Sweet Thunder Read online

  Attorney General Robert Kennedy had asked the writer James Baldwin—whippet-slender, Baldwin was a seer—to gather a group of Negro artists for a meeting to discuss the protests that were forming in certain pockets of the country. Kennedy feared adverse publicity if the meeting were held at the White House; his father’s swank apartment in Manhattan would do. Among others, Baldwin brought along Harry Belafonte, the handsome young movie star; Lorraine Hansberry, whose 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, about the humanity of a Negro family and their struggle for a home—its title was taken from a Langston Hughes poem—had entranced Broadway; and Lena Horne. Kennedy had never been surrounded by so much Negro genius and beauty—male and female—and his eyes darted about furiously. He reminded those present of the administration’s efforts to make life better for Negroes; he also told the gathering that President Kennedy was worried that radical Negroes and Muslims joining together could cause trouble. He seemed to miss the point that the American Negro had been in anguish since slavery. “You don’t have no idea what trouble is,” a young man at the gathering piped up. “Because I’m close to the moment where I’m ready to take up a gun.” His name was Jerome Smith and he had been beaten viciously during the Freedom Rides into Mississippi. His talk resembled a garbled sermon, but it was heartbreaking—jailings, beatings, all for the downtrodden of America. It nearly brought Lena to tears. Afterward, she told Baldwin and Belafonte she’d do anything they needed her to do.

  Not many outside Negro America knew about the Spingarn Medal. Inside Negro America, however, it was a kind of Nobel Prize, an annual honor bestowed by the NAACP since 1915 upon a figure who had scaled Olympian heights in America. The list of finalists for the award in 1960 included poet Gwendolyn Brooks, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, the leaders of the Greensboro sit-ins, and Langston Hughes. Hughes was by far the most prolific Negro writer in America—plays, librettos, translations, poetry, short stories, novels; he hit to all corners of the literary playing field. “Have lived longer than any other known Negro solely on writing—from 1925 to now without a regular job!!!” he had reminded a colleague in 1958. The Spingarn Medal went to the fifty-eight-year-old Hughes. He was overwhelmingly delighted. His protest poems had fallen out of favor in the 1950s, viewed as relics. But now, with white and black college kids crisscrossing the nation to protest inequality, carrying paperback copies of his collected poetry, Langston Hughes was in vogue. At the Spingarn ceremony, Hughes said he accepted the honor on behalf of Negro people: “Without them, on my part, there would have been no poems; without their hopes and fears and dreams, no stories; without their struggles, no dramas; without their music, no songs.”

  In final retirement with wife Millie. They lived quietly in Los Angeles, uninvolved with the world of boxing.

  1963–1966

  autumn leaves

  HER NAME WAS MILLIE BRUCE, and she was quietly beautiful. She was the kind of woman who slipped into places. Her voice was soft and her stature regal. Edna Mae Robinson had been a noisy beauty, someone who wished to be seen and then fawned over. Millie Bruce’s approach was different. She was one of those Negro women in Los Angeles who floated with a certain classiness around the strange jungle of Hollywood, even if Hollywood was mostly unwelcoming to her: But her brother-in-law was Eddie Anderson, Jack Benny’s “Rochester” sidekick. Eddie got invited to places and sometimes Millie went along. A woman he knew in San Francisco had told Sugar Ray Robinson to look her friend Millie up in Los Angeles. It was during his two-year whirl in the world of show business. On a dance floor, he tried to make a romantic move. She pushed him away. She would not sleep with a married man, even it was Sugar Ray Robinson. Her pride made him desire her more. As the years rolled by, they kept in intermittent contact. She read about him in the newspapers; he phoned.

  In 1962—Sugar Ray and Edna Mae had divorced that year—Millie was in New York City with a girlfriend, seeing the sights. He offered to take them out. It was an old trick of his: Take a woman to a jazz club where, invariably, he knew a member of the band, was invited up onstage to play—drums or piano—and proceeded to wow his date. When his musician friend Curly Hummer called him to the stage at the Spotlight on Fifty-second, Millie and her friend—he’d driven them over in the Cadillac, the top down, the weather lovely—couldn’t help but be impressed. He sent yellow roses, gifts. They became an item, and in time she was being referred to as his fiancée.

  In 1963, he took Millie to Europe for a string of fights scheduled for the last three months of the year. (Robinson was apolitical most of his life and skipped the historic March on Washington in the late summer of 1963. He simply couldn’t bear to tear himself away from the quest to restore his reputation, which he bizarrely felt was falling apart. There was something else: Sugar Ray had never had any links to the political and ministerial world of the South. He had no conduit to connect him with the galvanizing Alabama preacher Martin Luther King Jr., who had, for several years, been knocking at the country’s moral conscience. King knew Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr., Ossie Davis, and Sidney Poitier. Robinson, always an independent, considered such linkages nothing more than cliquishness, a thing he couldn’t abide. Hollywood’s Negro elite showed at the march: Sammy, Ossie, Harry, Sidney Poitier, as well as Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, James Garner, Charlton Heston, and thousands of others.)

  In Europe, with Millie, there were cabarets to attend, there was shopping to be done, music to be heard. Not to mention the myriad receptions held in his honor. As for the fights, they were forgettable. His opponents were unknown on American shores. There was Armand Vanucci, in Paris. (Boxing seemed a pastime for Vanucci. His full-time job was working as a security guard at the Louvre, keeping an eye on the Mona Lisa.) There was Fabio Bettini in Lyons; Emile Saerens in Brussels; and Andre Davier in Grenoble. Robinson won them all, save one, a draw against Bettini. He claimed it was part of a master plan to get another title shot. George Gainford wolfed down steak and eggs in the fine hotels and nodded his head. A title shot? Gainford thought otherwise. To avoid a serious injury from one of these fighters who might unload a lucky knockout punch was enough of a challenge. Sugar Ray fought ten times in 1964, which, considering he also turned forty-three that year, was astonishing. But still, his friends—Mel Dick, Miles Davis—pleaded with him to quit. “He kept saying, ‘I want to be champion again,’” recalls Mel Dick. Millie offered the blinding love of a fiancée. “He’s a wonderful fighter, a wonderful human being,” she said, refusing to judge the lackluster competition he now faced. “I’ve never known a man like him. He’s something else.” And off they went, all over—Millie and George and Harry and Sugar Ray, first-class airline tickets, George draping the blue silk robe around his shoulders. (Robinson had recently gotten a $120,000 refund from the IRS, after a lengthy legal battle, because they had wrongfully taken too much of his past earnings.) Then lingering in the dressing room afterward, slipping Robinson’s belongings into a bag. They’d been doing this now for more than twenty-five years, a quarter of a century. Greasing the palms of bellhops, commenting on one another’s sartorial tastes, laying a little dough and a couple of tickets in the hands of the limo driver.

  He surprised Millie in May and swooped her off to Las Vegas. They married in a small chapel. The only witness was the taxi driver, who waited so he could get them back to the airport. If Millie had dreamed of a fancy wedding she didn’t complain. “Oh, it’s lovely, Ray, it’s lovely,” she said of the chapel.

  There was a June 1965 bout in Hawaii. Millie loved the Hawaiian scenery; inside the ring against hard-hitting Stan Harrington, Sugar Ray took a pummeling. He would remember the night for its sociological lessons. “Man,” he told a Washington Post reporter, “that Hawaii is crazy. They got all kinds of [racial] mixes. I might spend a month there. They loved me. They kept me bowing for fifteen minutes before and after the bout. I sold the beautiful arena out for the first time.” It was left to George Gainford to explain what went wrong in the land of palm trees: “That Harrington in Honolu
lu bangs Ray’s head with his head in the sixth. Ray’s no bleeder, but an artery breaks. Only way I can stop it is by using a solution that—well, one drop in the man’s eyes and he’s blind. Hell, we don’t need to win bad enough to go blind. Last four rounds my man sees so much blood he thinks the Red Cross is pumping it.”

  There was something rather tender about watching the post-fight ministrations of Sugar Ray and Gainford now. They moved slower, they grunted more often from aches and pains, they took their own sweet time in leaving the dressing room. They had spent more than two decades on the road with each other, and often the distrust fell away to simple concern and familiarity. They both claimed they were chasing Joey Giardello, the reigning middleweight champion. The Brooklyn-born Giardello had been fighting professionally since the age of eighteen. He was merciless and fearless. On April 20, 1960, Giardello and Gene Fullmer had waged a savage head-butting contest at the fieldhouse on the Montana State University campus. That had resulted in a draw. Giardello finally took the middleweight crown three years later by defeating Dick Tiger in Atlantic City. Six months earlier he had defeated Sugar Ray Robinson in a ten-rounder in Philadelphia. The loss pained Robinson and stoked his determination. “Nobody has ever been a champion six times,” he said, while the sixties churned outside, beyond his concern and own current dreams.

  There was a May 24, 1965, fight in Tijuana, Mexico, against Memo Ayon. Both Gainford and Robinson figured they’d scoot into Mexico, whip this nobody Ayon, then maybe catch some rest in Los Angeles, visiting Millie’s folks. It didn’t work out that way; Ayon won the ten-rounder. Gainford howled it was stolen: “Ray beats this Memo Ayon person down in Tijuana like the United States whipped ol’ Hitler,” he tried explaining. “Even the Mexican newspapers say we win [sic] eight rounds.” But few believed his translation skills. According to Robinson, Ayon “came to me after the fight and said, ‘Mister Ray, I sorry.’”

  Millie didn’t care about the losses. He was a legend and the legend was still beautiful. She liked just watching him move about hotel rooms, swan through airports. She liked how he’d turn, in a small crowd, to glimpse her. They were down in the Dominican Republic, and there he was, in yet another orphanage, in another hospital, talking to the impoverished kids, holding their little hands, slipping dollars here and there, sometimes larger bills. It was easy to see his longtime concern for the downtrodden and oppressed—he came from their class. Now in memory of his sister Marie he seemed to be visiting the sick even more, dropping bills into the hands of nurses and children. “He’s a kind man,” Millie said. “In Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Stockholm—he goes to visit hospitals, shut-ins, all kinds of handicapped people. And he asks no credit for it. He does it even when he’s not promoting a fight. He tells me, ‘[Millie], my luck’s been good. I got enough to share.’”

  In the summer heat of 1965 Robinson landed in Washington, D.C., for a bout. The city hadn’t hosted professional boxing in two years; the name Sugar Ray Robinson was great publicity. His mother, Leila, was ailing back in Manhattan; he had gone over to the hospital to visit her before leaving New York. “Jab him. Jab him and follow through,” she advised her son.

  Sugar Ray and Millie took a suite at the lovely Mayflower Hotel. George was down the hall, and soon ordering room service. Robinson’s opponent was “Young” Joe Walcott—no relation to, but managed by, heavyweight Jersey Joe Walcott. Robinson believed fighters like Walcott were his only path to Giardello. Walcott was another nobody. “I want to retire as champion,” Sugar Ray said in the nation’s capital. “That’s the way I think it ought to be. I have faith that’s the way it will be.” Millie roamed around the city with him in the days leading up to the fight. “Of course Ray’s in shape!” she snapped at a question. “He runs every morning in New York. Twice around the reservoir. I know, because I go with him. I don’t run, but I go.” There was a workout in a small gym at the Washington Jewish Community Center. A few dozen milled around, waiting to be let in. “OK,” Gainford instructed when Robinson was in place. “Let the crowd in. He’ll skip rope.” The crowd numbered less than fifty. In his heyday, hundreds would shove through the doors of the Manhattan gyms just to get a glimpse of him. Gainford admitted he hadn’t done much research on Walcott. “Why, ten years ago the commission wouldn’t have permitted the match,” Gainford told a writer in Washington. “Ray would have beat him on his lunch hour.”

  It was just a wee bit past the dinner hour when fans started streaming into the Washington Coliseum on the night of June 24, on an evening when city leaders intended to showcase the return of boxing to their city, an evening with the great Sugar Ray Robinson in his dressing room—his name in capital letters on the marquee outside—ready to take center ring. Ed Weaver, the promoter, was hoping for 10,000 paying customers. He fell short by more than half: 3,800 showed. Challenger Walcott arrived at the Coliseum by taxi, wearing sunglasses and sucking on a toothpick. Sugar Ray, Millie, and Gainford arrived by chauffeur-driven car. Alighting, they cut a suave path, Millie in a white-sequined dress, the manager and fighter so easy it seemed they were engaged in a pantomime of footsteps and nods.

  Inside, the attendees screamed in unison at the sight of Sugar Ray, the five-time middleweight champion. Millie never saw the forty thousand-plus crowds at Yankee Stadium. She thought the 3,800 in attendance nothing to be ashamed about.

  Sugar Ray began pummeling Walcott in the early rounds, upper-cuts and hooks. Walcott looked confused, glancing to his corner for advice. At one point Sugar Ray faked a left—he could have delivered it, but there would have been consequences. In days gone by, he wouldn’t have cared about the consequences. Those days were locked away in memory and grainy newsreel footage. In the Coliseum, there erupted a strange burst of laughter: Robinson’s trunks were slipping down; he yanked them back up with his gloved hands. Then he went back to pounding Walcott. In the seventh, however, Walcott slipped in his first meaningful punches, and he did not let up in the eighth. Sugar Ray looked pained. He was grimacing. Millie began fanning herself with the night’s official program, her husband on the cover. “Come on, baby. Come on, love,” she cried out, believing somehow he could hear her voice above all the die-hard fans. Robinson held on, if barely, in the final two rounds; but Walcott’s late rallies were not enough for a victory. Young Joe seemed content to have survived. A few reporters came by Robinson’s dressing room. He didn’t want to talk about Walcott, only Giardello. He wanted Giardello, and imagined that tonight’s performance against Walcott would keep his momentum going in that direction. “I’d like it here in Washington,” Sugar Ray said, alluding to a championship bout with Giardello.

  The reporters shot glances at one another.

  “Outdoors in that big ballpark, maybe,” he went on. “It ain’t too cold here in September, is it?”

  The reporters left; Robinson showered; and, as always, Gainford waited. He didn’t let just anybody into the dressing room anymore. Too many shadowy figures had slipped in in the past. “He had started saying, ‘You can’t come in here unless you show that you’re on Social Security,’” remembers Jimmy Breslin. The sound of whooshing shower spray was heard. Then Robinson’s voice shot from the showers: “Hey, George! What was that cat’s name I fought tonight?”

  After Walcott, Sugar Ray fought twice in July, once in August, twice more in September, and twice in October. They were not pushover fighters, but none would prove valuable on the road to Giardello. Robinson lost two of those contests. The national press had, for the most part, stopped paying attention. Then Giardello said he had absolutely no interest in fighting Sugar Ray Robinson again. Robinson scoffed, believing Giardello was bluffing, angling for a larger purse.

  Reporters wanted Sugar Ray to sit down with them so they could write long and nuanced profiles. But he rebuffed them. “Something fascinates me about second acts in American life,” says Larry L. King, a young writer for Sports Illustrated at the time, who pleaded and pleaded with Robinson to spend time with him. Millie convinced R
obinson to relent. King was excited, then realized Sugar Ray was on to him. “He was smart enough to know I was not there to talk about the glory days of his career,” recalls King. “I was not going to write a piece about how great he was. It was going to be a downhill piece. He was hiding from me even when he was around.”

  Sugar Ray landed in Pittsburgh for a November 10 fight against Joey Archer. This time, the reporters showed up, but seemingly only to pounce. They asked why he was still fighting; what was he trying to prove; they asked him about his age, and the tone implied they thought he was too old. “To win the title again,” Sugar Ray said, in answer to questions of why he was still in the ring. “The beautiful end of a beautiful story.”

  Joey Archer was a dangerous foe. In nearly fifty fights, he had suffered just one defeat, a record that positioned him as a legitimate middleweight contender. Sugar Ray and Millie, and George and his wife, Hazel—Hazel rarely traveled with George; did she sense she was needed now?—checked into rooms at the swanky downtown Carlton House. And there was someone else in the entourage, Sugar Ray’s old trumpet-blowing friend: Miles Davis. Like many of Robinson’s musician friends, Miles had become worried about his continued fighting. Of them all, it was Miles who knew addiction, the way it could hold and grip. And Sugar Ray Robinson—on these wanderings that had taken him through the stifling heat of Mexico, now into the cold of Pittsburgh, pocketing no more than $700 a fight—was addicted to gallantry, to the fighter’s pride. Robinson had last fought in Pittsburgh in the winter of 1961. His foe that night had been Wilf Greaves. Greaves never saw the eighth-round hook coming; his eyes shut before he hit the canvas as voices whipped and whooshed atop one another. But that was 1961, and this was 1965.