wil haygood sweet thunder the life and times of sugar ray robinson

SPORTS
/
BIOGRAPHY
A CHICAGO TRIBUNE, WASHINGTON POST, PARADE, FORBES, AND
PROGRESSIVE MAGAZINE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
SWEET THUNDER
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF
AN ESPN/PEN BOOK AWARD FINALIST
SWEET
A HURSTON-WRIGHT LEGACY AWARD RUNNER-UP
THUNDER
“A literary knockout.”
—Sports Illustrated
“Thoroughly marvelous. . . . Haygood gives a fine account of Robinson’s career, but where
this lyrically written biography—with its jazz-inflected prose—truly excels is in its evocation of the culturally rich post-Renaissance Harlem, where Robinson began boxing as a
ninth-grade dropout.”
—Los Angeles Times
WIL HAYGOOD
THE LIFE
AND TIMES
“Haygood has given us a lot to ponder in this multi-layered biography about a complex
man who epitomized so much of his era. For those who don’t know the story, it will have
plenty to teach—about style, grace, intelligence and heart.”
—PETE HAMILL, New York Times Book Review
OF
“Haygood’s book is certainly one of the best biographies of a boxer ever written . . . an
important contribution to both sports literature and African American studies.”
—GERALD EARLY, Washington Post
ROBINSON
“You come away from Sweet Thunder . . . with images of Robinson in his prime striding
through your head. . . . [Haygood] is a biographer in his own prime. Sweet Thunder . . .
has real style and power.” —New York Times
“Writing with grace about a figure as elegant and punishing as Sugar Ray Robinson is no
mean feat, but Haygood’s deft biography does a beautiful dance between the man and his
times.”
—Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“Were all of American history written with the style and passion Wil Haygood pumps into
his dazzling biography of boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, college history departments would be
stormed by eager students.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
WIL HAYGOOD is a prizewinning staff writer for the Washington Post. His books include King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., In Black and
White: The Life of Sammy Davis Jr., and The Haygoods of Columbus.
$18.95 (CAN $20.95)
ISBN 978-1-56976-608-8
51895
IPG
SUGAR RAY ROBINSON
9 7 8 1 5 6 9 7 6 6 0 88
SUGAR RAY
WIL
HAYGOOD
Hayg_9781400044979_3p_fm_r6 1/27/11 11:38 AM Page a
Additional Praise for Sweet Thunder
“A wonderful mix of reporting and grace, inspired by the thunder and speed of a muchforgotten champion. Deeply researched, superbly written, thankfully devoid of dripping
sentimentality, Sweet Thunder takes an old broom to Harlem history and sweeps out the
corners.” —James McBride, author of The Color of Water
“A biography of astonishing depth.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“For decades, it seems, boxing scribes have fussed over one of the unending arguments:
who is, pound for pound, the best fighter of all time? Sugar Ray Robinson is always in
that conversation. And should the topic ever pivot to the best writers about the sport,
Haygood should be too.” —Associated Press
“Captivating. . . . A wonderful book that deserves a wide audience.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Pound for pound, Sugar Ray Robinson was regarded as the best fighter in boxing during
his career. Page for page, Haygood’s biography is a dazzling read.” —Newark Star-Ledger
“Wil Haygood [is] interested in the exuberant glamour of the Negro elite in Robinson’s
heyday. So his readers get two histories: of boxing and of Harlem in its glory days during
the first half of the 20th century.” —The Economist
“Haygood brings this remarkable twentieth-century story to life in all its myriad shades
of meaning.” —Booklist (starred review)
“Haygood’s prose is highly stylized, with a self-conscious, jazzy rhythm, and it soars.”
—Globe and Mail
“A great athlete should be the subject of a great biography, and that’s what Wil Haygood
has delivered with Sweet Thunder. . . This is more—far more—than a boxer’s biography.
Haygood provides a fascinating account of Harlem in the 1940s and ’50s—a time when
jazz flourished and black entertainers were beginning to emerge.”
—Sacramento Book Review
“For non-boxing fans, there are wonderful interludes highlighting several artists: the poet
Langston Hughes, the musician Miles Davis, and the chanteuse Lena Horne, all ethereally
moving in and out as they whip their lush magic on America.”
—New York Amsterdam News
“Haygood’s excellent account of Robinson’s long eventful life is packed with anecdotes
and lush pertinent context.” —Katherine Dunn, Bookforum
“A beautifully played jazz riff on [a] fascinating, complicated life. . . . Wil Haygood gives
us a rich portrait of a rising generation of sophisticated, urban African Americans who
dazzled the world.” —PEN/ESPN
“Haygood beautifully recounts the high and low points of Robinson’s life, from his youth
in Detroit and Harlem to his boxing wars with the likes of Jake LaMotta and Gene
Fullmer to his short careers on the dance floor and movie screen.” —CHOICE Reviews
Hayg_9781400044979_3p_fm_r6 1/27/11 11:38 AM Page b
Also by Wil Haygood
In Black and White:
The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr.
Two on the River (photographs by Stan Grossfeld)
King of the Cats: The Life and Times of
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
The Haygoods of Columbus:
A Family Memoir
Hayg_9781400044979_3p_fm_r6 1/27/11 11:38 AM Page i
sweet thunder
Hayg_9781400044979_3p_fm_r6 1/27/11 11:38 AM Page ii
Watertown, NY, 1937: Sixteen-year-old Walker Smith Jr.
so dazzled the audience that Jack Case, the legendary
local sports editor (holding cigar) became an instant
admirer. Case saw to it that Smith left town with a new
name: Sugar Ray Robinson.
Hayg_9781400044979_3p_fm_r6 1/27/11 11:38 AM Page iii
sweet
thunder the
life
and
times
of
Sugar Ray Robinson
Wil
Haygood
Hayg_9781400044979_3p_fm_r6 2/3/11 12:26 PM Page iv
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Haygood, Wil.
Sweet thunder : the life and times of Sugar Ray Robinson / Wil Haygood.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.
Summary: "Sugar Ray Robinson was one of the most iconic figures in sports and possibly the
greatest boxer of all time. His legendary career spanned nearly 26 years, including his titles as
the middleweight and welterweight champion of the world and close to 200 professional bouts.
This illuminating biography grounds the spectacular story of Robinson's rise to greatness
within the context of the fighter's life and times. Born Walker Smith Jr. in 1921, Robinson's
early childhood was marked by the seething racial tensions and explosive race riots that
infected the Midwest throughout the 1920s and 1930s. After his mother moved their family to
Harlem, he came of age in the post-Renaissance years. Recounting his local and national fame,
this deeply researched and honest account depicts Robinson as an eccentric and glamorous-yet
powerful and controversial-celebrity, athlete, and cultural symbol. From Robinson's gruesome
six-bout war with Jake \""Raging Bull" LaMotta and his lethal meeting with Jimmy Doyle to
his Harlem nightclub years and thwarted showbiz dreams, Haygood brings the champion's
story to life"— Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-56976-608-8 (pbk.)
1. Robinson, Sugar Ray, 1920-1989. 2. Boxers (Sports)—United States—Biography. I. Title.
GV1132.R6H39 2011
796.83092—dc22
[B]
2011001119
Cover design: Abby Weintraub
Cover layout: Jonathan Hahn
Cover photo: Sugar Ray Robinson, January 31, 1951, Bettmann/Corbis
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Harold Ober Associates, Inc., for permission to reprint an
excerpt from The Sweet Flypaper of Life by Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes, copyright ©
1955 by Langston Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates, Inc.
Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf
An imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
A division of Random House, Inc.
Copyright © 2009 by Wil Haygood
All rights reserved
This paperback edition first published in 2011 by
Lawrence Hill Books
An imprint of Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
814 North Franklin Street
Chicago, Illinois 60610
ISBN 978-1-56976-608-8
Printed in the United States of America
5 4 3 2 1
Hayg_9781400044979_3p_fm_r6 1/27/11 11:38 AM Page v
for Phil Bennett, Peter Guralnick, and Greg Moore—
cornermen supreme
Hayg_9781400044979_3p_fm_r6 1/27/11 11:38 AM Page vi
Hayg_9781400044979_3p_fm_r6 1/27/11 11:38 AM Page vii
contents
list of illustrations xi
Prologue: Round Midnight 5
1921–1942
Say Goodbye to Walker Smith Jr. 11
1943–1944
Sugar Ray’s Uniform 55
1945–1946
Esquire Men 99
A Lovely Setup for the Old Man 137
1947
1942–1951
Killer 155
An Opera in Six Brutal Acts 185
1951
Around (a Part of) the World in Fifty Days 267
1952
Dreams 305
1953–1954
The Very Thought of You Onstage 329
1954–1956
Greatness Again 349
1960–1962
Battling 363
1963–1966
Autumn Leaves 383
1967–1989
Saving All Those Walker Smith Juniors 397
Epilogue 409
acknowledgments 415
source notes 419
selected bibliography 421
notes 427
index 443
Hayg_9781400044979_3p_fm_r6 1/27/11 11:38 AM Page viii
Hayg_9781400044979_3p_fm_r6 1/27/11 11:38 AM Page ix
illustrations
ii
Young Sugar Ray standing in boxing pose with reporters
(COURTESY WATERTOWN DAILY TIMES)
55
Sugar Ray in uniform (THE RING MAGAZINE)
131
Langston Hughes (GETTY IMAGES)
155
Jimmy Doyle (REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION FROM THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
185
Robinson-LaMotta weigh-in (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
201
LaMotta knocking Robinson through the ropes (CORBIS)
233
Lena (PHOTOFEST)
253
Robinson-LaMotta 1951 (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
267
Time cover (TIME INC.)
273
Robinson at a table in Paris with Georges Carpentier and others
(COURTESY MEL DICK)
290
Robinson at Pompton Lakes pre-Turpin rematch, feet up
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
305
Robinson, Edna Mae, Jeff Chandler, and Sammy Davis Jr.
(COURTESY JESS RAND)
328
Robinson with poster of himself in tails (COURTESY MEL DICK)
330
Miles (GETTY IMAGES)
349
Robinson-Maxim (GETTY IMAGES)
363
Robinson at the sink (GETTY IMAGES)
382
Robinson and Millie (COURTESY MEL DICK)
397
Robinson and polio kids (COURTESY THE WASHINGTON POST)
Hayg_9781400044979_3p_fm_r6 1/27/11 11:38 AM Page x
Hayg_9781400044979_3p_fm_r6 1/27/11 11:38 AM Page 1
sweet thunder
Hayg_9781400044979_3p_fm_r6 1/27/11 11:38 AM Page 2
Hayg_9781400044979_3p_01_r4 1/27/11 11:39 AM Page 3
All his life the great prizefighter would stare with deep wonder
and searching upon this constantly moving cavalcade. It was
that world outside the ring that snared Sugar Ray Robinson,
the world where beauty and grace held a potent sway. He
leaned into Lena’s voice and studied Langston’s poems. He
tried explaining to Miles that their respective artistries had
much in common, believing that the trumpet and fighting
gloves shared similar mysteries.
As the American calendar kept rolling over the emotional
headlines of the forties and the dangerously quiet fifties, a
part of the world was spinning in a singular rhythm all its own.
From private home to nightclub, from lodge to auditorium,
there was a gathering of caramelized and brown and black
faces. Sepia dreams—lovely, spilling forth at night—were
everywhere, thousands captured in their net. These dreams
could not escape segregation, or the laws of the land. But
still, art poured from their conditional existence, like music
lyrics written on a windowpane.
That would be Billy Eckstine (“the sepia Sinatra,” they
called him) sitting in the chair at Sugar Ray’s hair salon. The
salon sat next to the prizefighter’s Harlem nightspot, called
Sugar Ray’s. His name glowed in red neon cursive lettering
atop the awning. The long mahogany bar hosted the
famous—starlets, comics, jazzmen, politicians, crooners. The
Hayg_9781400044979_3p_01_r4 1/27/11 11:39 AM Page 4
4
gangsters behaved themselves. And Sugar Ray loved every
minute of it. Tapping his feet, fingering his money clip. Why, he
loved this world so much there were times he wondered if it
just might overtake his primary line of work. Which was delivering pain and causing blood to flow.
Hayg_9781400044979_3p_01_r4 1/27/11 11:39 AM Page 5
prologue
round midnight
Rarely does he rush about—
moving, instead, as if in some kind of ether. Even on those days
when thousands upon thousands leave their Manhattan homes for
Madison Square Garden to see him under the klieg lights or for Yankee Stadium to watch him beneath moonlight, the great Sugar Ray
Robinson stirs gently. His work evenings begin around nine o’clock.
By midnight he is finished with his work inside the ring, though
sometimes, of course, it ends much sooner—a first- or second-round
knockout. In Boston in 1950, at the end of the fifth round in a fight
with Joe Rindone, Robinson turned to Nat Hentoff, a young
reporter at ringside, and mentioned that he hoped the TV audience
was enjoying the fight.
“This fight isn’t on TV,” Hentoff told Robinson.
“What?” Robinson snapped, disappointed.
“And so,” recalls Hentoff, “he went and knocked the guy out the
next round.”
Time to stir.
Huge crowds gather to see him after the fights—after yet another
great battle with Jake LaMotta, Carmen Basilio, Gene Fullmer. But
he is known for lingering in the dressing room. He travels with a
personal valet. Appearance is everything to him: His suits are handstitched on Broadway by tailor Sy Martin. (Sy does tailoring for
Duke Ellington and a lot of Hollywood stars.) Finally, there he is,
and the members of the crowd reach out to him—newsmen, autograph seekers, gangsters. Only after he has satisfied them is he free
to take to the night, authoring a style—cosmopolitan, jazz-touched,
elegant—unique to the midcentury fight game. In France they
respect his power, but truly love his style.
HE IS SUCH A NOCTURNAL FIGURE.
Hayg_9781400044979_3p_01_r4 1/27/11 11:39 AM Page 6
6
sweet thunder
Scores of admirers—many of them habitués of Broadway and
Manhattan literary salons—will trek to his rural training camp at
Greenwood Lake, New York. He often runs alone, mountains in the
distance, a solitary figure sweeping across land once trod by the Iroquois. He looks good in the morning light. Vermeer would have
loved him. His nightclub was on 124th Street in Manhattan. That
boozy and golden Hollywood couple, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard
Burton, would sit for hours sipping champagne, devouring heaps of
collard greens. (In 1968 Burton starred in a movie, Candy, a sexual
satire noted for nothing in cinema history save its eccentric cast:
Burton, Marlon Brando, Walter Matthau, James Coburn, and a
cameo by Robinson. Burton cast Robinson because he respected legends; Robinson did it for the money.)
Those who have watched him in the ring get as much pleasure, it
seems, watching him outside of it—alighting from his flamingocolored Cadillac down at the Manhattan pier, embarking for Europe
on the Liberté ocean liner, smiling from the pages of Life magazine
in white tie and tails. Because it is America, and he is a black man,
and it is a time of fierce segregation and racial polarization, there
are always two drama-laden ghosts—Jack Johnson and Joe Louis—
looming up at him. The public acclaim for heavyweight champions
Jack Johnson and Joe Louis had often been seen through the splintering and consuming twentieth-century prism of race, but it was
not so with Robinson. He declined that war and enlisted in cultural
enlightenment, laying claim to a different piece of cultural terrain.
He sought to force a new sensibility in the way we view athletic
accomplishment and society. He was the first black athlete to largely
own his own fighting rights, and the first to challenge radio and TV
station owners about financial receipts. Unlike Johnson and Louis,
he negotiated his own independence, constantly battering back the
belief that the athlete—especially the Negro athlete—was an uninformed machine. He simply wished the world to see him as larger
than the contours of the ring. So while the champagne slid down his
throat, he measured the barriers he’d slip through and plotted his
entrée into high society.
He believed business acumen would make him whole. But there
was something else—style. His name pops up on best-dressed lists;
he is a pal to jazzmen—Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Nat King
Cole, Billy Eckstine among them. In the autumn of 1952, he will
Hayg_9781400044979_3p_01_r4 1/27/11 11:39 AM Page 7
prologue: round midnight
7
abandon boxing and turn to the world of entertainment. He will
headline his own stage show, traveling with the likes of Count Basie
and Cootie Williams; Cootie is an old Ellington standby. Sugar Ray
plays piano and drums, and practices his tap dancing until drenched
in perspiration. Style is as much a mystery as the cosmos.
Sugar Ray Robinson was the first modern prizefighter to take
culture—music and grace and dance—into the ring with him. He
had convinced himself that style was as much a discipline as boxing.
That he dominated both, for so long, causes the world to marvel.
Before the headlines of Selma and Montgomery and Little Rock—he
followed the Little Rock crisis that day in 1957, full of pain at
reports of the little Negro children being verbally assaulted and
pelted with rocks; he’d suffer a rare loss that very night—before all
the marches, before it seemed as if a new America had just dropped
from the sky right onto the old one’s front porch, there was another
America and it swirled in its own lovely mist. And a good amount of
that swirling could be seen in the long glass mirror of Sugar Ray
Robinson’s nightclub. A jazz-age architect designed the place. Its
red neon lettering out front allowed the name of the club—Sugar
Ray’s—to fall, at night, right onto the hoods of the long automobiles. It was hard to imagine the proprietor did not plan it that way.
But stare into that mirror and there they are too—songstress Lena
Horne, poet Langston Hughes, and trumpeter Miles Davis—
habitués of the place. They were becoming seminal figures in their
own right, and they swayed as a kind of cultural chorus of the 1940s
and 1950s alongside Robinson. Their lives intersected; but more
than that, they were Robinson allies, themselves in the vanguard of
a certain kind of style. The singer, trumpeter, and poet were not
unlike cultural attachés, swooning their music and prose out into
the world with elegant defiance, commiserating or celebrating at
one of Robinson’s dining tables inside his club. They all wished to
push back the curtain onto mainstream America. Robinson long
feared being trapped in the ring, being webbed in the American
imagination merely as an athlete. He would tell acquaintances, at
the height of his worldwide fistic accomplishments, that the sport
actually bored him, that there were other venues to challenge his
creative prowess. He marched and listened as a Renaissance man
might. Art enveloped and seduced him. So, as we follow him in and
out of the ring, in and out of his midnight sonatas, across America,