Sweet Thunder Read online

  A phalanx of New York City police officers jumped up on the canvas, circling the ring to keep fans out. Turpin and Robinson hugged. Those who thought Robinson had become a relic of himself had to contend with his rejuvenated power and dominance. He had done what only two other middleweights—Stanley Ketchel in 1908 and Tony Zale in 1948—had done before him: recaptured a middleweight crown after losing it.

  Everyone wanted to see him in his dressing room. A physician hovered around Robinson; the head-butt would need stitches. Mayor Impellitteri was ushered through, followed by other dignitaries. Toots Shor and Walter Winchell were in the flow of bodies angling for entrance. “I paced myself slowly in the seventh, eighth and ninth,” Robinson explained, “but when I was cut I went out after him with all I had.” George Gainford surveyed the dressing-room scene, nodding at everyone. He was a champion’s manager again; a king in Negro America. Turpin sat dejected in his dressing room, still struggling to regain his senses: “Robinson shook me two or three times, but he did not hurt me,” he said unconvincingly.

  It was a peculiar facet of Sugar Ray Robinson’s fight manner that it sometimes took an emotional charge for him to elevate his artistic style to the height of its wicked savagery. He had carefully sought to explain to writers over the years that he was a boxer, a man with a precise craft—trying to draw a distinction between boxing and fighting, the former in his mind an artistic enterprise, the latter the pastime of ruffians and inelegant pugilists. While in the ring, he often tiptoed around, displaying a style beautiful enough to gaze at. But then those emotional challenges appeared: Tommy Bell standing in his way for the championship belt; Jimmy Doyle simply refusing to go down; Jake LaMotta winning for the first time and forever sealing his fate; George Costner robbing him of his name. When Randy Turpin’s head bashed into Robinson’s, dropping a warm curtain of blood across his face, it was the charge he needed; the savage genie erupted from its elegant bottle. Robinson was, in actuality, a hybrid: a boxer, but also an assassin of his opponent’s mind-set. Watching him in slow motion—as Turpin had done—was a bewildering exercise. One moment a caterpillar, the next a butterfly; one moment a boxer, the next a fighter.

  The next morning’s New York Times had the fight story above the fold, at the very top of the paper: ROBINSON KNOCKS OUT TURPIN IN TENTH ROUND OF TITLE BOUT, announced the headline. James Dawson, the Times’s boxing writer, referred to Robinson’s work as “a savage attack” against Turpin. Peter Wilson, the London Daily Express columnist who had long followed Turpin’s career and had come across the ocean to see him try to keep his crown, scored Turpin ahead going into the tenth and fateful round. Wilson believed Turpin lost because he “forgot what to do when he was hurt,” implying that the young fighter had no strategy to bounce back once stunned by Robinson’s brutal explosion.

  The newly crowned champion sent out a warning in the aftermath of the bout: He wanted Rocky Graziano next.

  In Harlem they were waiting, thousands lining the streets. There was already pandemonium outside his nightclub, joyful noises rising as many gathered there, like guppies circling a huge whale. His club sat less than thirty blocks from the Polo Grounds. A. J. Liebling, the writer, was excited by what he had just witnessed in the ring. He found himself waddling down Eighth Avenue, perspiring in the nighttime humidity, in search of a taxi—the subways were too jammed. “Drive me downtown, past Sugar Ray’s,” he told the taxi driver whom he had corralled.

  He’d stop if there was a clear path to the door; maybe a couple of pork chops, a drink or two.

  But it was not a scene that could be easily navigated: “As we approached the Theresa [hotel], the avenue was so jammed up with traffic that we could barely move,” Liebling would recall. “People were packed around the safety islands and overflowed onto the street. Somebody was beating an oilcan like a tomtom, and a tall, limber man was dancing in the street. Any idea I may have had of stopping at Sugar Ray’s for a nightcap left me when I saw the crowd in front of the door.”

  The great prizefighter was on his way.

  “That was a Cadillac night on Seventh Avenue,” Sugar Ray would recall of the aftermath of Turpin and that New York evening. “It looked like an assembly line.”

  Randy Turpin sailed back to London, wondering aboard ship if he’d have to return to his former job as a bricklayer’s assistant.

  But Sugar Ray’s Harlem was hardly finished with Randy Turpin. The fighter returned to New York City in 1953 for a fight against Bobo Olson. During the visit he resumed his affair with Adele Daniels, the beauty whom he had met shortly after his arrival in New York City to fight Robinson. Daniels soon charged Turpin with assault—later adding a charge of rape. Their relationship had been tempestuous. Turpin’s manager scoffed at the charges, as did Turpin, calling it all an attempt to blackmail him. (Turpin’s wife in England had told family members he sometimes abused her.) The New York police arrested Turpin at a hotel, preventing him from leaving the country until he posted bond and forcing him to return for trial. The trial got under way in 1955. British tabloids went wild. The Harlem courtroom was packed every day. But the trial didn’t last a week—Daniels decided to accept a small monetary settlement.

  For Randy Turpin, the brew of adulterous romance melting into celebrity, and the seductive world of the bigtime fight game, was dangerous. Like Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Henry Armstrong, Jake LaMotta, and other ring stars had before him, Turpin stared bewildered into the glare of shame outside the ring.

  Randy Turpin happily sailed away from America after the Daniels trial, having now been bewitched not once but twice in Sugar Ray’s Harlem.

  For so many of the world-recognized fighters, the arc of victory—life inside the ring, the circling fame—seems to reach an end, and then the haunting really begins. This is what happened to the great Randy Turpin back home in England: He won a couple of British championships before retiring in 1958. The retirement party was held at Harringay Arena. Turpin looked resplendent in an evening suit, his wife, Gwen, and family members in attendance. Some of the giants of boxing showed up to salute him, among them Max Baer, Bruce Woodcock, and the great Henry Armstrong. (Sugar Ray sent his regards.) Turpin was only thirty years old upon retirement—and he was broke. His business ventures had collapsed. When his earnings were bountiful, he had been quite generous lending others money. As he sought to borrow money shortly after retiring, no one helped. He grew embittered. He worked in scrap metal, roaming the countryside, dragging old abandoned cars back to the yard. It was a steep fall for a man who had dressed in Savile Row suits. He came out of retirement and fought once in 1963 and once in 1964. He won both; the latter fight was held in someplace called Valetta, Malta. No one cared anymore. He turned to wrestling, crisscrossing the European continent and engaging in farcical bouts. He would tell anyone who asked that he owed huge back taxes and also had a family to feed. He wore a hearing aid on account of being deaf in one ear; it was an old childhood injury that boxing had worsened, and wrestling only more so. He kept wrestling, vowing his wife and four daughters would not go hungry. He and Gwen owned a small café in Leamington Spa. They lived in the flat upstairs. It was an unlovely place. He worked in the kitchen while Gwen worked out front, dealing with the truckers and stragglers—and the curious who came by to gawk at the onetime world champ. In December 1965 Turpin journeyed back to America to attend Sugar Ray Robinson’s retirement event, held at Madison Square Garden. When he bounded beneath the ropes, embraced by Sugar Ray, the applause was loud. No one in the crowd realized the torment he was going through. When Turpin returned to England, he was stunned to find that the tax office was threatening to take his café. Gwen noticed his mood shifts—agitation one moment, serenity the next—and told him that it would all work out some way. On the morning of May 16, 1966, he purposely rammed his head into a wall inside the café. The next day—just after sending three of his four daughters off to school—Turpin strolled upstairs, ostensibly to check on his youngest daughter, Carmen. He pulled a .22 calib
er pistol. He shot the seventeen-month-old infant twice, then turned the gun to his heart and pulled the trigger. His wife, Gwen, rushed upstairs and found her daughter curled on the bed and her husband slumped to the floor. She grabbed little Carmen and bolted on foot to a nearby hospital. It was a miracle the child survived—one bullet had entered near her brain, the other near her lungs. Police raced to the house and found Turpin dead.

  In the days afterwards, many across England, struggling for clues to such a heinous act, wondered if Randy Turpin had suffered brain damage during his fight career, and if that, along with a mortal fear of losing the means to care for his family, had unhinged him. Psychologists and boxing officials pondered all manner of questions. For years afterwards, Englanders would still talk of Randy Turpin, focusing on those sixty-four days he held the world championship after defeating Sugar Ray Robinson. There was talk through the years of paying some kind of tribute to him, but it came and went. Then, in 2001—exactly a half century after that Robinson victory—an 8″6″-high statue of Randy Turpin was unveiled in Warwick. His daughters appeared at the ceremony. There was a bronze plaque at the base of it, and the words on it echoed the excitement Englanders had held for him in the days leading up to his two bouts with the great Harlem middleweight:

  IN PALACE, PUB, AND PARLOUR

  THE WHOLE OF BRITAIN HELD ITS BREATH

  He is always being hunted. Such is the curse of the champion. There is no place to hide. Champions have always found it difficult to walk away, to take their crown and vanish. In 1952 the great prizefighter had led many to believe he’d had enough of it all. Bright lights shone from another direction in Sugar Ray Robinson’s imagination—from the world of entertainment. But then, right in the middle of those dreams, three figures with tantalizing histories—Olson, Graziano, and Maxim—appeared before him. The first two were fearless hunters, and Maxim, a champion already. The public believed in the promise of rare theatre. They knew someone’s bones would be left to feast on.

  1952

  dreams

  THERE WERE MORE than a few familiar characters in mid-twentieth-century boxing circles who carried weapons, the small .22 caliber handgun being the most common sidearm. With mischief often lurking in the shadows—owing to the proximity of gangsters and gamblers around the sport—the safety of Sugar Ray Robinson was never far from George Gainford’s mind. While Robinson’s sometime driver Chico, the midget, did carry a weapon, few relished the idea of Chico—with his knee-high aim—engaging in a shoot-out with anyone. Gainford, however, had a more potent source of protection in the form of Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson. (The bump on the back of Johnson’s neck explained the nom de guerre.)

  Sugar Ray, just retired in 1952, with his wife Edna Mae and Hollywood star Jeff Chandler, along with Sammy Davis Jr., at the Riviera nightclub, in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Robinson dreamed of Broadway; he would eventually get there as technical advisor for the fighter Sammy would play in the acclaimed 1964 production of Golden Boy.

  Johnson had become a notorious Manhattan criminal by the 1930s, with dozens of arrests to his name. A well-built man with a menacing look, he gambled and ran numbers. He also engaged in skirmishes with gangster Dutch Schultz over turf in the lucrative Harlem numbers racket. It was Gainford who brought Johnson into the Robinson camp as an ally. (Gainford and Johnson had Charleston, South Carolina, childhoods in common.) Johnson was sometimes seen at Sugar Ray’s fights, smiling and nodding like a bronzed potentate, undercover police operatives trailing him. There were many evenings, as well, when he was spotted gliding into Robinson’s nightclub; he fancied the fried chicken and cabbage, and was known to leave generous tips. But where Robinson had propelled his life far beyond the confines of Harlem, Johnson’s illegal activities left him as a man operating in a social world confined to north of 125th Street. His threatening visage was real, but the range quite limited.

  Sugar Ray knew all too well that the waters outside the boxing ring were swampy, so he allowed Gainford to wade into them on his behalf, cutting deals—with Sugar Ray’s approval—and analyzing the terrain.

  “Ray didn’t want people to think George was always in control,” says Mel Dick.

  Robinson had little to offer shadowy figures such as Johnson, save for a good fight, a welcome at his club, and the smile of a friend. They wanted nothing more.

  If Bumpy Johnson was happy to be around the fight game, then Gainford was happy to use Johnson’s reputation on Robinson’s behalf. Bumpy—in a doorway, unsmiling, bracketed by his minions—was quite a sight. “There was one instance where Gainford was having a back-and-forth with these gangsters—Frankie Carbo and that gang,” recalls newspaperman Jimmy Breslin. “Well, Gainford goes down there to meet with them and he’s with Bumpy Johnson. And those gangsters fled.” (Robinson’s personal valet had a name that fit right in with these gangster tête-à-têtes: Bennie Killings had come to the fighter’s attention because he seemed adept at interpreting Robinson’s sartorial tastes.)

  In the first week of June 1952, Johnson had gone to a gambling parlor on 122nd Street. The game seemed to be going well enough, until a fellow gambler rose, pulled a gun, and fired two shots into Bumpy, one lodging in his chest, the other in his abdomen. Johnson was rushed to Sydenham Hospital, operated on, and given the news that he was quite lucky to have survived. “I would have taken that fellow, gun and all, if he had not started shooting when he did,” Bumpy said. Bumpy had a private suite and a private nurse. Someone had brought a chessboard up to his room. He whiled away some of the hours staring at kings and queens on the board. Sugar Ray and George Gainford were mindful to send best wishes for Bumpy’s recovery.

  His record collection was massive, and Sugar Ray Robinson spent hours listening to the likes of Count Basie, Dinah Washington, Duke Ellington, Sinatra, and Billy Eckstine, among others. He adored Sinatra, but dreamily convinced himself he could achieve the allure of Eckstine onstage. As 1952 dawned, Sugar Ray Robinson was thinking more and more of the world of musical entertainment. Joe Louis predicted that 1952 would be Robinson’s last year in the ring. And in late 1951 Earl Brown, the Amsterdam News columnist, expressed a similar sentiment: “In a year or two, this grand athlete will probably hang up his gloves for good.” The talk of retirement was now picking up momentum. Sugar Ray had had long conversations in recent years with bandleader Lionel Hampton and crooner Billy Eckstine about the entertainment world. He continued, as well, to corner musicians entering his nightclub, quizzing them about their work schedule, and insisting on information about nightclubs around the country. In 1951, when he had turned thirty, many observers surmised—with so many great battles and championships already won—that he had earned the right to think of life beyond the ring. But George Gainford thought the talk of a career in entertainment full of folly. He was a manager, and he wished to keep managing the champion he had first laid eyes on in a church basement all those years ago. Gainford reminded Robinson that if he didn’t defend his title within certain time limits, he would risk being stripped of it. So the manager lined up two fights. Robinson found himself flying out to San Francisco to face Bobo Olson, a former foe, for the first of those fights. It was a competitive bout and was only stopped in the twelfth when Robinson loosed a combination and a wicked blow into Olson’s midsection. (Sometimes Robinson wondered just how many vicious-hitting middleweights were out there in the world, lurking, for they seemed to be all but popping out from behind trees!)

  Sugar Ray Robinson’s arrival in a city, and the beginning of his training sessions, continued to spark a great deal of interest among the citizenry, especially among Negro athletes from area colleges. To them, Robinson was a figure of great accomplishment who swelled their own pride. When Robinson began his training for the second Olson fight at the Royal Gym in San Francisco, he was so high-spirited—he had had a six-month layoff from the ring—that he invited many locals to come watch his workouts. There were shoeshine men, newspapermen, young local fighters, and members of the University of San
Francisco football team, among them Ollie Matson, the great Negro running back. Robinson’s pre-fight sessions were lively affairs, with him sometimes frolicking and clowning in the ring.

  But Robinson realized in the first round of the bout at Civic Auditorium that Bobo Olson found none of it funny—not Robinson’s reported levity during his training sessions, and certainly not the fact that Robinson had already signed for another title defense following the Olson match, as if a victory were a foregone conclusion. Bobo Olson came out swinging and landing blows, and those early flurries saw an eruption of fan support on his behalf. (Hundreds had been turned away at the box office hours before the sold-out encounter, and police braced themselves for a disturbance, which didn’t materialize.) Robinson, owing to the long layoff, was missing punch after punch. The hard-hitting Olson “was scoring solidly with a good left to Robinson’s chin and an occasional solid right to the ribs.” In the seventh, Olson landed a below-the-belt blow, and even though it drew a warning from the referee, the damage was done and Robinson’s legs buckled. He looked unsteady, and the tattooed Olson had fire in his eyes. Over in Robinson’s corner, a streak of worry crossed Gainford’s face. The UP dispatch writer saw it shaping up as a “surprising battle.” In the ninth, Olson landed a walloping left to Robinson’s chin, then another one in the tenth. Despite the aggressive Olson attack, Robinson seemed unworried. At the end of the tenth, the judges had scored the fight evenly. But in the eleventh, the Sugar Ray of old reappeared: He unleashed roundhouse rights to Olson’s body and kidney area, and Olson’s head snapped like a puppet’s. The joy began to slowly drain from the faces of Olson partisans who had been howling for an upset. It was “cunning” that enabled Robinson’s victory, many of the ringside reporters felt. Robinson—who had agreed to the fight for a $1 purse and expenses, donating the prize money to the Runyon Cancer Fund—felt, in the end, it had been too much of a challenge after such a long layoff. “I never fought so hard in my life for $1,” he admitted following the bout, sitting in his dressing room draped in a white terry-cloth robe. Gainford tended to him with the gentle satisfaction of someone who had escaped a perilous journey through terrible weather. “Olson is a clean fighter and I hope [he] gets up there after I give up the middleweight title—if I’m still holding it when I retire,” Robinson added.