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  For his back-to-back Golden Gloves victories, Robinson received plaudits from the Salem Methodist church hierarchy. On some Sundays parishioners would spot him, his mother, Leila, and his two sisters sitting among them. They were a family in repose, the commingling of boxing and Bibles now making welcome sense to Leila Smith.

  It caught few by surprise when the young Sugar Ray, having conquered the amateur ranks, now eagerly wished to turn professional. The Smith family was still strapped for cash, and Leila could often be heard lamenting in the confines of their home about another bill she was late paying. The prospect of turning pro excited Gainford: Sugar Ray was indeed the most valued fighter in his group. But if it excited Gainford, it also worried him: The New York professional fight game could seem a Byzantine operation. Men operated in the shadows; fighters seemed to be managed and owned by different entities; many fighters were beholden to the Mob. A Negro fight manager stepped into that game with many questions that no one would answer, and with little true security for his fighter. It was Curt Horrmann who offered a plan.

  Horrmann had been born into a well-off Staten Island family, owners of a beer brewery. One New York columnist would note, “His family is wealthy enough to keep him in crepes suzette for life.” As he grew into manhood—he had a well-appointed Manhattan apartment at 64 East Seventy-eighth Street—his patrician air become more pronounced: Tall and dark-haired, he carried himself with a sense of authority. Horrmann was also a familiar face at the downtown Stork Club, whispering among the beautiful Manhattanites as he consumed his favorite meal—a steak dinner. His maroon Packard sat parked outside, gleaming. With family money in his pockets and time on his hands, Horrmann looked about for activities in the Manhattan area that might occupy and also excite him. At various times throughout 1938 and 1939, however, he had been bedeviled with an array of illnesses; at one point it was pneumonia and his family feared for his life. But he recovered and went back to finding an occupation. He started to ponder the fight game, with the idea of finding a rising young fighter to invest in. His advisers suggested he take a look at Buddy Moore, the Salem Crescent heavyweight. At Madison Square Garden during the 1940 Golden Gloves, Horrmann found himself fascinated not by Moore, but by the new Manhattan sensation—Sugar Ray Robinson.

  Gainford realized Horrmann could offer Robinson what he couldn’t: money. Money to train and set up a training camp; money to bring in talented sparring mates; money that would keep Robinson from having to work—as he sometimes did—as a grocery clerk. “He can come up with a hundred-dollar bill faster than any man alive,” Gainford told his young fighter.

  In mid-1940, Sugar Ray Robinson, George Gainford, and Curt Horrmann all signed an agreement, granting Horrmann the right to manage Robinson. Horrmann would get 33 percent of the future pro’s earnings; Gainford would get 10 percent; and Robinson the rest.

  The troika of Robinson, Gainford, and Horrmann started to assemble in the summer of 1940, and both trainer and manager watched Robinson intently during training sessions. There were some in Manhattan fight circles who wondered if Robinson and Gainford had made the right decision in bringing the inexperienced Horrmann into their camp. But Gainford realized the necessity of financial backing. Robinson recorded his first professional win on October 4, 1940, in Manhattan against Joe Echevarria in a two-round technical knockout. Robinson mowed down all six of his opponents to close out the year, and just thirteen days into 1941, he had already registered two knockouts. His fighting style depended a great deal on balance and lightning speed. At times whirling around the ring—as if moving from rock to rock across a shallow lake—he seemed the epitome of lightness and balance, until he stopped to unload a series of punches that drew gasps from onlookers.

  If Herman Taylor, a Philadelphia-based fight promoter, had had his way, Robinson and Gainford would have adopted that city as a base of operations. Taylor was the first big-time promoter to imagine greatness for Robinson. Between the winter of 1940 and the summer of 1941, Taylor set up seven fights for Robinson in Philadelphia. Sugar Ray defeated every foe, five by vicious knockouts. While some of those fights had been on under cards—warm-up bouts leading to the main attraction—they served their purpose: Robinson became a celebrity in the city. Men showed up at his fights wearing blue jackets and white pants—blue and white being Robinson’s robe colors—and women searched their closets for blue and white ensembles. Taylor introduced him to Main Line movers and shakers; society ladies beamed around him. Children began recognizing him.

  Robinson returned to the city for a July 21, 1941, fight with Sammy Angott. Angott had been a lightweight champion, and while it was a non-title fight, the stakes were huge for Robinson. It was a main attraction; now other fighters were on his main card. In the second, Robinson caught the tough Angott with a right, crumpling him to the canvas. Gainford watched as the referee began a count; Robinson glared at the fallen Angott, who finally lifted himself up. But Angott—six years older than Robinson and several inches shorter—never regained any equilibrium in the ring. Robinson won the ten-rounder in a decision. There was much joy during the train ride back to Manhattan. Robinson had received his largest purse to date—$6,000. He was flush and giddy, and he told his mother, Leila, to quit her job at the linen factory. She did. Marie and Evelyn were told to pick out new wardrobes. Sugar Ray insisted his mother find a larger apartment, and they quickly relocated to 940 St. Nicholas Avenue, on one of the nicer blocks in Harlem. New furniture arrived—he had selected the parlor set himself. Fresh drapes were hung. There were family tears at the newfound wealth.

  Robinson’s travels in 1941 and early 1942 took him twice to Detroit for fights, both of which he won with little trouble. Shortly before that first fight in Detroit, a middle-aged man came looking for Robinson, and when he found him, both hugged: Walker Smith Sr. was happy to see his son after a nearly decade-long estrangement. They talked about his budding fight career, and about his sisters Marie and Evelyn. Robinson sensed, however, his father was suffering financially, and before leaving the city, slipped him money. Robinson had a far more sentimental streak toward his father than did other family members, and for the next few years his father would pop up at some of his fights up and down the East Coast.

  On September 19, 1941, Robinson faced Maxie Shapiro in New York City. It was Robinson’s debut as a pro at Madison Square Garden. Squealing with delight, he and Gainford rode around the block, staring up at the marquee over and over: BOXING TONIGHT—SUGAR RAY ROBINSON VS. MAXIE SHAPIRO. Robinson would remember the night out for its sentimental value. Shapiro never forgot the encounter for other reasons: “I moved out in the first round and went into a crouch. All of a sudden—whsst! This blur went past my head. Then—whsst! Another blur. It must have been something like that in the foxholes. The second round I didn’t get low enough. I felt like I got hit in the forehead with a baseball bat. I was on the floor twice, and in the third round I was being careful, but he was too fast. Whsst! Here it comes again, and I’m on the floor again, and I said to myself, ‘The hell with it. I’ve got a bellyful of this guy,’” At the end of the third round, the referee thought so too, and called it for Robinson.

  More knockouts followed; Robinson seemed a man in a hurry. He and Gainford and Horrmann were seen rolling through Manhattan in Horrmann’s maroon Packard; they looked easy and confident, all three full of smiles. Robinson purchased new suits, new wide-brimmed hats, casting silhouettes against the dusk. Horrmann was careful to avoid segregated venues like his revered Stork Club, so they dined in Harlem and at fine restaurants in the Bronx with gleaming china and silverware. They wanted a training camp—just as Joe Louis had a training camp. Horrmann’s money financed the site at Greenwood Lake, outside New York City, where Joe had also trained. Horrmann determined they must have nothing but the best and so he outfitted the camp—all for Robinson—with a tutor (who doubled as a secretary), a dietician, an assistant trainer to help Gainford, and an assortment of crack sparring partners, most of whom were former Go
lden Gloves champions themselves. Bob Considine, the great sports columnist for The Washington Post, turned his attention to Robinson in 1942 as the young fighter kept piling up victories. Considine—who felt that many a Negro fighter had been left on the scrap heap by unscrupulous managers—hoped that Horr mann’s presence in Robinson’s corner might usher in a new era of financial solvency for Negro fighters, if others took the cue. Considine believed that, with Horrmann, Robinson was now a beneficiary “of superb handling.” Considine added: “In another era he might already be on his way back to his shoeshine box.”

  Sugar Ray Robinson had totaled twenty-eight victories within two years of turning professional. One month after defeating Maxie Berger, he stepped into the ring—again in Manhattan—against Norman Rubio. Rubio was known as a “tough, two-fisted clouter,” and there were those who thought Robinson might suffer his first defeat. Nat Fleischer, founder of the venerable Ring magazine—the boxing bible—did not. Fleischer was in attendance that night and came away so astonished that he put the young Robinson on the cover of the June 1942 issue of Ring. It was Robinson’s first national cover: “Ray Robinson—Colored Welterweight Champion of the World,” the headline said. It was misleading, since Robinson held no championship as of yet, but few argued with the prediction. On that cover he is shown in a picture-book pose, the left arm extended and the right close to his chest. His hair is close-cropped and his boyish look belies the lethal impact of his fists. Fleischer, who wrote the accompanying article, gushed. He was already among those who were proclaiming that Robinson “rates among the welters as does Joe Louis among the heavyweights.” He added of Robinson’s gifts arrayed against Rubio: “Speed to burn, hitting power that pounded his man into a state of helplessness, aim that landed punches with sharp-shooting accuracy, blocking that enabled him to pick off punches that looked dangerous—he had all these in addition to contempt for his opponent that went a wee bit too far.” Robinson, who defeated Rubio in an eighth-round TKO, had acquired a habit of turning his back on his felled opponents—walking swiftly toward his corner as if he were late for an engagement beyond the arena. It unnerved the likes of Fleischer. “In order to achieve the greatness of [George] Dixon and [Joe] Gans,” Fleischer wrote, “Robinson must put his entire mind on the technique of fighting and forget the gallery.”

  Yet such gestures were musical flourishes that Robinson took into the ring, and they moved those in the gallery. His success depended on an allegiance to technique, a point Fleischer missed. The technique fed the flourishes, and Robinson often left center ring accused of being cocky—or original. Horrmann and Gainford believed in the latter label.

  Robinson was actually loath to relinquish so much of his potential income to Horrmann and thought Horrmann took too much of his earnings. In moments heightened by hubris, Sugar Ray Robinson thought he could manage himself. He worried incessantly about fight contracts, percentages; he sought to arrange meetings with radio executives to determine their station’s cut of his fights. The executives were perplexed by his demands, which they ignored. Gainford could not corral his young fighter. Robinson remembered the simplicity of the bootleg fights of his younger days: The money—after Gainford’s shavings—went directly to him, the winner, from Gainford’s palm. There were no middlemen. What he saw up close in his youth he could not now forget. “I had learned,” he would remark, “that if I had to get punished, I was going to get as much money as I could for it.” Robinson also thought Horrmann acquiesced too much when dealing with fight promoters; Horr mann, however, felt he had to bend in favor of the opposition—not only to stop fighters from fleeing possible matchups with the dangerous Robinson, but also to ensure Robinson of a consistent fight schedule. There were times when Horrmann, in dealing with managers of the likes of Fritzie Zivic—many fighters had found themselves battling Zivic’s arsenal of dirty tactics—sounded naive and unprepared for hard negotiating. “Robinson is a comparative novice in there,” Horrmann said a year into Robinson’s pro career, when negotiating the Zivic bout, “but he can be as rough as Zivic.” (Robinson defeated Zivic in blistering back-to-back contests, each of which went ten rounds.) If Horrmann seemed a little too silk-stocking for the grubby world of boxing, it was not his only problem: His family members wondered what he was up to, investing money in a Negro fighter who resided in Harlem, a world away from their New York. They wondered about Horrmann’s long stretches away from home, on the road with Robinson and Gainford. They worried about his health. But Horrmann loved all of it. He grinned like the men who owned baseball teams, like racehorse owners, like tycoons even: He owned something; he was proving his investment had been shrewd; his fighter was winning, bout after bout. His daddy had founded a brewery; he had discovered a fighter, a fighter who had already jumped onto the cover of Ring magazine! But then Sugar Ray Robinson—blinded by Horrmann’s old-money wealth, the kind of deep wealth he wanted, and that he believed promoters were keeping him from attaining—wished to be rid of his manager. The contretemps caught Horrmann by surprise. He tried reasoning, but Robinson was determined: He wanted independence; he believed he and Gainford could handle his career, and Gainford bent to his wishes. He had to pay Horrmann $10,000 to buy back his contract.

  Sugar Ray Robinson had said goodbye to Walker Smith Jr.—and to Curt Horrmann. It was now just him and Gainford. And, of course, Leila and Evelyn and Marie—he would always trust women more than men. Already he had been mentioned in the same breath as Henry Armstrong and Joe Gans. Many expected the young fighter to hone the greatness he already possessed. It was the arc of mystery behind all great athletes: The truly gifted found their greatness within; they were almost beyond teaching. Babe Ruth was simply powerful with a bat; Jesse Owens’s legs churned in a blur; Joe Louis’s punch from ten inches out packed frightening strength upon impact. The great ones reveled in the flaws and inconsistencies of others. Managers could do the expected things on their behalf—travel arrangements, providing comfortable surroundings, demanding rest. But the great athlete was full of singular will, forging ahead against the open space where new records might be set, where new foes might be beaten. George Gainford, for the first time in his life, now had a superior athlete in his keeping. As long as he had him, he knew, he would not end up a bum in anyone’s park.

  But there were few things that made the young Sugar Ray Robinson feel as triumphant as being invited to work out with Joe Louis at his training camp outside Manhattan. Louis and his managers sensed something special about Robinson. Welterweights did not command the kind of attention heavyweights did—but this fighter, Robinson, was unique, and they hardly had to read Ring magazine to realize it. At the camp, for the most part, the young Robinson rowed the boat out on Greenwood Lake while Louis or one of his managers fished. He was the young knight—beneath the king, Louis, and his men. He listened but also watched how they lived. He first saw the lovely Lena Horne there—she had come to visit Joe, whom she was dating. The young Sugar Ray acquired a sense of what real fame could be like. He slept in the cabin at night and dreamed of it for himself.

  As 1942 came to a close, Sugar Ray Robinson was a mere twenty-two years old. He had already—and with riveting quickness—reached a height that was awe-inspiring to many. But he saw only the glitter of championship belts, and he did not own one yet. His hunger for competition seemed insatiable. Now removed from poverty, he was happy. He was free to go at the world.

  But the world had gone to war. And Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson were about to find themselves on the battlefield—albeit stateside.

  Theirs was a tricky relationship, and it ran, for the most part, quite smoothly. That’s what gave it its mystery. It was so free of competition. At Joe’s big fights, Sugar Ray would glide down the aisles, nodding, his hair glistening as he turned like a politician. Joe, spotting him from inside the ring, would raise his big chin in the young fighter’s direction.

  Both were estranged from their fathers and were not above seeking out father figures.

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p; Joe was older by six years, and it struck many that at times there was something of a big brother-little brother rapport between them. Sugar let onlookers think what they wished. Children scampered after both.

  As they strolled side by side in fedora and tweed, there glowed about them something rich and magical: they were two of the freest Negroes in America in 1942.

  Inside the ring, both liked the short jab. Outside of it, each liked long-legged, mulatto-colored women.

  Joe’s favorite band was Duke Ellington’s. An Ellington tune on the airwaves at the time—“Sepia Panorama”—was sweet and lively, and Joe and Sugar jumped to it.

  Joe was hitched to the troika of Jack Blackburn, Julian Black, and John Roxborough, his trainer and two managers. Among those three, there had been prison time, unsavory friendships, numbers running. Joe’s country grin wasn’t able to keep up with their slipperiness. Sugar watched it all, licking at the air until he understood that the fame had some darkness to it, some furtive underpinnings. Sugar convinced himself he could match wits with any city slicker—a class of human being not unknown to him.

  As Sugar was rising—and Joe falling into the aging smoke that catches all prizefighters—war cannons sounded. They found themselves in the Army, side by side.

  The children would miss running after them.

  1943–1944

  Sugar Ray’s uniform

  WHILE LEADING TROOPS into battle in 1775—and with time to assess his setbacks while shifting and plotting new strategies during the American Revolution—George Washington came to a conclusion about sartorial affairs and his colonial militias: His soldiers were badly dressed. In the field, their clothing consisted of common apparel: shirts and pants and shoes they managed to grab from cabin or tent. Spotting them from yards away, one was hard pressed to distinguish a private from an officer. The slipshod dress—soldiers had no uniforms at the Battle of Bunker Hill—often created confusion in the ranks. Soon enough Gen. Washington insisted on uniforms for all his men. The standards of military dress would be elevated even more in succeeding American engagements.