaney—thin, rubbing his eyes—said his brother seemed changed following the fight with Levine fifteen months earlier. He seemed sullen; he was no longer shadowboxing and “sparring around” the family house, Delaney said, breaking into tears. Instead, he said his brother sat reading, staring off into space. He didn’t even like to go dancing anymore, one of his favorite pastimes. The implication was that Jimmy had suffered an injury that had not healed and that had obviously altered his personality. Paul Doyle, Jimmy’s manager—old and gray-haired, and now looking even more so—seemed somewhat confused by the proceedings. He recited Jimmy’s prior fights leading up to the Robinson engagement and said Doyle had acquitted himself nicely in those fights, all of them victories. Paul Doyle could only vow that his fighter was in “tip-top” shape when he had entered the ring against Robinson.

  For public consumption—and certainly with an e
ye toward future promotions—Larry Atkins issued a statement to the Cleveland media. In it he said Doyle seemed physically fit and ready to fight upon completion of the medical examinations that he had to take once he arrived in Cleveland. Atkins’s statement—issued on behalf of himself and fellow promoter Bob Brickman—included the revelation that New York officials had already deemed Doyle fit to fight there in anticipation of future engagements in that city.

  If Sugar Ray Robinson and George Gainford had waltzed into Cleveland with the scent of boxing royalty about them—the champ and his manager taking up the first title defense of their crown—within minutes of Gerber’s grilling they looked otherwise. With their slack and unsmiling faces, and Gerber’s relentless questioning, and a stenographer nearby recording their every word, they looked like two Negroes caught on the wrong side of the law in a sometimes lawless metropolis. Edna Mae had tried her best the night before to console Robinson, but she also had the unmistakable look of worry as she reminded her husband that the fight game was a dangerous business. (Gerber, as if in a concession to the distraught Robinson, excused him from having to testify under oath; not so Gainford.)

  Gerber minced no words, however, with either man, and he expected succinct answers.

  “Did you personally rank Doyle as a worthy opponent?” Gerber asked Robinson.

  Robinson, dressed in light-colored pants, dark shirt, and a pair of sandals, alternately rubbed his forehead and chin. He looked exhausted during the round of nighttime questioning.