Sweet Thunder Page 33

  Robinson, who had been giving money and purses away as he gallivanted in style across Europe—all on behalf of the Runyon Cancer Fund—began thinking he needed one good payday on his European travels. (He would be paid $84,000, his biggest payday on the Continent, for the Turpin bout; Turpin $24,000.) Neither Robinson nor Gainford, however, would be spending any time watching fight film—slow-motion or otherwise—of Randy Turpin.

  It was impossible for Turpin and his followers to miss the hullabaloo around the presence of Sugar Ray Robinson in London. Just as he had done in Paris, Robinson kept the populace in a state of frenzy. Turpin was, indeed, British champ, but that title carried far less cachet than Robinson’s world crown. The prospect of Turpin in the ring with Robinson—it had been decreed a world title match—did serve, however, to raise Turpin’s profile. Englanders, normally absorbed by their love affair with the less brutal endeavors of cricket and rowing, surrounded his training headquarters—a castle in North Wales—yelling his name while milling around on the grassy lawn below. Sometimes Turpin would appear on the balcony of the castle, staring out across the throngs with a look of wonderment, unaccustomed to this kind of attention. He waved at the crowds, albeit tentatively, as if it all might vanish right before his very eyes.

  On July 9—a day before the fight—Turpin, along with his manager, George Middleton, and some family and friends, boarded a train to London. Jack Solomons, the fight promoter, had already announced that all eighteen thousand tickets were sold. When Turpin’s train pulled into the station, he was surprised to see that there were upwards of five hundred fans there to greet him. “This is the first time a crowd has bothered to meet me before a fight,” he said, glancing around, the train’s engine still churning, the crowd closing in on him, “but it does me good. I have never felt better.” Middleton whisked the fighter away to a hotel.

  Some London writers opined that there hadn’t been this much interest in a championship bout since the days of Bob Fitzsimmons, Britain’s last world titleholder. The London-born Fitzsimmons became middleweight champion in 1891 and would eventually go on to hold three titles.

  The fight was drawing a large contingent of gamblers and bookies into London. The fight odds remained 4–1.

  The days in the English countryside suited Robinson—so did the hours-long card games. Edna Mae began to fret. “Why is Ray doing this, not training, playing gin rummy all night?” she asked Gordon Parks. Parks did not know the mysteries of boxers or training, and he had no explanation for her.

  “One may smile a little at the size and variety of his entourage,” a Times of London report offered about Robinson, “but not at his fighting record.”

  On fight’s eve, Sugar Ray hit golf balls.

  There were rumors that Robinson’s party would travel to Earls Court Arena by way of Windmill Street on the day of the fight. Fans began choking the streets at midday. The appearance of so many bobbies on horseback (crowd control) simply convinced those gathered that their hunches had been correct. Within minutes of its appearance, the much-talked-about pink Cadillac was surrounded by thousands of fans. Inside the automobile, Robinson and Gainford sat surprised once again at the size of the crowd. Faces of excited fans pushed up against the windows. Women blew kisses. Gordon Parks had broken away and hoisted himself above the street, yards in front of the car, so he could get a good photograph. The Cadillac cruised past the London Pavillion—Bert Lahr, one of the stars of The Wizard of Oz, and Robert Alda were appearing in a play, their names on the marquee—then past several billiards halls and pubs. The bobbies had to raise their voices over the noise of the crowd in an effort to maintain order. Their horses bridled and turned sideways, scenting the agitation of the crowd. This was yet another reason why Sugar Ray Robinson was bewitched by Europe: He had never received such a reception in America. Here he was the challenger—and being shown such affection! There had been nothing like this in Detroit or Manhattan or Chicago. This is what he and Gainford had witnessed in the heyday of Joe Louis: thousands reaching their hands out; women swooning, men saluting, children scampering with wide grins. Paris had been sweet; London town was even sweeter.

  Chauffeur-driven cars pulled up in front of the arena, men alighting from them carrying walking sticks. Young boys swarmed about like fish inside a huge tank. Promoter Jack Solomons looked around the packed Earls Court Arena—diplomats and politicians and entertainers and commoners all in attendance—and lamented that he had not had the foresight to hold the event outdoors, where he imagined he could have drawn more than a hundred thousand. As it was, the eighteen thousand in the sold-out venue sat elbow to elbow. Loud roars greeted both fighters. Robinson’s elegant silky blue gown caused one observer to muse that it could “have been designed by Schiaparelli.” Turpin’s garb did not claim the eye; it was plain and drab. Robinson stayed on his feet during the moments before the bell; Turpin sat on a stool in his corner. There was a preternatural calm about him.

  In the first round the fighters felt each other out, trading harmless punches until, with just seconds to go in the round, a Turpin left hook connected and stung Robinson. He wobbled backward; fans roared; Gainford shifted in his corner. The blow seemed a warning to Robinson of Turpin’s power. (Even during the weigh-in, Robinson’s cornermen marveled at Turpin’s physique. He outweighed Robinson, 158 to 154, and appeared all chiseled muscle. And at the age of twenty-three, he was seven years younger.) Many noted, at the beginning of the second round, droplets of blood oozing from Robinson’s mouth. It was in the third that Robinson found his natural one-two punch, delivering the combination—he had seemed to jump off the ground while doing so, drawing those long-familiar gasps of shock—right to Turpin’s face. Turpin, expressionless, answered with a powerful left hook of his own, which caused a quick puffiness below Robinson’s eye. As The Times of London correspondent observed, Turpin’s “lefts from the start had more sting and weight behind them than Robinson’s,” a fact clearly noticeable to the fans. At the end of the round, Turpin sat on his stool with the unworried look of a chap waiting for a bus in central London on a sunny day. Watching the bout, Gordon Parks was hardly concerned about Robinson’s ring strategy: “No cause to worry, I thought, Ray’s just stalling, giving the audience its money’s worth.”

  Turpin was prone to a boxing style of bouncing up and down on his feet as if doing a knee bend. Commentators often described the movements as being like those of an elevator—up and down, up and down. The unorthodox style befuddled Robinson. Turpin would come at Robinson sideways, then start the up-and-down motion—like a lethal gazelle—before unleashing one of his fiery blows. “Turpin was outpunching me,” Robinson would later concede. But Sugar Ray, bolstered by some “whiplash lefts and rights,” took the sixth round. Gainford nodded heaps of approval; this is what he had been waiting to see all along. Turpin partisans feared it was but a prelude, that the great American fighter was ready for his assault. But then, in the seventh, Robinson suffered a head-butt from Turpin. Some crowd members made gratified sounds, believing the blow had come from a Turpin punch. It appeared accidental. But the gash above Robinson’s left eye looked nasty. “His eye! Look at Sugar’s eye!” a Turpin partisan cried aloud. “Turpin’s opened his eye, I tell you.”

  “I could tell it was a bad one,” Robinson would recall of the wound, “not only from the feel but also from the way Turpin was staring at it and aiming his right hand for it.”

  Gainford knew as much. “It’s bad,” he told Robinson in the corner. “Don’t let him butt you again.”

  Turpin hardly needed to. He bore into Robinson with steady rights and jabs. “Hold on, Sugar,” Robinson’s wife Edna Mae shouted from her seat. Then, in the eleventh, a peculiar thing happened: Robinson himself began moving up and down in an elevatorlike motion, copying Turpin’s style. It was the only way he saw to counteract Turpin’s ring manner. But Robinson—always a stand-up, dancing fighter—looked awkward. He had never been a fighter to mimic anyone. Gainford did what he could to te
nd to Robinson’s tender facial wounds at the end of the eleventh. But in the twelfth young Turpin slammed another fist into Robinson’s nose. More blood. “Get him,” Robinson’s sister Evelyn cried out, her eyes closed for long periods of time as if she herself began to think the unthinkable. There were murmurs echoing through the crowd now; Robinson’s normally sturdy legs looked fragile.

  Prognostications aside, it was to the disadvantage of Robinson and George Gainford that they had not seen any of Turpin’s three fights leading up to their engagement. One took place on April 16 against Billy Brown. On May 7 he faced Jan de Bruin. And on June 5 it was Jackie Keough. The first two fights ended in second-and sixth-round knockouts; the third was a seventh-round TKO. In each Turpin displayed a ferocious and relentless boxing style with LaMotta-like strength. Anyone seeing those fights, or having studied them, would not have taken Randy Turpin lightly.

  At the beginning of the thirteenth—while, again, having looked eerily calm during the break after the previous round—Turpin forcefully attacked an obviously confused Robinson, and, as the UP dispatch noted, “from then on he couldn’t be stopped.” The English fans, not only unaccustomed to seeing two Negroes in the ring together but feeling now that their Randy Turpin could be victorious, began yelling for blood. When the final bell rang, Randy Turpin—a fighter knows—raised his arm in exuberant triumph. It was the most emotion he had shown the entire evening. He turned to Robinson and put his arm around him and began escorting him to his corner as if he had meant no harm in taking down the older fighter, as if he had merely been fighting for family pride—against all the insults heaped upon the racially mixed Turpin boys their whole lives. Fans rose in their seats; fathers had to yank back sons who wanted to bolt toward the ring. There was the click-clack of typewriters at ringside, some reporters writing furiously as others scurried to find telephones. The pretty nutmeg-brown faces of Edna Mae and Evelyn Robinson had collapsed. Their Sugar Ray had been dethroned.

  The AP scorecard was unforgiving: nine rounds for Turpin, four for Robinson, two judged even. Turpin, egged on, stepped toward a microphone and spoke to the crowd. “I hope I’m able to keep this for you for a long time,” he said. The applause rose again. Then a boxing official entered the ring and presented Turpin with a silver gilt globe, the representative emblem in England of any world championship. As he was leaving the ring, the arena started singing: “For he’s a jolly good fellow …” Jack Solomons, the shrewd promoter, had stuffed a victory cigar in his mouth.

  Reporters scrambled to get to Turpin’s dressing room. They were met by the poised fighter, his brothers, and manager, George Middleton. “I thought I was winning all the way,” Turpin told them. “He never hurt me once.” Then, as if it were just the right thing to do, Turpin walked over to Robinson’s dressing room. “You were a real champion just like they told me,” he told the now-former champion. Robinson—suffering only the second defeat of his professional career—was magnanimous. “You were real good,” he told Turpin. “Just like they said you were. I have no alibis. I was beaten by a better man.” As Turpin departed, Robinson’s doctor set to work on the gash above his left eye. It would require ten stitches. The room grew quiet. They were all so unaccustomed to this type of outcome. “Come on, everybody,” Evelyn Robinson finally said, breaking the silence, “don’t look so sad.”

  The next day’s newspapers, on both sides of the Atlantic, gave big play to the epic story. RAY ROBINSON LOSES TITLE IN BRITAIN, the New York Times page-one headline said. “Randy Turpin,” the paper’s account began, “23-year-old British Negro who never before had fought a bout of more than eight rounds, scored the most amazing upset in twenty-five years of boxing history … when he defeated Ray Robinson to win the world’s middleweight championship.” The Times of London report was no less surprised: “Randolph Turpin upset every calculation, even to a great extent perhaps his own, by gaining a boxing victory over the famous Ray Robinson at Earls Court last night.” The Los Angeles Times headline: TITLE TO TURPIN: BRITISH NEGRO TRIUMPHS IN STUNNING RING UPSET. Time magazine weighed in: “It was boxing’s biggest upset since 1936, when Max Schmeling knocked out Joe Louis.”

  What had gone wrong? Blame was laid on Robinson’s social calendar and his lack of preparation. All those parties! Those sunny afternoons on those lovely golf courses! A tone of mockery in reference to the entire Robinson European tour threaded its way into some London-based newspaper accounts, with a London Observer columnist allowing that Robinson’s “triumphal tour [was] more like that of an Oriental potentate than a prizefighter.” Gainford had lacked the forcefulness to curtail Robinson’s social schedule. And in the aftermath he struck a sanguine note. “This’ll do us no harm at all,” he insisted. “And the return fight’ll be a wow.” Those negotiations were under way within hours of the conclusion of the fight.

  Robinson was leery of returning to his hotel after the fight. He was never a man to tolerate gloom. There would surely be all those reporters, wanting more and more. His friend Gordon Parks hustled him into his auto and then sped away, determined to find an out-of-the-way hotel for Robinson for the night. As Parks drove along the streets, he was aware of a feeling beyond empathy for Robinson’s defeat: He felt such pride. He was not only Robinson’s chauffeur right now but his protector. He still called Robinson champ, because always in those witchy moments following a champ’s defeat, it was important to keep the glory and aura alive. But he also felt a duty, conscious that they were two Negroes from America, in another land, supping at the high tables of Europe, all the while knowing great shadows still awaited them over their shoulders, back in America. And now, over here, they must watch out for each other—Robinson making sure Parks had all the access he needed; Parks dropping his photographic duties on a night like this to help another American Negro in need. This was a sliver of real freedom, as free as the tales told by all those jazzmen who had come swaying into Robinson’s Manhattan club. As far as Gordon Parks was concerned, driving the great Sugar Ray through the night, heading toward some kind of peace was better than being Walker Evans down in Alabama or Dorothea Lange in Georgia or certainly Parks himself enduring insults in those Washington restaurants.

  Robinson had sounded the note of grace in defeat, but privately he seethed. “I’ll kill him the next time,” he vowed to Parks. “So help me I’ll kill him.” That was a sentiment that echoed throughout the Robinson family: “I don’t think I even want to see that fight,” Robinson’s sister Evelyn said of the pending follow-up match. “Ray will murder him.”

  Robinson’s mother, Leila, had not come to London, remaining in New York City. Fearing that she would worry once she heard news of his injuries, Sugar Ray sent a telegram. MUM—a note of levity struck in using the English word for “Mom”—I LOST ON DECISION BUT I AM OK.

  The celebrations for Randy Turpin culminated in his hometown of Leamington Spa. A throng of twenty thousand lined the streets; shops were closed; a jet streaked overhead in honor of the occasion. Many said they hadn’t seen such a celebration since the end of World War II.

  Perhaps it mattered little to Robinson now, but there remained plenty of Londoners who had been transfixed by his presence in the ring. Writing in the London Observer days after the fight, Maurice Richardson conceded that the country’s pride and admiration indeed lay deeper with Turpin now: “But there is something really charming and generous about the graceful and fabulous Sugar.”

  Robinson returned to Paris and allowed the pace and charms of that city to soothe his injuries for a few days. Then it was off to Cannes where he relaxed, whiling away hours at the baccarat table, talking movies with Jack Warner, the Hollywood studio chief who was vacationing there. The dethroned champion looked like a man without a care in the world. Some New Yorkers worried: Where was he? They had anticipated he would return home after the Turpin bout. And when he didn’t, there was chatter throughout Manhattan—from Salem Methodist church to City Hall—that perhaps Sugar Ray Robinson had grown morose. There had been
no communiqué, save for the telegram to his mother. A group of New Yorkers joined together to write an open letter to the baccarat-playing Robinson that was published in the Amsterdam News. The letter was a odd mixture of disbelief at the loss and encouragement for Robinson to pull himself together and return. It ended with a strange bit of gossip, informing Robinson that there were folk back home who believed “you took too many pictures with white women, especially that stuff kissing the big lady of France, and a few remarked that the Communists don’t like the way you talk against them and wanted to get revenge.” (Robinson had been goaded to take a political stand against American segregation, but refused to do so.) It concluded: “Ray, we don’t know what it is, but wherever you are, hurry up and come back and show us that you haven’t lost your Sugar. Wherever you are Sugar Ray, Won’t You Please Come Home!” It was signed, “Boys on the Block.” Anonymous as it was, it had the imprimatur of musicians, actors, Negro political clubhouse leaders—those in Harlem and Manhattan who considered themselves friends of Robinson.