Sweet Thunder Page 36

  Robinson and Gainford left San Francisco with a month to prepare for the fight in Chicago with Rocky Graziano. But Gainford was feeling uneasy. Not because of Graziano, but because Robinson had again, while in San Francisco, mentioned that word: retirement. The fighter whom he had discovered and trained and invested so much in! Where would that leave George Gainford? He had no intention of returning to the basement of a church on the hard side of Harlem.

  The standoff featuring two marquee names was a match for all the dreamers. Sugar Ray Robinson vs. Rocky Graziano was for all the kids who boxed in AAU tournaments; and the men who shadow-boxed in their basements; and the older men on stoops who remembered Henry Armstrong and Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney and Billy Conn and Marcel Cerdan. It was for all the fans who couldn’t forget Lew Jenkins and Charley Burley. And also for all the ladies lucky enough to have beaus who had gotten tickets—April 16, 1952—to the indoor Chicago title fight. Sugar Ray Robinson and Rocky Graziano were both men with compelling images: Robinson the marcelled-haired, silk-robed gladiator with the pink Cadillac and nightclub, Rocky the street brawler and onetime juvenile delinquent with the humble tastes of a plumber. They were each survivors of the New York City streets in their youth. And each had turned professional in the golden glow before World War II. Also, each had broken through scandalous news accounts—Graziano’s prison record, and Robinson’s AWOL fugue during the war. It was a wonder they had not met before 1952, except the color bar upheld by the various boxing commissions kept Robinson from the likes of both Graziano and Tony Zale. Both Robinson and Gainford—along with their followers—remembered well what Graziano had howled from the ring in 1945 after his knockout of Billy Arnold: “Now get me Robinson!” By the time of their announced meeting in 1952, boxing fans imagined a turning back of the clock—to a time when both fighters were still fairly new and sensational figures in the world of professional boxing. Fans agreed: It was a fight of extreme interest. Nevertheless, Arthur Daley of The New York Times realized it was a match that, with the passage of time, stood “tarnished with age.” If Robinson had indeed slipped in his prowess, a point many now began to ponder, “he slipped from so high a peak that he hasn’t descended to the timber line,” Daley wrote. “He still is in the rarefied atmosphere of true greatness.” In 1948, Graziano—who always had a slugger’s power but never the guile and cleverness of a Robinson—had lost his belt, and for the next three years he fought a string of forgettable matches. The bright lights of the entertainment world, even as he continued fighting, had dizzied him. “His heart no longer is in his work,” Daley of the Times believed. “Once … he was an uninhibited roughneck who wore no man’s collar, including his own. Now he wears a tie and jacket, and combs his hair. Civilization has ruined him.”

  No matter how stellar Sugar Ray Robinson’s achievements, more and more people mused about and predicted the dimming of his fight capabilities. In Chicago for the fight, Joe Nichols of The New York Times predicted that Graziano would beat Robinson and regain the title. Joe Bostic of the Amsterdam News predicted a Robinson win, but not with much enthusiasm as he also pronounced Robinson “well over the hill” in his fight career.

  On the day before what fans hoped would be a fabled match, Robinson was making his way to his seat at the home opener for the Chicago White Sox. He had the same expression on his face as he often had behind the bar of his nightclub: jovial and relaxed.

  Graziano was in a snappy mood. “I’ll knock him out,” he said of Robinson. “I know I can beat this guy.”

  And doubtless Rocky Graziano felt reborn standing opposite Sugar Ray Robinson in the ring inside Chicago Stadium during that first round. “He came out of his corner with his curly black hair flopping on his forehead,” Robinson would remember, “and with his right hand cocked like a revolver.” The 22,264 in attendance—boxing officials had predicted 19,000—was only a thousand less than the world indoor record set in 1932, also in Chicago Stadium, when Jack Dempsey fought King Levinsky. In the first round Graziano caught Robinson with a solid left hook, and many thought to themselves this was the Rocky of yesteryear. But the Robinson answer was quite declarative: a lightning-quick series of punches—delivered “with such breathtaking speed that they hardly could be counted,” according to The New York Times—that stunned Graziano. In the second round Graziano unloaded “a rocking right” that smashed into Robinson’s head. Robinson would admit afterward that had the punch landed “three inches further down my jaw I would have been knocked out.”

  But then all of it began to unfold in true Robinson fashion: The ghostly-quick Robinson started dancing around Graziano, shifting as he threw his punches, dodging Graziano’s blows, then bouncing more punches into Graziano’s head. It was as if someone had cranked up a newsreel to high speed. As the third got under way, Graziano knew he was in trouble. Robinson was moving quick about the ring, then dancing in front of Graziano as he unleashed more blows. In one moment, however, Graziano stopped all of it and fired a right into Robinson. Robinson went down—some believed it a slip—but rose up quickly. And when Robinson did, he saw—like a wolf at night peering through trees at prey—the open line into Graziano’s unprotected jaw. The Robinson left, delivered as he was backpedaling, was the first salvo of the combination; then came the right, which floored Graziano and sent his mouthpiece flying. Graziano was out cold for five seconds. He then began to stir and struggled up against the ropes, but he was engulfed in a haze. Again he plopped to the canvas. The referee rushed in; Robinson’s corner entered the ring to celebrate the victory. It had taken less than eight minutes. The epitaph of Sugar Ray Robinson had been written too soon. He remained a fighter quite far from the timber line of his sport. Robinson turned to Joe Louis in the aftermath: “I’ll meet you at the Archway,” he said, referring to the local lounge owned by Killer Johnson. (In the minds of Robinson’s cornermen, one of the more beguiling things about his personality was how he could go from bruising fighter to post-fight party organizer. He got such joy from directing human traffic, making spontaneous plans, sending word to invite local musicians to the festivities.)

  Reporters wanted Robinson’s take on the ring proceedings. “I had it tonight; yes sir, I had it tonight when I needed it—thank God,” the victor said afterward.

  Sugar Ray Robinson had forced the pundits to make reassessments. “Robinson is a cold-blooded machine,” Arthur Daley of the Times concluded after the fight. Sugar Ray had sent observers from the stadium shaking their heads. But that wave of melancholy about time also surfaced again. Sugar Ray Robinson had a malady known to many great men: He was both a realist and a sentimentalist. The constant drumbeat of one disposition—the realist—without the other was apt to stiffen the mind-set and turn it away from dreams. But too much of the other—the sentimentalist—too often yanked the intellect in directions that left it most vulnerable. The march from Black Bottom to the Waldorf Astoria ballroom had been a mighty one; he could not relinquish the majesty of it so easily. So he allowed degrees of both to settle inside him. “Sooner or later you come to the end of the road and I think two or maybe three more fights and I’ll call it a career,” he said, much to the dismay of Gainford, and really not sure if he believed it himself.

  He shared laughter with Chicago friends before boarding the Twentieth Century Limited train back to Manhattan. Aboard the train, Pullman porters acknowledged Robinson’s presence as the sweet laughter flowing from the champion’s entourage bounced up and down the aisles. As the train rumbled through the Midwest, Gainford and Robinson broached the subject that had trailed them since arriving in San Francisco months earlier: Joey Maxim. Maxim was the light heavyweight champion of the world. Robinson had been mulling another step up in weight class. In San Francisco he had told reporters he wanted no part of Maxim, and he repeated the assertion in Chicago, but it was all a ruse to gin up interest in the meeting. (Robinson had actually told French reporters while in Paris nearly a year earlier that he very much looked forward to fighting Maxim.)
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br />   Back in Manhattan, Robinson was again thinking about his future. Ideas rolled around in his head: He would gather some musicians and hit the road, making a sweep of the country just like Ellington and Billy Eckstine and Count Basie. He would retire. Then, hours later, another decision: No, he would not retire. He would keep fighting, because the public wanted great fighters to keep fighting. Ideas fluctuated day to day. He went to church at Salem Methodist—front pews reserved for the champ and family!—and prayed to the gods for guidance, unsure of what they were trying to tell him. He practiced his tap dancing; he ran his fingers across piano keys in music halls. He would retire. Yes, he would dance and he would focus on his businesses. If only he could approximate the beautiful music of Eckstine and tap like the Nicholas Brothers, Harold or Fayard. He had looked so handsome in white tie and tails. Everyone had told him so. But it was such a mighty dream, perhaps an impossible one. There were as many entertainers who didn’t get the right break as there were fighters who didn’t get the right break. No, he would keep fighting.

  He bewildered reporters, who were trying to figure his next move. Joe Bostic of the Amsterdam News was a decade-long acquaintance of Robinson, yet still pronounced the fighter an “enigma.” “To fathom Robinson’s reasoning quirks is to qualify for election to the world’s great geniuses of psychology,” Bostic wrote.

  Television executives also had a hard time dealing with Robinson’s psyche. He always felt that he didn’t get enough respect from TV execs when it came to revenues for fight profits, even though, as Sugar Ray knew, he had changed the scope of television boxing, drawing fight fans as well as fans of his style, his artistry. The more viewership, the more revenue. And the more revenue, Robinson figured, the more money in his pockets. In a dirty business, he thought of himself as the closest thing to a Sir Galahad of the fight game. In his mind, when he cancelled a fight, it was akin to workers going on strike: It was done to gain respect and leverage. But he was not always successful in these endeavors—he could not penetrate the various professional boxing organizations, with those Mafia figures in the shadows that sponsored the fights and controlled profits. So he would rebel against them by leaving the ring. After all, he “was the man selling the tickets,” he had told one boxing official.

  He sat upstairs in his nightclub, the sounds of Harlem traffic sailing through the windows, reading his fan mail. A lot of it came from cancer patients. He slipped down to his business establishments; he had his nails manicured, his hair clipped. Yes, he would leave the ring; he would devote time to answering some of those heartbreaking letters from the cancer patients. “I’m just plain tired of fighting,” he had said in San Francisco. “I don’t even watch fights anymore, not since Joe Louis and my other friends quit.” He would let boxing officials see if they could survive as well as they had without the services of Sugar Ray Robinson, without his marquee pull. At least that was one side of his inner debate. The other side cut to the bone of Sugar Ray’s competitive spirit. He began asking Gainford questions about the light heavyweight division, about his chances of taking another crown. And beyond that, he began asking about light heavyweight Joey Maxim. He asked Gainford about Maxim’s stance in the ring, the timing of his punches, his stamina. Gainford realized that just as in his Golden Gloves youth, Robinson was pursuing this line of inquiry for a reason. The fighter, who had also been studying Maxim on tape, was clearly plotting. That which Sugar Ray didn’t have propelled him forward. The rare fame of a singular Negro simply wasn’t enough. Gainford had been caught off guard by Robinson again, and this was what he liked: how Robinson kept him alert, made his cagey assessments seem even more cagey. At times Gainford wondered who was managing whom, but any confusion in their alliance dissipated at the noise Robinson made when he felt unappreciated. He bore in on goals. He wanted desperately to know about life on the road for musicians, so he had cornered Dizzy Gillespie and questioned him all night long. Now he wanted to know everything Gainford thought of Maxim. And it wasn’t just Maxim. It was the whole portrait of professional boxing that constantly stayed on Robinson’s mind—Armstrong and Joe Louis and Charley Burley and all the Negro fighters who had been wronged. Robinson, the sentimentalist, would avenge their hurts. He also knew—the realist—that the light heavyweight purses were larger than the middleweight purses. Besides, it would prove a comeuppance for boxing officials: He’d yank more money from their tight purses and slippery accounting practices. After some behind-the-scenes negotiations, all mostly orchestrated by Robinson himself, Gainford sent word forth: Sugar Ray Robinson would fight light heavyweight champion Joey Maxim on June 23 at Yankee Stadium. Sometimes the middleweight champion of the world couldn’t keep from dreaming of the multiple titles that his old friend Henry Armstrong had held.

  Joey Maxim—he took his ring name after the Maxim machine gun—was raised in the fight-crazed city of Cleveland, Ohio. He turned professional at the age of eighteen. It was against the wishes of his parents, however, who could never bring themselves to see him fight. But plenty of teenyboppers did: Joey Maxim, with his dark hair and smooth skin, had matinee-idol looks and sent girls swooning. He also had his fans in Hollywood: Frank Sinatra counted himself one of the fighter’s biggest admirers. In 1950 Maxim won the world light heavyweight title by defeating Freddie Mills in London. “Maxim is as good a fighter as Dempsey, except he can’t hit,” Maxim’s manager, Jack Kearns, once sarcastically said of him. Maxim had also fought heavyweight Ezzard Charles—and lost.

  Maxim and Robinson—the latter having gone from welter to middle—had something in common: They were not averse to reaching upward from the mountain they stood on, to test themselves.

  By early June, in the days leading up to Robinson-Maxim, the weather in New York City had become unpredictable. Some days came in with normal temperature readings for that time of year; others blistering with heat, and stifling. Those were the days that saw men pushing carts laden with ice for sale up and down the pavement and children skipping around open fire hydrants. On weekends, the well-to-do left town for the Hamptons and Long Island Sound in search of cooler temperatures. People couldn’t stop talking about the weather, but the looming title fight generated much conversation too. In downtown Manhattan and in Harlem salons; on barstools and in diners and all the way across Central Park; on rooftops where the breezes blew and down to the bohemian hangouts in Greenwich Village, Manhattan was abuzz about Robinson-Maxim. Fans were lining up at both Madison Square Garden and the Polo Grounds to purchase tickets, priced from $5 to $30. Many offered theories and conjecture about each fighter’s chances, about the pitfalls faced by any challenger who was stepping up or down to another weight class. Maxim was stronger; Robinson quicker. Maxim had crafty Jack Kearns, who had managed Jack Dempsey. Robinson had George Gainford, who had led his fighter to two championship titles. Still, many believed Robinson faced the stiffest hill to climb. It was Maxim’s caginess and strength—he had already taken on heavyweights—that colored their worries. And yet: “Sugar Ray is no ordinary fighter,” Arthur Daley of the Times opined before the contest. “He is a boxer who outboxes boxers. He is a slugger who out-slugs sluggers.”

  Robinson, Gainford, and cornerman Harry Wiley—along with the traveling entourage—settled into training camp at Pompton Lakes. But from the start it was tense, with Gainford and Wiley arguing almost daily over which strategy might work best for Robinson in taking on Maxim. Gainford was already feeling uneasy: Rumors had been circulating that Kearns, Maxim’s manager, was going to offer Robinson a more lucrative package—utilizing his TV contacts—to manage his career. Robinson assured Gainford he had no interest in Kearns’s offer, be it real or imagined. But it hardly seemed to soothe Gainford’s worries as he heaved himself about the camp, instructing from the sidelines and all the while arguing with Wiley.

  “You let me make the decisions!” Gainford finally roared at Wiley one afternoon, turning heads.

  Wiley’s eyes bulged. He felt now this was public theatre, with onlookers wond
ering how he would react. Pride was at stake. “I got as much right to make the decisions as you do,” he shouted back. Gainford told Wiley to shut up.