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  His head aching, his nose puffy, Sugar Ray sat bewildered in his dressing room. “The 30-month lay-off was too long,” he tried explaining as reporters jostled to get closer to him. Gainford shook his head, and was heard whispering about a possible return to the stage, intimating he and Robinson might shepherd that convoy of stars around the world with Robinson as emcee. He also hinted at the possibility of Robinson linking with Elaine Robinson (widow of Bojangles Robinson) to form a dance act. There was the scent of desperation. Sugar Ray slipped out of wintry Chicago aboard a train with his wife Edna Mae, heading back to Manhattan.

  There were those who wondered if Tiger Jones would be a prominent addition to Sugar Ray’s epitaph. Wilfred Smith, in the Chicago Tribune, had a one-sentence opening paragraph in his story: “Sugar Ray Robinson hasn’t got it anymore.” Henry Armstrong, the former triple titleholder, had been in the audience that night. “When you’re through, you’re through,” he said of Robinson afterward. Armstrong, usually a quiet man, seemed to enjoy the momentary spotlight, his eyes glinting at the reporters as they flipped the pages of their notebooks before him. Armstrong, of course, might have had his reasons for contributing so enthusiastically to the Robinson epitaph: A young Sugar Ray had beaten the aging Armstrong in that bout at Madison Square Garden in 1943. “Let me tell you, when you get old you don’t get young again,” he offered by way of personal wisdom. Many, of course, found an opportunity to weigh in. “When a Tiger Jones can lick him, it proves his comeback is hopeless,” Arthur Daley of The New York Times said of Robinson, concluding the fighter should retire permanently.

  His obituary seemingly written, Sugar Ray announced he would take a week to ponder his comeback commitment.

  The once-glorious fighter faced a spiraling of his legacy. He could quit—again—and there would be another run of commentary about his career, about the domination and uniqueness of his fighting style. Such an abrupt move would lack a certain kind of poetry because of the Jones denouement, but the realists would catch up to the significance of his ring contributions. Or he could summon the hungry Walker Smith Jr. and retool himself with the fierce spark and energy of his younger self.

  He chose this last path and vanished back to the woods of Greenwood Lake to find the seeds of his youthful rise, when he feared nothing, when he had come out of nowhere.

  It was cold at Greenwood Lake, and the wind was howling and the naked tree branches stung as he ran through them. He was heard whistling. “He kept saying, ‘I’m gonna do it,’” recalls Mel Dick of Robinson’s still-burgeoning triple title dream.

  Sugar Ray’s team set up a bout for him against a fighter by the name of Georgie Small in Boston. No one was worried about Small; the Robinson contingent didn’t even arrive in the city until the day of the fight. Braca and others left Robinson in his hotel room as they went to tend to errands, which always concerned last-minute pre-fight details. When they returned, Sugar Ray, who had leafed through the newspapers while they were away, was fuming. “How come you didn’t tell me this fella killed a man in the ring?” Sugar Ray demanded of Braca. Braca was dumbfounded. Small had killed a fighter by the name of Laverne Roach. Robinson had read about it in the newspapers and the revelation spooked him, turning his mind back to Jimmy Doyle and Cleveland. Sugar Ray told everyone to pack; they were leaving. Braca cried that the fight was to take place that very night, that expense money had already been paid. Sugar Ray instructed Braca to return the $2,500, and everyone departed Boston.

  In Cincinnati on March 29, Robinson garnered a victory against Johnny Lombardo. He gained strength as the fight went on, showing some of the old lightning speed toward the end of the ten-rounder. But only 5,124 were in attendance. That figure was almost laughable; he had fought before larger crowds at some of his Golden Gloves bouts. Sugar Ray’s stature had now fallen so far that the bout wasn’t televised or even broadcast on the radio. He was back fighting in the trenches, clamoring for respect as Walker Smith had once done. He refused to complain. Two weeks later he caught a train to Milwaukee to face Ted Olla. Olla was regarded as a rugged fighter no one was advised to take lightly. Robinson and Olla did little in the first two rounds. Then, in the third, Sugar Ray unleashed a vicious right that stunned Olla, sending him backward. Robinson followed, belting him with eight uninterrupted right punches. He finished him off with a left, which dropped him. Three weeks later—Gainford and Wiley could spot little bits of the old Robinson returning, the speed, the calculation—Robinson was in Detroit, facing Garth Panter. Panter had lost six of his previous seven fights, a fact that gave Sugar Ray little consolation seconds into the first round of their meeting when Panter rocked him with a fierce right. The blow bent Robinson’s legs as he briefly lost his balance and was seen grappling for a piece of rope. Robinson had never been on such a slippery slope as he was now, right this moment, in the ring; any loss would almost certainly prevent boxing authorities from granting him a title bout. In the second and third rounds, Robinson went about slugging Panter with abandon, alternating blows to the head and body. Panter held his own until the eighth round, when Robinson treated him to six consecutive blows that had his hometown crowd up out of their seats. That evening he recorded his fourth straight victory.

  Sugar Ray turned thirty-four years old while in Detroit. Friends threw him a birthday party. The festive occasion seemed to mark the start of a new confidence on the part of everyone around him. Sugar Ray himself was starting to feel young again. Gainford could not tell if his fighter had worn away all the rust, but he dared wonder if he had somehow managed to beat back the unforgiving clock.

  Boxing officials sent word through Robinson’s representatives that, with his recent victories, he was indeed a possibility for Olson. But they wanted him to face one more contender and emerge victorious before getting an invitation to face Olson. Robinson’s camp settled on Rocky Castellani. (It was noticed by many that he was now turning more often to Braca and Glaser for advice than to Gainford and Wiley; the latter two were viewed more and more by Robinson as relics from his past as opposed to the new thinkers whom he felt he needed.)

  Sugar Ray stepped off a train in San Francisco on July 8, and was met with the kind of odds he wasn’t accustomed to: Castellani was a 9–5 favorite. Robinson had two weeks to train before their bout at the Cow Palace.

  Castellani, a Pennsylvania native, was smart and rangy. He had fought a title bout against Olson in the summer of 1954; Olson had needed all fifteen rounds to hold on to his crown. Even Sugar Ray conceded that Castellani was “a hard hitter.”

  From the opening round, Robinson’s strategy was apparent: He was going to go after Castellani’s midsection, hoping to tire him as he sought to deliver targeted blows. But the strategy seemed to wear on Robinson first. (It didn’t help that he suffered a head-butt from Castellani in the second that drew blood.) In the fourth, Castellani connected with two hard left hooks to Sugar Ray’s face. There was a wave of murmurings from the crowd; the reporters down front winced and scribbled into their notebooks; camera flashes popped. Castellani’s corner told him to keep his aggression up and he did so. In the sixth, he threw a trio of punches at Sugar Ray in a span of seconds—a right that slammed into his face, then a left, then another right to the face. That final right was a blow that made Robinson feel as if he had been “whacked with a baseball bat.” He slumped to the canvas. Before the eyes of a national TV audience his title shot was slipping away. Referee Jack Downey began his count. Robinson rose just as Downey reached the count of nine, and his supporters breathed a sigh of relief. He held fast in the seventh. Then, in the eighth, Sugar Ray unleashed a volley of blows to Castellani’s midsection, which had the 9–5 favorite grimacing. Sugar Ray—was hungry young Walker Smith peeking through his eyes?—now seemed fully energized. He let go with a “bombing right”—as the UP reporter saw it—to Castellani’s jaw. He knew then he had Castellani and rushed him to the ropes, firing away at will, lifting the fans from their seats, causing men to wave their cigars in the
air, causing the crowd to unleash primal screams.

  In the stands, in the aisles, outside in front of the Cow Palace, knots of fight fans were talking about him, about how he looked, about the just-displayed splendor of Sugar Ray. A San Francisco reporter thought it one “of the greatest rallies” of Robinson’s career. There had actually been greater rallies in the late 1940s, but one understood the sentiment.

  Eight weeks later, International Boxing Club officials announced a middleweight title fight to take place in Chicago: Bobo Olson against Sugar Ray Robinson. It was the matchup Robinson had been waiting for. Even as the blood was being wiped from his face in the aftermath of the Tiger Jones loss—as he had looked into the doubting eyes of Gainford and others—it was the match he dreamed of.

  Robinson and Olson met in Chicago in late October to sign contracts before the press. The signing took place on the North Side of the city, at the Cameo club. (The signing venue was odd. It was as if boxing officials were trying to remind Robinson of his nightclub performing days.) Sugar Ray was in a light-colored suit, cuff links peeking, and his hair shone against the constantly snapping camera flashes. Olson—dressed more quietly in a dark suit, sans tie—called Robinson “a great fighter,” but allowed as to how he had no intention of giving up his crown.

  “The bout will be a good one,” Sugar Ray promised, “and we guarantee it will not go more than fifteen rounds.”

  The reporters chuckled.

  Then they enjoyed a buffet provided by boxing officials. As they nibbled and chomped, many of the scribes circled Robinson and began complimenting him on the cut of his suit.

  Back in New York, Sugar Ray set off for Greenwood Lake to train. The Olson bout would take place on December 9. He ran miles and miles—through snowstorms even. There was the shriek of wind cutting through the trees, snow billowing over hillsides. George Gainford stared in astonishment. It was as if he, the very man who had discovered Walker Smith Jr., was now seeing something even he couldn’t decipher. It was either unimaginable will—or that trick of time. Two of Robinson’s sparring partners in camp had been unusually rough. Robinson didn’t flinch: “Will we be needing these gorillas anymore?” he asked toward the end of camp. When he was told no, he knocked one out, then the other.

  At night, the fireplace in the camp crackled.

  Sugar Ray Robinson—getting old, as Henry Armstrong had observed—seemed to be turning into a specimen younger than his years.

  “The world was moving for me again” is how Sugar Ray felt.

  The Negro men coming in and out of the Conrad Hilton, in long coats and fedoras, with copies of the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, and Chicago Defender tucked under their arms, blowing the cold from their hands, nodding to staffers: These were Sugar’s men. They considered it their duty to watch over him in the days leading up to the title fight. On the day before the fight, they noticed how calm he seemed to be. He played blackjack. After lunch, they all stepped outside; Sugar Ray wanted to go for a walk. They headed off, crunching snow beneath their feet. When Robinson’s hat was blown from his head, they all leaned from the sidewalk to retrieve it for him, curls of vapor wafting from their animated mouths. As they continued walking, some were heard huffing and puffing, but not Sugar Ray. They wanted to turn around, kept reminding him of the cold, but he paid them no mind, walking like an explorer. Before they wound up back at the hotel they had walked two miles. In those two miles not one soul had recognized the fighter.

  Maybe Bobo Olson should not have spent all that time hunting in the Illinois woods before the fight.

  Maybe the challenger—the oddsmakers had him an underdog at 4 to 1—had simply reached back into time, bringing back the best of who he had ever been. And maybe Bobo Olson, eight years younger, could not compete effectively against even a resurrection of the best that Sugar Ray Robinson had ever been. Maybe the national TV audience thrilled Robinson in ways he couldn’t imagine. Maybe he was upset at those across the country—and those among the twelve thousand in the arena—who didn’t believe in him. Some, he knew, were too young to remember his glory days of the 1940s; he wanted, even after losing to Jones, the benefit of the doubt. Maybe the camera flash and the whistling got to him right from the beginning; and maybe he knew what he planned to do all along, from the moment he left his hotel to the moment he had his Frager gloves slipped onto his delicate hands and his hair smoothed back on his head. Maybe he realized, as never before, the utter aloneness of the fighter—despite the hangers-on, the crowds, the adulation, it was a pitiless profession. Maybe he realized all of that, and the volume of those sensations rang in his ear alongside the roar of the crowd when he slammed a right into Bobo Olson’s chest in the first round, stunning the champion. Olson—nearly bald, which always made him look older than his years—began to look like he didn’t even belong in a match with Sugar Ray Robinson, began to look, in fact, like a hardware store salesman who had been dropped into the middle of a boxing ring. Two minutes into the second round, with the punches from Sugar Ray coming at a furious clip, he unloaded a right uppercut into Olson. The thudding noise didn’t even have time to reverberate before Sugar Ray unfurled a left hook. The one-two combination dropped Olson. He went back with a surprised look on his face, as if blasted by a hurricane-force wind. The moment lifted the fans from their seats, riveted the national TV cameras to Robinson’s face, and stopped the popcorn vendors cold in the aisles. Robinson crouched nearer the fallen Olson, as if he were pleading with him to stay down—yet preparing to deliver another wallop. Olson was listless. Sugar Ray had fought, in fact, as if his very dignity had been at stake; as if he considered it a huge intrusion on his time to face, yet again, a fighter he had bested twice in the past. Referee Frank Sikora stood over Olson, counting him out. Sugar Ray Robinson was once again middleweight champion of the world. Gainford draped the white towel around his neck. Fans tried touching him, stretching their arms and hands through the ropes. Robinson had come out of retirement and recaptured his belt. He cried, sobbing like a child as he leaned into the ropes. Gainford and Braca and Glaser looked at him with bewilderment. He was not the type to sob. It was pure joy.

  Later that night, they packed the Archway (the Chicago lounge), and drinks flowed as his admirers pumped their fists at one another. Women smudged his cheeks with kisses as jazz tunes floated in the air. This was his world, and he so loved being back in it—the fine and easy thrill of victory swirling around him in whoops and laughter like something lifted from a phonograph; women, willowy and sepia-toned, and the scent of their nutmeg face powder like some kind of sexual language written into the nightclub air; men crowding him like proud and whiny boys. He bought drinks without ever reaching in his pants pockets, noticed that the faces of strangers lit up at the sound of his husky voice as if a switch had been flipped. He noticed faces outside pressed against the windows, peering inside, wanting to get inside just to touch him. This was the joy he had missed—what he called “the sweet sounds” of victory—which he mistakenly thought he had tired of. Deep into the night, however, he began looking around, his eyes resting on certain figures for unusually long amounts of time. He convinced himself he now had to measure those who had believed in him against those who had not.

  All his life Sugar Ray had had few close male friends. After his father abandoned him, he would come to find women—his mother, his sisters, the kind ladies at Salem Methodist—more dependable. Men—his father, so many boxing promoters—weren’t trustworthy. While he had come close to establishing a rapport with Joe Louis, they simply traveled in different worlds. George Gainford had been around Sugar Ray nearly two decades now, but money was always the glue that held them together—and Sugar Ray was the one who made the money. Peek behind the curtain of his entourage and all its members had specific duties: manicurist, hairstylist, wardrobe attendant. In Sugar Ray’s mind, the entourage was business—and his business was style as opposed to bonhomie. He knew, as well as any fighter, that fighters are alone. Little wonder he admire
d those who pursued solitary endeavors—the jazz trumpeter, the poet, the singer onstage in front of a microphone. To Red Smith, the esteemed sportswriter, Sugar Ray was always an enigma, “a brooding genius, a darkly dedicated soul who walks in a lonely majesty, a prophet without honor, an artist whom nobody, but nobody, understands.” Now, at least internally, he was mostly alone. He would strip himself to remake himself. It would comfort him as he went about forging his new identity: a fighter looking for greatness once again.

  Sugar Ray Robinson’s financial empire, however, was still crumbling. The IRS by now had attached themselves to his life, skimming upwards of three quarters of his take from some fights for back taxes. He refused, however, to allow it to affect his jet-set lifestyle: He flew twenty-two people, all expenses paid, to Los Angeles five months after the last Olson fight for the rematch. The California air was lovely. For training, however, Sugar Ray preferred austere surroundings and set up camp in the desert, near San Jacinto. Then, on the evening of May 18, over at the aging Wrigley Field, he proceeded to knock out Olson again—in round four. The reporters working for the local dailies shook their heads and so did the movie stars who had attended the fight: It was all so mesmerizing.

  Sugar Ray Robinson was now forcing columnists and critics everywhere to reassess the depth of their knowledge about him. “It turns out now that we buried Ray before he was dead” is how Russ Cowans of the Chicago Defender put it.

  He would fight only one more time in 1956, defeating Bob Provizzi in November in a ten-rounder in New Haven. Sugar Ray longed for an opportunity to return “home,” to Madison Square Garden, the scene of so much of his glory. He had not fought there in five years. It seemed like, and in some senses was, another lifetime; it also seemed like yesterday to the born-again fighter.