Pound For Pound

by BOYD HERB

• ISBN13: 9780060188764
• ISBN10: 0060188766
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-12-28
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

Hailed by Muhammad Ali as "the king, the master, my idol," Sugar Ray Robinson was the greatest boxer America had seen since Joe Louis and is considered by many today to be, pound for pound, the best boxer the sport has ever known. A world welterweight and five-time middleweight champion, he had a career that spanned three decades. With his graceful yet powerful style and Hollywood looks -- which he would use to his advantage upon his final retirement from boxing -- he embodied the very essence of the "sweet science." Before he finally hung up his boxing gloves in 1965, at the age of forty-four, Sugar Ray Robinson won 125 consecutive fights, including victories over Henry Armstrong, Kid Gavilan, Carmen Basilio, Jake LaMotta, Rocky Graziano, Gene Fullmer, and Randy Turpin. His successes were not his alone, however. They belonged to his family as well, though those relationships would be marked by neglect and abuse. At a time still characterized by discrimination, his victories, like those of Jackie Robinson, represented victories for all black America. And they were all the more symbolic because of the place he chose to call home -- Harlem. Co-written with Robinson's son, Ray Robinson II, and thoroughly researched by Amsterdam News reporter Herb Boyd, Pound for Pound is not only a definitive portrait of an emotionally complex man and his family, it is also a portrait of Harlem at the apex of its creativity, a time when Miles Davis was playing at Minton's, Langston Hughes was writing his divine poetry, and a boy from Georgia originally named Walker Smith Jr. would take on the moniker "Sugar."

Author Biography

Herb Boyd teaches at the College of New Rochelle.

Table of Contents

Foreword	xi
Prologue	1	(6)
From Red Clay to Black Bottom	7	(10)
Street Dancer from Hell's Kitchen	17	(4)
A Home in Harlem	21	(4)
The Crescent's Star	25	(7)
The Man with the Golden Gloves	32	(8)
Punching for Pay	40	(9)
Sugar Ray and Edna Mae	49	(13)
The Matador and the Bull	62	(5)
From Silk to Olive Drab	67	(11)
Champion at Last!	78	(9)
A Dreadful Dream	87	(5)
A Brown Baby and a Pink Cadillac	92	(12)
``Le Sucre Merveilleux'' in Paris	104	(10)
The St. Valentine's Day Massacre	114	(6)
It's Turpin Time	120	(13)
Bumpy, Bobo, and Rocky	133	(6)
Take It to the Maxim	139	(6)
Top Hat and Tails	145	(12)
Return to the Ring	157	(16)
The Perfect Punch	173	(6)
Broke!	179	(7)
Sugar's Dilemmas	186	(13)
Millie and the Mormon	199	(9)
Mexican Divorcee	208	(9)
The Other Woman	217	(6)
Ali	223	(7)
Up Against the Mob	230	(7)
A Bloody Bridegroom	237	(4)
Pound for Pound	241	(12)
Lord of the Ring	253	(10)
The Final Bell	263	(5)
Epilogue	268	(9)
Sugar's Ring Record	277	(11)
Interviews	288	(1)
Notes	289	(9)
Bibliography	298	(4)
Index	302

Excerpts

Pound for Pound
A Biography of Sugar Ray Robinson

Chapter One

From Red Clay to
Black Bottom

Sugar Ray Robinson on the page is almost as elusive as he was in the ring. In the opening chapters of the autobiography that he completed with the assistance of New York Times sportswriter Dave Anderson, Sugar states that he was born May 3, 1921, in Detroit's Black Bottom. While the date of his birth is accurate (though it is listed as 1920 in Ring magazine, boxing's bible), the location he gives is contradicted by a birth certificate that cites Ailey, Georgia, as his place of birth. Whoever filled out the certificate -- and it could have been Sugar's father, Walker Smith, Sr. -- was only barely literate, since colored was misspelled "colerd." He was named Walker Smith. Hismother's name appears to be Lelar, though in his book Sugar refers to her as Leila; her maiden name was Hurst. According to the certificate, Walker, Sr., is twenty-eight and a farmer and Lelar is twenty-three and a domestic. Gene Schoor, who wrote a biography of Sugar Ray Robinson in 1951, notes that Mrs. Smith was born August 25, 1900, which would have made her twenty-one at the time of Sugar's birth, and was one of sixteen children.Walker, Jr.,was the couple's third child. And "Junior" would be the name Sugar would answer to as a boy.

In his autobiography, Sugar writes that his parents were from Dublin, Georgia, which is about 130 miles northwest of Savannah. Both of his older sisters, Marie and Evelyn, were born on a farm not too far from Dublin. In 1980, Walker Smith's funeral announcement states that he arrived in Detroit in 1916; Schoor reported 1917. If either is true, then he must have gone back and forth for the children to be born in the South, or he came alone and his wife came later. This region of Georgia at that time, mainly within Montgomery County, was well-known for three things: cotton, the Ku Klux Klan, and lynching. During thepost–World War I years, particularly 1919, the year Evelyn was born, at least ten black soldiers were lynched, half of them in Georgia. According to author Donald L. Grant, "Many of the demobilized black veterans continued to wear their uniforms, sometimes because they had no other clothes and sometimes because they were proud of their service. Many whites reacted savagely to this practice." Countless numbers of black soldiers who had gone abroad to make the world "safe for democracy" returned home with a newfound spirit of freedom, only to be brutally reminded by the Klan and other white residents that nothing had changed. And to drive this point home, the Klan torched several black churches and lodges, burning them to the ground.

With the cotton infested with boll weevils and the membership of the Klan increasing with each lynching, black farmers had few alternatives but to seek better opportunities elsewhere. Sugar's aunt and her husband were among the migrants who moved north to Detroit looking for a better life. They found a place to live and settled in an area known as Black Bottom. This sector on the city's east side was an outgrowth of the restrictive covenant that confined the movement of African Americans. It contained the most dilapidated houses and received the least services. Even so, it was an improvement over where its residents had lived before. Sugar's aunt and uncle notified Walker, who followed them, gaining employment almost immediately as a ditch digger. "Pop was a wiry little guy," Sugar recalled in his autobiography, "five foot seven and a hundred and fifty pounds, with a dazzling smile that lit up his dark brown face.And he was strong."Much of Walker's strength -- and certainly his fatigue -- came from wielding a shovel, digging out cellar shells for buildings. Resourceful and hardworking, he was soon behind the wheel of a shiny new black Ford Model T, tooling about town and "styling," like sashaying while driving, just as his son would do years later in flashier automobiles: Cadillacs and Lincolns.

His father's tastes for luxury notwithstanding, he managed to purchase train tickets for his wife and children to join him in Detroit. This act alone distinguished him from so many fathers who, once out of the grip of American apartheid, never looked back or gave a thought to those they left behind. Sugar wrote that he made the trip to Detroit in his mother's womb, coming into the world a few weeks after their arrival. If they left Georgia shortly after he was born, that might account for his recollection that he was born in Detroit, not Ailey, Georgia. Or given Sugar's penchant for invention, this was just another example of his remaking himself, his way of recalling his life the way he wanted it to be, not as it was. Blurring dates, events, even people came as easily, and was probably as necessary, to him as sidestepping a blow or counterpunching opponents with a wicked left hook.

The Smiths' home on Canfield, just north of Black Bottom, and near Paradise Valley, was typical of the small homes in the area. It was a two-story yellow brick house, neat but not pretentious. The neighborhood's citizens, many of them recent migrants from Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, had begun coming to the city in droves since 1914, shortly after Henry Ford announced the possibility of earning five dollars a day in his automobile plants. The population increased astronomically, from 5,000 to 120,000, between 1910 and 1930. There were jobs for them in the factories, but mainly they were the hardest, most dangerous, lowest-paying, and most unskilled ones. But the majority of these new arrivals were not deterred by the onerous work, since they were used to spending long days under a blazing sun picking and chopping cotton ...

Pound for Pound
A Biography of Sugar Ray Robinson. Copyright © by Herb Boyd. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from Pound for Pound: A Biography of Sugar Ray Robinson by Herb Boyd, Ray Robinson
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.