Sweet Thunder Page 21

  “Well,” Robinson offered, “Doyle had a very impressive record up until the time he lost the fight with Artie Levine. He had not been beaten for about two years.”

  Gerber continued: “Isn’t it a fact that you considered yourself personally a much better fighter and strictly outclassed Doyle in the last nine months?”

  “It is a fact that the champion in each class is supposed to be the best,” Robinson answered, fidgeting.

  “Did you notice during the fight that Doyle’s right eye kept dropping?” asked Gerber.

  Robinson: “I was too busy fighting to notice.”

  Gerber soon switched to Gainford. He asked Gainford if he had noticed anything strange or disconcerting about Doyle’s appearance before the fight.

  “I’m not a physician, sir,” Gainford answered. “I have no connection with Doyle, only Ray Robinson.”

  The social mores of the period did not augur well for sharp-tongued replies on the part of two out-of-town Negroes, no matter what their sports pedigree. Gerber proved as much when he announced that both Robinson and Gainford were being “smart” and even “evasive” with him. The manner in which he was steering the inquest forced some to conclude Gerber was being unfair and accusatory toward both Robinson and Gainford. The press weighed in. An editorial titled “Manslaughter in the Ring” appeared in the Chicago Daily Tribune. In it, Robinson found an ally. “If there are any manslaughter charges lodged they should be made against the men who permitted Doyle to go into the ring and not the man who struck the fatal blow,” the editorial opined. “Robinson did what he was supposed to do, which was to knock out his opponent.”

  The Cleveland Press also targeted authorities in an editorial titled “Did the Doctors Know?” “The rugged business of fisticuffs is a little out of this page’s province. But it is of general editorial concern that prizefights are supervised and regulated in the public interest. Medical examiners and boxing commissions are supposed to protect the ring participants against both mayhem and suicide. In these protective chores for the Robinson-Doyle match, it looks as though the Cleveland authorities failed somewhere.”

  On the final day of hearings—after Gerber had summoned promoter Larry Atkins, referee Jack Davis, Arthur P. Hagedorn, the boxing commission’s physician, and Andrew G. Putka, who chaired the city’s ring board—several boxing officials let it be known they felt Gerber had cast aspersions upon them and their professionalism.

  Gerber said he would issue his findings as soon as possible.

  Mayor Burke, who was fighting an election battle against Eliot Ness (Burke would handily win), urged that the report be released promptly.

  Gerber worked fast, issuing his findings on June 30. Local and national publications eagerly reported on them. Of crucial interest was the fate of Robinson. The coroner cleared the fighter of all possible charges resulting from the death, calling Robinson “absolutely blameless” and stating that he “was unfortunate in being the opposing contestant at the time of Doyle’s fatal injuries.” Gerber also went on to absolve all Cleveland parties connected to the contest; he stated that the city’s boxing commission “should not be considered negligent in having allowed Doyle to fight.”

  The results of the Gerber probe ushered in some changes within the Cleveland boxing scene. From now on any fighter, like Doyle, who had suffered a serious head injury in a previous fight would not be allowed to fight in Cleveland. A fighter’s medical records would now be more strenuously examined. (Taking a cue, many other states would adopt these guidelines as well.)

  Robinson wished to do something for the family of Jimmy Doyle. He quickly announced he would hold benefit fights in the very near future, with most of the proceeds going to Doyle’s family.

  If Jimmy Doyle, unmarried, had a girlfriend, no one knew, no girl came forward. If there was someone he might have written love letters to while on the road, glorying in his pain and talking about the beauty of being a fighter who was keenly respected and nationally ranked, no one knew.

  Those who had fought against Jimmy Doyle, and the managers and promoters who knew him, began replaying his career in the newsreels of their minds. He had seemed to bring something into the ring with him. It was more than skill, or a hard punch. He charged and charged at his opponents. It would have taken more than golf clubs—as Robinson knew—to beat him back. Some of Doyle’s childhood friends who had traveled cross-country, sadly to watch him die in Cleveland, kept mentioning how much moxie he possessed. There was that, but there was also something else: Jimmy Doyle had a sweet rage about him.

  When the press referred to him as Irish Jimmy Doyle, it must have pleased him, for he was quite proud of his heritage. There is a line from the poem, “The Balloon of the Mind,” written by the Irish poet Yeats: “Hands, do what you’re bid.”

  Bigger and better fighters had long snickered at Doyle. But he had surprisingly found a way to whip them. He looked, too, like he had been in fights, in lots of fights. He was as unhandsome as Sugar Ray was handsome. Except when he was raising his hand in the ring, sweat dripping, nothing but his bag of books and magazines waiting for him back in the hotel room. Then Jimmy Doyle was quite beautiful.

  His body was taken back to California, where he was buried, in the soft soil.

  Fight managers spend countless hours trying to decipher a fighter’s psyche. The practice can be as fruitful as reading the cosmos. “I don’t know how it will affect Ray’s fighting in the future,” Gainford said before departing Cleveland. “He’s just like anyone else and is bound to have some reaction. How it will manifest itself … Time will tell.”

  Sugar Ray Robinson was six months into his world championship now. The welterweight division was such an unpredictable one before his ascendancy; there had been long stretches where the title had been vacant. Sometimes gifted contenders came out of nowhere. He had beaten Tommy Bell for the crown—but Jimmy Doyle had also beaten Bell in a non-title match. It was not that the fighters were interchangeable, just that the division was yet to be solidly claimed by anyone. Which is what Robinson wished to do. He wanted to own the division, to stake his claim to it, just the way his onetime Army buddy Joe Louis had controlled the heavyweight division.

  Of those two much-talked-about killings in the country that week—Bugsy Siegel and Doyle—both had been nighttime appointments. One was done in the serene moments of a man’s plain domestic life—reading the evening newspaper. There were bullets and shattering glass and the whispering flaps of the newspaper falling to the ground. No one saw a thing. The other killing had taken time—the way unforgettable cinema takes time—melting into the senses, as smoke does into cloth. It had been done in front of thousands. The victim lay dying against the silent end credits and the hushing sound that swept through the Cleveland Arena. Cinema vérité. And standing over the fallen man, a feral and ferocious figure. In Cleveland, doing his job.

  Robinson had never been a boisterous fighter. If only he could have helped Jimmy Doyle up, the way he used to help those Golden Gloves boys up off the canvas in Chicago and New York City after he had battered them.

  He was at the dawn of his full potential now, imagining ways to invent a whole new kind of prizefighter. He would jump weight divisions. It was scary—for it would take the will of a Houdini to jump weight divisions and still win. He knew he would have to be as methodical as a scientist.

  Gerber, the coroner, had asked him: “Well, did you notice that Doyle was in trouble at any time?”

  And he had answered: “Getting him in trouble is my business as a boxer and a champion.”

  He came through on his promise to Doyle’s family, staging several bouts in the weeks ahead on behalf of Jimmy, and giving part of the gate receipts to Doyle’s mother. Gainford was unhinged by it all, believing his fighter might be needlessly hurt—fighting out of guilt and sentiment—by someone trying to make a name for themselves. Gainford needn’t have worried. Sammy Secreet and Flashy Sebastian were both knocked out in the first round. Enough money w
as raised through the bouts to set up a trust fund for Doyle’s mother. The last fund-raising fight was staged right in Los Angeles, inside the Olympic Auditorium, the place where young Jimmy had first gotten noticed, had first heard the roar of people shouting his name.

  Sugar Ray Robinson had long seen death and dying—it had been a constant in his Harlem. There were gangland slayings, and wife-husband domestic horrors. There was the killing of numbers runners, their bodies laid out on the pavement for all to see. The downtown publications—The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune—might not have covered those killings all the time, but the two Harlem papers, the Amsterdam News and the New York Age, certainly did. They wrote the stories up with tabloid fanfare. There were killings by poison, killings by butcher knife. At times it seemed like the Harlem metropolis where Sugar Ray Robinson had spent some of his formative years was a breeding ground for death. In the years to come, Jimmy Doyle’s death would be looked upon as a witchy footnote, and even though Robinson would remark now and then that he had dreamed of it in the months prior to the bout in 1947, it sounded too pat, too made-up. None of the articles written leading up to the fight mentioned a bad dream. They did mention the eye injury from sparring at Greenwood Lake. Sugar Ray was smart enough to realize that dreams could not be qualified or verified. His actions in the aftermath had been noble. Jimmy Doyle’s mom would always have food on the table. Gainford indeed continued to worry now and then, as any manager would under the circumstances. There were tales of fighters and ring deaths before Robinson, and, sadly, there would be more afterward. Four years later another fighter, Roger Donoghue, was responsible for the blows that killed George Flores in a bout that took place at Madison Square Garden. The death haunted Donoghue. He soon quit boxing, was seen shadowboxing inside Manhattan bars, mumbling to himself, joking, a man in pain. “You killed a man,” a kid once piped up to him. “I’m going to tell everybody.” And Donoghue had replied: “You don’t have to tell everybody. They already know.” Donoghue would find work, though: He’d befriended writer Budd Schulberg, who wrote the screenplay for Elia Kazan’s 1954 movie On the Waterfront and got Donoghue work training Marlon Brando for his role as failed boxer and union hero Terry Malloy. No one ever taunted Sugar Ray. And soon, George Gainford’s worries fell away.

  Some sportswriters, Bill Corum among them, had started to fret in Cleveland that perhaps Robinson had peaked. That maybe they had seen the best he could do. Before coming to Cleveland, Robinson had become engaged in a war with Jake LaMotta, having already fought him five times, losing once. But they would glance back over their shoulders in the months and years ahead and realize that great and wondrous battles lay beyond Cleveland. Everything was mere prelude in the world of Sugar Ray.

  By the time Sugar Ray Robinson left Cleveland, his poise had begun to return. Edna Mae had wrapped her lovely arms around him. George Gainford was calling him champ, champ, champ. The summer wind was in his face.

  Up, up, and away then, over the Highland Park golf course where he’d swiped at balls; over the Cleveland Arena where he had fought a foe who had come into the ring with a fire given to him by those legendary heavyweights Jim Jeffries and Jack Johnson; away from the shadow of death; into the future where he believed he had beautiful worlds—boxing, fashion, dancing, boxing again, worlds that were often at odds with one another—to conquer.

  In the years beyond his ring life, when the fame had mostly fallen away, when Sugar Ray had settled into his sixth decade on earth, living in sunny Los Angeles with Millie, his wife, the love of his life (who had replaced Edna Mae); in those seasons and years when his hands had gone slack, he was given to shoving his fight films into an old Super 8 and showing them to houseguests. He’d sit in a chair, neatly dressed of course, and his shoulders would roll a little as the figures clashed on the screen. The smile was serene and his eyes would widen as he pointed out little things—the fighters, the difficulties they presented, the arenas and cities—to his guests. The names of the opponents—Carmen Basilio, Jake LaMotta, Randy Turpin, Kid Gavilan, Bobo Olson, Gene Fullmer—would come off his lips in that whispery and hoarse voice of his. (All those fighters, just like him, cursing the air some mornings, trying to dodge ailments that seemed to search for them and haunt them long into the night, complaining about mattresses being either too soft or too hard. So many fighters with so little to do now. The memorabilia craze, which would have corralled them to moneymaking signings, had not yet taken off.) But Sugar Ray refused to have a copy of the Doyle fight in the house. Why would anyone wish to have a film of a death they had been so close to causing? Why would anyone wish to have a ghost flitting around their house? In all those days and weeks in the aftermath of the fight, he had told Gainford that he was fine, that the death was not bothering him, that George should just keep his mind on the future bouts, on securing the next paycheck.

  But there he sat, all those years later, dodging Jimmy Doyle, who had grown up just miles from the house in LA where the TV now flickered in front of champ Sugar’s face. Dodging Jimmy Doyle—as if such a war of the conscience could be won.

  It was one of Sugar Ray’s realities that he was in perhaps the most savage of all sports and that sometimes it repelled him. Not long after the Doyle fight he would begin saying to acquaintances that he could walk away from the sport anytime; that sometimes it bored him; that he controlled it and wouldn’t let it control him; that he realized the claws of time were upon his back. But the fight business provided income and glory, which he welcomed. So he was forced to unleash his savagery—as if it were beyond his control, like an eagle ascending through air after prey—and when awful damage had been done, he would attempt to salve his conscience with dignified actions: walking across the ring to lift the shoulders of his fallen Golden Gloves opponents; helping Doyle’s family realize Jimmy’s dream of purchasing a house for his mom. Fight fans would watch him in the aftermath of Doyle, and on those occasions when he held a punch, when he motioned to the referee to intervene during a clutch—on behalf of the opponent he was whipping badly—they would be obliged to wonder: Was Sugar Ray pulling back? Would caution be displayed—Gainford’s deepest fear—when it should not be? Those who watched him had no way of knowing. But he did suddenly become a philanthropist—not huge sums, but in the 1940s and 1950s small sums could help a family stave off disaster. He started to visit poor schoolchildren and orphanages, dispensing gifts. He would battle with one hand and give with the other. It was the manner in which he forced himself to understand the brutality that he unleashed in life.

  Their episodic war stretched nine years. They fought across World War II and into the Korean War—and through three presidential administrations. Their sagas shared newspaper space with Roosevelt’s steeliness, Truman’s resolve, and Eisenhower’s steadfastness. A mélange of life’s characters came together around their battles—gangsters, bookies, whores, hotel doormen, pimps, Pullman porters, gents from the Old Country (Italy), restaurant workers, newspapermen, prison inmates, old pugilists, gents from uptown (Harlem). “I fought like I didn’t deserve to live,” Jake LaMotta once said, as if ascribing demons to his very existence. Sugar Ray Robinson professed to have no demons, although his paranoia rested in a dark place. Without the song of patriotism floating over either—as in Joe Louis against Max Schmeling—people were left to crawl toward their baser instincts: “On the streets, it was the ‘nigger’ versus the Italian,” remembers Robert Royal, a Sugar Ray acquaintance. A feverish ethnic pride broiled inside many. LaMotta knew there were those who called him a wop, though never to his face.

  Years before, in Italy, men like LaMotta’s father, who had nothing, were marked as being from the proletariat class. From high above, Robinson vs. LaMotta seemed a collision of cultures—the artist and the proletarian; the proletarian fighting like someone pushing mightily to the other side. But the artist had convinced himself he was fighting for the ages. The archetypal enmities of each gave their half dozen clashes a grave and haunting timelessn
ess.

  1942–1951

  an opera in six brutal acts

  BEFORE ALL THOSE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE started to gather around Sugar Ray and before his name was etched in neon up in Harlem, before he’d killed a foe, before he even held that precious first title, the biggest and hardest war of his professional life had begun.

  The Robinson-LaMotta feud lasted more than a decade, becoming one of the greatest rivalries of all time. In the wake of the savage opera lay scandal, beautiful women, heart break, and plenty of blood.

  It was a ring rivalry that held the nation in rapt attention, the kind that could not have been designed or plotted in hotel suites or the back rooms of boxing clubs. There had been other rivalries of similar weight and fascination. Before he fought Joe Louis, Max Schmeling had German history behind him: the leader of the Third Reich sending him to America to conquer the boxing world. History between fighters could also ignite passionate interest. Rocky Graziano and Tony Zale, two hearty and rather robotic pugilists, first clashed in 1946. Zale won in a sixth-round knockout. The following year, in Chicago, Zale was at it again, punishing Graziano so badly into the third round that Graziano partisans feared the bout would be called. Blood was gushing. But Graziano thundered back, lifting fans from their seats, and by the sixth it was over. Graziano emerged the surprising victor. Immediately, there were cries for a rematch. A rivalry had taken root. It was the kind of moment that kept the bookies cheerful. The third bout was announced, but it wasn’t to be. A story broke in the press that Graziano had served prison time, and had even been given an additional prison sentence while in the military for striking an officer. This led to more probing, which revealed that he’d failed to report an attempted ring bribe in a timely manner. Officials held closed-door meetings, and Graziano lost his license to fight in New York City. But much of the public, especially the working man in the shadows—coal miner, factory worker, construction worker, ditchdigger—sympathized with Rocky. The sentiment echoed around a feeling that Rocky was a stand-up guy; that he had gotten a terrible rap; that he was a tough sort because one had to be tough to survive in the world. And soon enough he was being talked about in glowing terms—a onetime dead-end kid who had created his own damn luck in a crazy world; a guy who maybe didn’t have class, in the traditional sense of the word, but who had guts, and his guts had gotten him to where he could look anyone on Park Avenue in the eye and stand tall on his own pride. A poor man bent out of his pride could understand such a thing. He lost the third fight against Zale, but his legion of fans grew. A deeper kind of glory awaited him outside the ring. Ordinary men rushed up to him, simply wishing to touch him. He’d become a workingman’s good luck charm, a hero. He called his autobiography Somebody Up There Likes Me.