Sweet Thunder Page 43

  In the sixth—as they were trading blow for blow—Fullmer made a mighty lunge toward Robinson. Robinson clutched Fullmer and their momentum sent both fighters tumbling against the middle ring rope. The rope snapped; everyone gasped. One could hear the jangled clatter of typewriters as reporters quickly moved to get them out of the way. At the beginning of the thirteenth, Fullmer cracked Robinson with a hard left to the face. In the next round he delivered punishing blows to Robinson’s midsection. It would take a knockout on Robinson’s part to swing the momentum away from Fullmer, and he did not, on this night, have a knockout punch in him. Sugar Ray took the loss with equanimity. “There’s nothing I can say but that the better man won tonight,” he said into the glare of TV cameras.

  In Chicago for their second bout, champion Fullmer was a 3–1 favorite. Martin Kane of Sports Illustrated, who had seen the first encounter, believed Robinson faced an uphill battle: “Instead of thinking his way through 15 rounds he will have to fight his way through a majority of them,” he wrote. “It could be not only a better fight but a shorter one, for … Gene Fullmer … may find the confidence this time to swing from his heels in the early rounds and thus weaken Robinson for a TKO.”

  Fullmer began their second encounter by once again charging Robinson. Only this time Sugar Ray wasn’t surprised; he absorbed every blow. In the second, Fullmer unleashed a torrent of rights and lefts to Robinson’s midsection. It was hard not to marvel at Fullmer’s stoicism; in the third, Robinson pounded him with left hooks. As Nichols of the Times would put it: “There were few indeed who had any hope or confidence that Sugar Ray could ‘take out’ the hitherto armor-plated Fullmer with a punch.” By the end of the fourth round, the judges had split the rounds between the two fighters. Many were twitching, wondering if Sugar Ray would have the stamina to keep going.

  Then, 1:27 into the fifth round, there it was, that sweet and blinding and wondrous left hook, coming through the ages and into Fullmer’s hour, a silencing to all the doubters and nonbelievers. The crowd roared; Fullmer was collapsing to the canvas; Robinson was dancing with the knowledge that the left had done its damage. The referee began a count, which Fullmer couldn’t hear—he was out cold, asleep to the noises of Chicago Stadium and the footsteps of Sugar Ray. At the count of eight, Fullmer did attempt to rise, but he was slow, like a groggy bear, and he collapsed again. “I was just maneuvering him, trying to draw him in with a right,” Robinson said afterward. Fullmer came to back in his dressing room.

  “What happened?” he demanded to know, staring for an answer from his brother Don.

  “He hit you twice and then came up with that left hook,” Don explained rather succinctly. “That did it.”

  Robinson may have been the most stylish of fighters, but Fullmer had come up against another Robinson gift—resilience. “Robinson has to be worked over hard or he will stay with you forever,” Fullmer had confided before the match to a Utah reporter.

  It was difficult for Sugar Ray Robinson to turn his attentions to the mundane problems of domestic life. Early fame had spoiled him. But he always lavished attention and concern upon his sisters, Evelyn and Marie. In the early spring of 1959 Marie fell ill; it was cancer. She was hospitalized in Manhattan and Sugar Ray rushed to her side. The prognosis delivered by doctors was grim, but Sugar Ray would not accept it. He started making phone calls. He had plenty of contacts—not the least Walter Winchell—in the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund. He had raised all that money for the fund himself, and now he needed that research to save his sister. He told his mother he’d find the best doctors anywhere in the world. He told her that their Marie—lovely and vivacious Marie, who had accompanied her brother on so many out-of-town fights—would recover. Robinson prayed at Salem Methodist, the church where he had learned how to make men bleed. The family brought her to her mother’s house in early April. “I’m so sick, I’m so tired,” she sighed to her brother. On April 19, 1959, Marie died. Sugar Ray was distraught. He went into a tailspin, believing that his world “would die with her.”

  By the first week of December 1960, he had landed in Los Angeles. Robinson and Fullmer were stepping into the ring again. The first encounter was judged a draw. The draw created a strange scene inside the ring, with the hands of both Fullmer and Robinson being raised. (The strangeness continued—though it wasn’t strange for Hollywood—as a gorgeous Italian beauty, Gina Gianucci, stepped to center ring. Gainford moved to the microphone: “It’s fitting now to say that Robinson will be leading man in a feature length movie to be made in Rome next summer and this pretty lady is his leading lady.” Gianucci smiled; wolf whistles shot through the air; Sugar Ray smiled. The movie was never realized.) Hack Miller, of the Deseret News in Salt Lake City, was at ringside. “I believed Robinson fought the best fight that night,” Miller later said. Robinson was old, Fullmer young—and “the mere fact that aging Robinson had held the young slugger from Utah to an unpopular draw was itself a victory for Ray,” commented Miller. The two fought a fifteen-rounder in Las Vegas the following year. It was full of brutal hitting, and there were reporters at ringside who wondered how Robinson could withstand the punishment, only, in the fourteenth and fifteenth, to begin wondering how Fullmer could withstand the punishment. There was a thirty-five-second nonstop flurry in the final round, blows greeted with blows, uppercuts followed by right and left hooks, the referee circling furiously. At fight’s end, there was blood on each fighter’s trunks. That night went to Fullmer; the overall war, many felt, to Robinson.

  Sugar Ray had once again played his card—an abrupt pullout if his financial demands weren’t met—in negotiations with the Fullmer camp. Fullmer had never seen anything like it: “He was tough on the contract negotiations. He wanted all the money, and everything else in his favor. He wanted everything his way.”

  As the fifties had closed around him, Sugar Ray could look around and see a kind of golden age of boxing passing. Five middleweight titles lay behind him, in addition to a welterweight title. He had dominated the forties and fifties. He had done what only the greatest in his sport had been able to do: win in a titanic fashion and snatch the rare defeats back with the same style. He was “the miracle man of boxing,” according to a 1959 assessment in Nat Fleischer’s Ring magazine. Fight managers and promoters were always looking for the next great fighter—the next Sugar Ray, the next Joe Louis. Fleischer believed he saw the next great heavyweight a year later, at the Olympics in Rome—the type of fighter whose style and grace made him think of both Robinson and Louis. The fighter was a Kentucky schoolboy and he fascinated Fleischer. The honey-colored and broad-shouldered Cassius Clay, a light heavyweight, had come out of Louisville with a dazzling reputation. In one of the celebrated matches that rocked that summer’s Olympics, the Kentuckian bloodied Zbigniew Pietrzykowski, a tough left-handed Polish fighter. “Clay’s last-round assault on Pietrzykowski was the outstanding hitting of the tournament,” Fleischer proclaimed—and a Fleischer proclamation was not one to take lightly. In Rome three boxers had emerged with gold medals: Eddie Crook, Wilbert McClure, and Clay. And of those three, everyone left talking about Clay.

  Shortly before heading off to Rome, Cassius Clay had in fact ventured to Harlem. He wanted to meet Sugar Ray Robinson, whom he idolized as did so many young fighters. Dick Schaap, a man-about-town and the sports editor of Newsweek magazine, escorted young Clay. The sights of Harlem entranced the young fighter—street-corner preachers, men and women in colorful attire, big cars. Robinson’s Cadillac came into view. Clay, hungry for some possible pointers before heading abroad, thought he might get a sit-down session with Robinson. But Robinson had no interest in the Olympics or Olympians. He offered Clay and Schaap perfunctory hellos and that was pretty much it. His club was failing; he had work to do. “That Sugar Ray, he’s something,” Clay muttered, hurt. “Someday I’m gonna own two Cadillacs—and a Ford for just getting around in.”

  The young Cassius Clay couldn’t have known it, but the great Sugar Ray Robinson was on the ver
ge of financial ruin. There were catchy names on the doors of his businesses in Harlem—Knockout Productions, Sugar Ray’s Entertainment Corporation—but they meant nothing. He signed for a January 22, 1960, fight in Boston against Paul Pender, a former fireman who packed a wallop of a punch. Robinson held sparring sessions on the ground floor inside Filene’s, the downtown Boston department store. Huge crowds gathered outside the store to peer in at him through the windows as he skipped rope and shadowboxed. One noontime crowd numbered upward of two thousand. The newspapers often made reference to the thirty-nine-year-old Robinson’s age. Some in the crowds had stared at him through the windows with wide-eyed stillness—as if he were a museum piece.

  He would receive $49,000 for the Pender fight. (Forty-nine grand used to absorb traveling expenses for European jaunts for his whole entourage—now it was money for bills and old debts and Uncle Sam.) Pender, listless for much of the fight, connected on a volley of blows in the eleventh from which Robinson found it hard to recover. Pender won the fifteen-rounder, thus relieving Sugar Ray of his crown. But the crown itself was only sanctioned by New York, Massachusetts, and Europe. (Gene Fullmer held the National Boxing Association crown, the more legitimate of the two.)

  Afterward, the gentlemen from the Fourth Estate crowded around Sugar Ray. Gainford cracked wise, comparing his fighter’s loss to the Brink’s robbery—a reference to the 1950 Boston heist staged by some local misfits. (It was quite a successful heist, until they were caught.) Losing to the likes of Paul Pender? A fighter who had retired four times from the ring? The reporters wanted to know why; they wondered what had happened to their miracle worker. Robinson laughed. “Man, I’m old,” he said.

  But on that day in 1960, before he took off for Rome to start his own legend at the 1960 Summer Olympics, the impressionable Cassius Clay saw only the Cadillac, the name atop the outside of the bar, and the glittering aura of his hero.

  If he had been one to play and spend more time with his two sons, perhaps Sugar Ray would not have worried so much about his own travails. But fatherhood bewildered him. He thought his sons might simply love him as so many fans did. But a son comes to need a father more than a hero.

  Sugar Ray was back to deep brooding, sitting in his office above the nightclub, whistling: “Sweet Georgia Brown,” “The Very Thought of You.” He still threw some elegant soirees at his nightclub, and his New Year’s Eve affairs were the rage. But the flow of champagne was drying up. Even the great Harlem power broker Lloyd Dickens, who had helped usher in the age of the modern Harlem politico by helping to finance campaigns for Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and others, couldn’t save Robinson’s businesses. He had looked at the books and winced. In 1962, the shuttering began—the barbershop, the lingerie shop, even the fabled nightclub. The community’s decline had slowly begun in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Count Basie had all abandoned Harlem for fancy homes out in Queens. Minton’s Playhouse, Harlem’s most notable jazz spot, was struggling, with many of the musicians who had contributed to its fame—Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clark—now playing more frequently in Greenwich Village. “The heyday of Negro entertainment is long gone,” wrote a Harlem columnist back in 1949. “Nobody seems to care … Only a few places offer anything approaching a show, and even so it’s nothing like the days when Harlem jumped.” After the death of his sister Marie, patrons saw Robinson at the club less and less frequently. Accountants—already worried about the chunks of his income the IRS was siphoning for back taxes—informed him its upkeep was draining his finances. His last New Year’s Eve gala at the club was 1961. That night he watched patrons leave, then sat on a stool in front of the long bar. The mirror bounced his reflection back at him: Times were changing. The gyrating and noisy and unpredictable sixties had arrived; it was a whole new era for Sugar Ray.

  There were, as well, marital woes. Always a nocturnal figure, he stayed out later and later; sometimes he did not return home. Edna Mae would not have any more of it. He had never really been a family man. Edna Mae liked company in her home—family members, aunts, cousins—and their presence often grated on Sugar Ray. They took her side in arguments, which caused him to flee toward the emotional security of his sisters and mother. He had lived so close to the stars his whole adult life it had given him a certain sense of indomitability. Now his feet were down on the ground and it confused him. The losses seemed almost complete when Edna Mae filed for divorce.

  Had there been darker currents at work in the unraveling of the celebrated marriage of Sugar Ray Robinson and Edna Mae? All those smiles, all that glamour! Of course, the curtain that separates any marriage from the public can sway in a tricky and deceptive manner. In the years after Sugar Ray’s death, his son, Ray Jr.—who seems to have suffered the not uncommon mixed feelings about a famous father who did not give him the needed attention—charged that his father slapped his mother at times during the marriage. The charges were later mentioned in a cable TV documentary. Robinson’s allies—so close to their hero—refused to believe it. “Edna Mae never told me about any abuse,” recalls Mel Dick, Robinson’s longtime friend. “I’m not saying it didn’t happen. Who knows? But Ray Jr. never got along with his father and always had issues with him.” Still, there is little doubt that the marriage had moments of volatility. In 1989, a magazine writer visited Edna Mae at her two-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Pictures of Sugar Ray were everywhere; the prizefighter had been dead less than a year. Edna Mae was then employed as a personal exercise trainer at a local YWCA. The former dancer had kept herself in shape through the years. She said she was working on a book (never published) about her and Sugar Ray. “He was so different from anything I’d ever known or experienced,” she confided to the writer. “We were so opposite to have been attracted [to each other], but they do say that is the way it works.” She talked of the multiple miscarriages she had had during the union; she hinted at his womanizing. “No matter what he did—and he could be a rascal—I was always totally his when he fought,” she said. The issue of how much money she got in the divorce settlement, a paltry $23,000, still grated on her. Edna Mae, who never remarried, had found it difficult to bring other men into her life. “I tried to have other romances, buy my son was just so unhappy with any relationship that I had.” There were hearty men who approached her, but soon they were gone. “They shied away because they felt like they could not walk in his wake. And you know, they may have been right, because there were a lot of things about him that I thought were unique and belonged only to him.”

  Sugar Ray turned forty-one years old in 1962. What would a forty-one-year-old Negro do? There were no inquiries or job offers from executive suites. Why, the great Henry Armstrong was barely making twenty grand a year working that recreation center job out in St. Louis. Joe Louis had gone through another couple of marriages. To make ends meet, he had turned to refereeing wrestling bouts. He had also turned to snorting cocaine and keeping nefarious company.

  Sugar Ray dreamed of options. Hollywood? The only black athlete who had crossed over—and was actually getting work—was former professional football player Woody Strode, who was playing cowboys. The young Cassius Clay, turning pro, had made a pitch to Robinson about becoming his manager. But Robinson thought Clay bewildering and strange; he himself had never been one to engage in braggadocio. And here was Clay, howling from restaurant tables, making knockout predictions, composing poetry in honor of himself.

  On top of it all, Clay kept company with the Muslims. When Clay told Robinson that Elijah Muhammad could promise him $700,000 if he converted to Islam, Sugar Ray truly thought the young man insane. He declined the offer to manage Clay.

  Sugar Ray fought an undistinguished fighter by the name of Denny Moyer in New York in 1962. He picked up a $20,000 check—though he lost. A year earlier Robinson had beat Moyer in a ten-rounder. The rematch got Robinson on the cover of Ring magazine: “Sugar Ray Robinson—Finished?” the headline asked.

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sp; In 1963 there was a three-month period when he did not fight at all. He convinced himself he missed the rings, the crowds. George Gainford was still around. So was Harry Wiley. (Braca and his contingent had left over the issue of money they felt Robinson owed them from revenues.) He told them to pack up; they were going back out on the road. There would indeed be more fights. As a matter of fact, they were going to Paris. The French still loved him despite the failure of his cabaret act over there. He knew they did: Le Sucre Merveilleux, the marvelous Sugar.

  Suddenly there seemed more of a political bite along the streets of Harlem. Now seemed a time to morph style into action, to channel song and poem and trumpet in the direction of protest. The children of Little Rock had made way for the college kids on Negro campuses. Lena Horne knew it was coming, and she was energized by it: A rolling boulder headed directly for the Kennedy White House. Negro college students had staged sit-ins against segregation in Greensboro, North Carolina; there were threatened boycotts of retail chains in the North. Man had not yet landed on the moon, but the sixties had landed upon America.

  In 1960, that building-up year where there would be no turning back, Lena was sitting in Luau, a Hollywood restaurant. A waiter told another customer he’d be right back, kind of bragging that he was serving Lena Horne. “Where is Lena Horne, anyway?” the customer said, in a voice steeped in booze. “She’s just another nigger.” Horne heard it and popped up from her seat in a rage: “Here I am, you bastard! Here’s the nigger you couldn’t see.” And with that she picked up an ashtray and hurled it at the bigot. There was blood—his—and publicity. The young protesters everywhere now knew where lovely Lena stood. She was soon featured on the cover of an arts periodical, SHOW magazine. The cover shows a curtain—white—torn generously at the center with Lena looking through, out onto America. The caption: “Breaking the White Barrier: Lena Horne Speaks on the Artist and the Negro Revolt.”