Sweet Thunder Page 37

  Wiley said he would do no such thing, and seeking an edge against the burly Gainford as he felt a confrontation coming on, pulled a gun. Bystanders began scooting away.

  “I can shoot you,” he warned Gainford.

  Robinson jumped into the fray, demanding that Wiley put the gun away, which he did. Everyone finally relaxed. Through the subsequent days a degree of normalcy returned as tempers cooled. Still, the whole episode left Robinson wondering if his manager and trainer had been focused enough on helping him overtake Maxim.

  A gaggle of reporters arrived at the camp—among them roly-poly A. J. Liebling—and began peppering Robinson with questions.

  “Have you ever fought a man that heavy?” one reporter wanted to know.

  Robinson smiled: “Never a champion that heavy.”

  “Do you think you can hurt him?” another asked.

  “I can hurt anybody,” Robinson answered, as Gainford and Wiley nodded in affirmation.

  Robinson sparred beneath the arching trees on a makeshift ring. There were old Manhattan acquaintances in attendance; some former boxers. He had had a group of kids from the New York City Police Athletic League brought out and they were knee to knee on bleachers watching him work out and seemed as delighted as if it were Christmas morning. Liebling seemed especially impressed with Robinson’s style of jumping rope: “Most fighters jump rope as children do, but infinitely faster. Robinson just swings a length of rope in his right fist and jumps in time to a fast tune whistled by his trainer. He jumps high in the air and twists his joined knees at the top of every bound. When he jumps in double time to ‘I’m Just Wild About Harry,’ it’s something to see.”

  But once back in Manhattan, Robinson never allowed anyone to sense the strain that had taken place inside his camp. He was seen playing the piano days before the scheduled fight, throwing his head back with wide smiles like Fats Waller.

  People arriving in town for the fight—described by one local publication as “big-money men and their womenfolk”—had flooded the city hotels. Bellhops at the Waldorf Astoria, the Edison, the New Yorker, the Commodore, and the Hotel Roosevelt, as well as the Hotel Theresa uptown in Sugar Ray’s Harlem, were commenting about the heavy business. But on the day of the fight, not long after the weigh-in at Madison Square Garden, there was an announcement: Because it was an outdoor event, organizers could not ignore the rain in the forecast. “We even referred to the Farmer’s Catalogue,” said Jim Norris of the International Boxing Club, which was promoting the bout. The fight was postponed for forty-eight hours. Robinson and Maxim maintained a calm demeanor regarding the delay. As Robinson made his way back out to the street, the hubbub intensified, and a crowd materializing behind him. Standing in front of the Garden, dressed in suit pants and wearing a V-neck sweater, he held an umbrella over his head, surrounded by his excitable gallery. Laughing and making light of the weather, he looked like a dandy on holiday.

  Going into the weigh-in, oddsmakers had the bout pegged as even. In their thinking, it had simply been too difficult to predict a winner. But the two-day delay shifted opinion and the odds became 7–5 in favor of Sugar Ray—people thought Robinson would better adjust to the postponement than Maxim.

  On the evening of the fight, as the skies darkened and the clock showed four hours before the ten p.m. starting time, the Manhattan temperature rested at 96.5 degrees. Already it was a record in the history of the city for June 25. But at Yankee Stadium, the temperature had not yet peaked.

  In those charged minutes before the fight, it was difficult to ignore the beautiful people, for they were everywhere, alighting from Cadillacs and Jaguars and chauffeur-driven cars. Some who had toted binoculars were gawking through them like bird-watchers. Eddie Green, a realtor and Sugar Ray acquaintance, had a custom car designed—a “Muntz-Jet automobile”—which made its debut outside Yankee Stadium that night. “The car clips off a smooth 140 mph, is outfitted with a private bar and refrigerator,” a reporter would note. “Its lemon-yellow color and out-of-this-world lines caused even the most blasé sportsman to stop and take notice.” Betty Granger, a writer for the Amsterdam News, couldn’t help but notice “the new crop of glamour girls in town from every corner of the country” for the fight. Neither Edna Mae Robinson nor her sister-in-law Evelyn aimed to play second fiddle to any of those girls. Edna Mae turned heads as she sashayed to her Yankee Stadium seat wearing “a full-length coatdress with graduated hemline over an aqua blue sheath strapless dress.” The ensemble was completed by diamond mink cuffs and a black diamond mink stole over her arm. Evelyn Robinson—Bennie Killings, Sugar Ray’s high-stepping valet, was her escort—wore a blue Chantilly lace dress. A string of pearls circled her neck, and her blue gloves matched her blue shoes. Evelyn Robinson had, in fact, recently begun designing her own clothing and appearing in fashion shows. In addition, her face was all over advertisements in the New York City subway system: She was seen in promotional ads for Chesterfield cigarettes.

  Murmurs across the open air signaled the arrival of the fighters in the ring.

  Before the bell, it was hard to dismiss the fifteen-pound weight advantage held by the tall and muscled Maxim. Robinson loosened himself in his corner like an animal shaking off water. The ringing of the bell echoed through the darkness as referee Ruby Goldstein circled the combatants.

  Maxim, slow of movement, a plodder even, went right for Robinson’s body in the opening round. They were heavy punches delivered with the authority of a light heavyweight. Robinson tossed right jabs to Maxim’s upper body. In both the second and third, Maxim continued clinching, offering body blows at the same time; referee Goldstein was forced to break up the hold and warned Maxim about it. Not long into the fourth Robinson landed his most crushing blow yet, a right to Maxim’s jaw that shook him. Robinson continued firing, turning Maxim into a huge punching bag. James Dawson of the Times felt Robinson was now “giving Maxim a boxing lesson and a battering.” Jack Kearns, Maxim’s cagey manager-trainer, was seemingly unworried: His fighter looked unfazed even though welts had formed beneath both eyes from the Robinson blows. Maxim continually stepped toward Robinson as if to the cadences of a slow-moving military drill. Every time Maxim clinched, Robinson reacted again by pelting him with left jabs. Plumes of cigarette smoke rose from the press section. The smoke, and the wattage of all the overhead lights, created a saunalike effect: the ring temperature would eventually reach 104 degrees. Cornermen soaked their respective fighters with wet towels in the seconds between rounds. If Maxim had stamina in the first nine rounds, Robinson had points, as all judges had him ahead at that stage in the scheduled fifteen-rounder. “I’m getting sleepy,” Robinson had told Gainford at the end of the ninth: it was disorientation from the heat. Still, his left hooks and crosses were delivered crisply. But it was also evident that Robinson’s balletic moves—his corner constantly reminded him to keep clear of Maxim’s power, so he was really dancing tonight—were tiring him in the heat. (Just before the tenth started, referee Goldstein himself needed some smelling salts.) Both fighters exchanged lefts, then rights, with Maxim connecting on a solid left-right as the bell rang to end the tenth. Goldstein, his white shirt completely soaked, wobbled to the edge of the ring like a sightless man. The ring doctor came to his aid, and after a quick examination, pronounced Goldstein finished for the night. “I thought I was being roasted to death,” Goldstein would later say. Referee Ray Miller—one of three substitute referees on hand, and a former boxer himself—climbed into the ring to take Goldstein’s place. And now the fight began to turn into a slow-motion minuet, as if a newsreel were broken and droning slowly. The audience was surprised at what they were seeing, something so different from the earlier rounds: Robinson lunging his fists at Maxim as if lifting them through mud; Maxim moving his head as if it weighed a ton; Robinson missing a wild right, his arm moving as if he were waving outward over an expanse of open land; Robinson walking to the wrong corner at the end of the eleventh as if bouncing along a hall of mirrors. Robinson
, always so prideful of his hair, looked as if he had just emerged from a swimming pool. In the twelfth Robinson, summoning all of his willpower, let loose with a series of lefts and rights. Maxim stumbled but did not fall. Robinson wilted again, like a wax man torched by the heat; the humidity had him like a giant claw. He was now fighting, he would later admit, without memory of what had happened in the round before or the round before that. In the thirteenth he flung a right and it knocked him to the floor without touching anything save air. It was a rare sight: Sugar Ray Robinson face-first on the canvas. Maxim, aware of victory now, walked to his corner as casually as if walking through the door of the Stork Club. Robinson’s corner circled him as he sat on the stool, his head slumped. “Can you stand up?” one of the doctors who had gathered around him asked. Robinson’s head went left to right: no. It was over. A thundering noise from many of the more than forty-seven thousand in attendance wafted up and through the darkness. The great Sugar Ray had been defeated.

  It was the third defeat of his career, and the first so-called knock-out. Gainford and Wiley worried about the effects of the heat on their fighter; thoughts he might die flashed between them. With the help of others, they gingerly got him to the dressing room. Robinson’s valet, Bennie Killings, arrived at the door with Edna Mae, who insisted on seeing her husband. Officials at first refused to let her in, not wanting her to see her husband in such a state. Edna Mae prevailed but only for long enough to plant kisses on his face. As she was escorted out, Mayor Impellitteri made his way in. “He didn’t knock me out, did he?” Robinson finally asked the mayor, who told him it was the heat and not Maxim. Manny Berardinelli, Maxim’s brother, had accompanied Maxim to the fight, working his corner. “The heat didn’t get my brother,” he would remember, decades later. “It just got Sugar Ray. Joey won that fight and it was the biggest fight of his career.”

  Robinson was afraid of hospitals and pleaded with doctors in his dressing room not to be taken to one. So he was brought to the home of his mother, Leila. Nearly a dozen people invaded her house, wanting to watch after Sugar Ray. She resented their presence and eventually shooed them away. As the night of her son’s mighty defeat deepened—he had dropped more than ten pounds during the encounter—she caressed his lips with ice chips to provide a degree of comfort.

  The next morning New Yorkers were greeted with bizarre rumors: Goldstein, the referee, had died; Robinson had been hospitalized—and was on the verge of announcing his retirement from the ring. Reports of Goldstein’s death were false; he and his wife only laughed when told about them. Robinson, of course, had never gone to the hospital. As for retirement, he denied it; he said he wanted another shot at Maxim. But Maxim scoffed: “What have I got to gain by fighting him again?” he wondered. He doubted the receipts for another bout would be as remunerative.

  Robinson’s admirers had given him credit for battling so long and well against Maxim. Many blamed the heat. But such sentiments hardly comforted Robinson. Just a day after the fight he rode into downtown Manhattan and sat in a darkened theatre. Movie theatre owners often showed the big fights a day later on the big screen. Robinson sat like an ordinary fight fan with hundreds of others and watched himself on the screen. He stared. His face grew anguished, as if he couldn’t believe he was watching himself fall to defeat. He later harangued Gainford and Wiley for not giving him salt tablets and also for allowing Goldstein to be replaced as the referee. If Goldstein had been given a rest instead, he would have regained his equilibrium. The blame heaped upon them angered Gainford and Wiley, and for the first time ever, they spoke of him with sadness when they were not in his company. Gainford, however, failed to assess the fissures now growing between him and Robinson. It was not a defeat Robinson could let go. He consulted with doctors, listening as they repeated to him, time and time again, that it was the heat that had felled him, that heat could do strange things to the body. And with each reinforcement that it was the heat, Robinson stepped further away from Gainford. In his mind Gainford had spoiled his chance at immortality. It was not a time now for sentimentality. Robinson pleaded for a rematch with Maxim until it became obvious that Maxim and his manager had other plans.

  Sugar Ray had wanted to become a triple titleholder like his idol Henry Armstrong, and Bob Fitzsimmons—and that was out of reach now.

  He sat in the pew of Salem Methodist on Sunday mornings, seeking divine guidance about the future. Both Gainford and Wiley noticed, following the Maxim defeat, that Robinson had begun talking of God, and intervention; of how God just might have wanted to humble him. They rolled their eyes. They reclined inside his nightclub and imagined he would, in time, stop with the religious jabbering. Strolling away from church, however, Robinson avoided talking about any kind of sports, lest parishioners think him one-dimensional.

  The image of old fighters cadging meals in restaurants—in Robinson’s own nightclub even—began to haunt him more and more. Joe Louis had looked awful in those last ring moments, his dressing rooms so funereal.

  Thirty-year-old Sugar Ray Robinson was still a young man by most standards, but in the world of prizefighting that was the age of most uncertainty, full of hindsight and circumspection. He wanted a future as interesting as his past. For the first time since his teenage years—and his brief Army duty—there were no fights being lined up for him in the weeks following the Maxim bout. He could not abide losing, and being the victim of a knockout—even if classified as a TKO—had always been anathema to him. He had started, in the months before the Maxim bout, to have dreams, and they were dreams about death and dying. Church personnel would come across him at the church during the week, sitting in a pew—praying.

  Sugar Ray Robinson found it very difficult to discuss boxing in public. It was a savage sport, but it held a kind of sacredness to him—a mystery. His comments to reporters were always mercifully short; he hid behind musical instruments when away from the ring. So he would not step to a bank of microphones to announce retirement. Because of the Maxim loss, he did not believe he deserved a fancy retirement ceremony. There was no big dinner or farewell event announcing his retirement. He dodged reporters; Gainford and Wiley were dropped from his payroll. It was left to boxing officials in September 1952 to inform the public that the great middleweight champion was leaving the ring. For days and even weeks after, however, stunned fans and watchers debated his career, talked about his major battles in barbershops and diners, in shoeshine parlors and gambling dens. Young fighters talked about his dominance and ring savvy and began collecting magazines that had featured him as keepsakes. Sugar Ray Robinson just slipped away like a ship across dark waves into the night.

  He had for so long cherished his independence. While Joe Louis had become entangled with various boxing promotional organizations to keep a steady income, Sugar Ray avoided them. The season had seen him become philosophical, allowing that “any man with two hands can beat you.” Now, more than ever, the year 1952 closing around him, he was his own man. His life had played out against a backdrop of wondrous rhythm—buried deep and unseen in those old phonograph records he had hauled around as a young fighter—and in the arc of his fighting career he had showed his epic gifts: Seasoned fighters were vanquished, greatness devoured. He had introduced a new version of pugilist to the world. The French had called him Le Sucre Merveilleux—the marvelous Sugar.

  And now, that old dream of entertaining had invaded his senses again. He wanted to do what Lena and Miles were doing. Vaudeville was gone, but cabaret thrived. Every big city had fancy nightclubs, and many of those nightclub denizens had seen his name atop marquees. “Robinson thought he could sing and dance,” recalls newspaperman Jimmy Breslin. “I went to a thing one night, a kind of audition of his. It was in an apartment house on Seventh Avenue. Robinson played the piano and he sang. He did this to let the agents see him for the first time. It was okay, but it was street stuff. It wasn’t professional.”

  Entertainment agents are in the business of talent, sure enough, but also smoke an
d mirrors—why couldn’t a world boxing champion who had good legs, looked good in formal wear, and played piano become a success onstage? Other pugilists—Jack Johnson, Max Baer, Rocky Graziano among them—had pushed their way into the realm of entertainment, though not a one with any manner of distinction. Edna Mae Robinson told her husband she knew he could be successful with his own act. Edna Mae, and so many of her lovely girlfriends, had come out of that swinging and sepia world that Sugar Ray Robinson now intended to enter.

  Who could know—even among the coast-to-coast newspapermen and fight fans, among the mind readers and tarot card holders of Harlem—that, in time, the flip side of the recording of his life would offer another kind of music? Something to complete the symphony of Sugar Ray Robinson—something as great, bruising, and as heartbreakingly operatic as anything in the annals of the fight game itself?

  INTERLUDE Edna Mae and Those Lovely Sepia Women in the Mirror

  They were beautiful, and they were well practiced at turning—at just the right moment—toward the flashbulbs of the camera. It was the beginning of the 1950s when they started to get noticed. Madison Avenue ignored them, but they strutted on the pages of Negro publications—and also the occasional photo display in special editions of Life and Holiday magazines. Many were the offspring of strong-willed mothers who encouraged them to have an appreciation of art and music—and their own beauty. They moved from stage to cabaret setting, taking an occasional role in film. Lena Horne was their maiden voyager. But neither Eartha Kitt nor Dorothy Dandridge, Marva Louis nor Hazel Scott nor Edna Mae Robinson felt intimidated by the glow that Horne had cast. Like Horne, all were convinced of their individual sensuality, beauty, and talent. They cast quite a different spell from the darkly hued and heavyset women—Hattie McDaniel, Butterfly McQueen, Louise Beavers—who had been featured in American cinema, often in the role of maid, a decade earlier. This new group aimed to etch a different persona.