12
The Greatest,
Pound for Pound
It is when we try to grapple with another man's
intimate need that we perceive how incompre-
hensible, wavering and misty are the beings
that share with us the sight of the stars and the
warmth of the sun.
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
"When I am old," I wrote more than twenty years ago, "I shall tell them about Ray Robinson. When I was young, I used to hear the old men talk of Joe Gans and Terry McGovern and Kid McCoy. They told of the original Joe Walcott and Sam Langford, of Stanley Ketchel and Mickey Walker and Benny Leonard. How well any of them really knew those men I'm not sure, but it seemed to me that some of the greatness of those fighters rubbed off on these others just because they lived at the same time.
"That is the way," I wrote, "I plan to use Sugar Ray. When the young assault me with their atomic miracles and reject my Crosby records and find comical the movies that once moved me, I shall entice them into talking about fighters. Robinson will be a form of social security for me, because they will have seen nothing like him, and I am convinced that they never will."
I am still sure today that they will never be able to match Robinson because of the social changes that were altering life in this country while he fought. The prejudice that drove the black— as before him it drove the Irish, the Jew, and then the Italian—to the ring in desperation is becoming a part of our past. In an age of reason fewer men are forced to fight with their fists, the amateurs are not what they used to be, the bootleg circuit, where Robinson received his intermediate schooling, is long gone, and the professional game has been on the decline for twenty-five years.
Ray Robinson—and Archie Moore, the venerable Sage of San Diego and the greatest ring mechanic I ever saw—were the last of the old-fashioned fighters because they fought from the end of one era through the beginning of another, and because they were the products of poverty as well as prejudice. Robinson was eight years old when his mother brought him and his two older sisters from Detroit to New York, and tried to support them on the fifteen dollars a week she made working in a laundry. Robinson sold firewood he gathered in a wagon under the West Side Highway and as far south as the Bowery. On Saturdays and Sundays he shined shoes, and at night he danced for coins on the sidewalks off Broadway. For him, as for all those others of that time, the fight game was a court of last resort.
"You may find this hard to believe," he told me a couple of times, "but I've never loved fightin'. I really dislike it. I don't believe I watch more than two fights a year, and then it has to be some friend of mine fightin'.
"Fightin', to me, seems barbaric," he said. "It seems to me like the barbarous days when men fought in a pit and people threw money down to them. I really don't like it."
"But at the same time," I said, "I must believe that fighting has given you the most satisfying experiences you have ever known."
"That's right," he said. "I enjoy out-thinkin' another man and out-maneuverin' him, but I still don't like to fight."
I believed him then, and I still do, because of something else he once told me and that one of his sisters confirmed. On the streets of Detroit and New York he ran from fights.
"I would avoid fightin'," he said, "even if I had to take the short end. I'd even apologize when I knew I was right. I got to be known as a coward, and my sisters used to fight for me. They used to remark that they hoped that some day I'd be able to take care of myself."
How able he became is in the record. He began fighting when he was fifteen, and he had 160 amateur and bootleg-amateur fights before he turned pro. As a professional he not only won the welterweight championship of the world, but he won the middleweight title for the fifth time when he was thirty-seven and he went fifteen rounds trying for it again when he was forty. He was forty-five when he finally retired in 1965, and in 362 fights, amateur and pro, over thirty years, he failed to finish only once. On that June night in 1952, when he boxed Joey Maxim for the light-heavyweight title, giving away fifteen pounds, it was 104 degrees under the Yankee Stadium ring lights, so brutally hot and humid that Ruby Goldstein, the referee, had to be replaced in the eleventh round. Robinson was giving Maxim a boxing lesson, and seemed on his way to winning yet another title, when he collapsed in his corner at the end of the thirteenth.
While Willie Pep was the greatest creative artist I ever saw in a ring, Sugar Ray Robinson remains the greatest fighter, pound-for-pound and punch-for-punch, of more than a half century, or since Benny Leonard retired with the lightweight title in 1924. Perhaps it is foolish to try to compare them, for Pep was a poet, often implying, with his feints and his footwork, more than he said, as that night when he won a round without even throwing a punch. Robinson was the master of polished prose, structuring his sentences, never wasting a word, and, as he often did, taking the other out with a single punch. That was the Robinson, however, that most Americans, enthralled by him as they were but who came to follow boxing on television, never saw. His talent had peaked between 1947 and 1950, before the era of TV boxing and before it saddened me to watch him years later on the screen struggling with fighters like Gene Fullmer and Paul Pender whom once he would have handled with ease.
"The public don't know it," he told me when I brought it up as far back as 1950, fifteen years before he retired, "but I do. The fighter himself is the first one to know."
"And how does he know it?" I said.
"You find you have to think your punches," he said. "The punches you used to throw without thinkin', you now have to reason."
It is something that happens to all of us, once the instinctive inventions and discoveries have been made. Then we reach back into the library of our experience, and what was once the product of inspiration is now merely the result of reason.
"How are you, old buddy?" he said on the phone, when I called him before flying out to Los Angeles. "When are you comin' out?"
"I'm fine," I said, "and I want to come out next week if you'll be there. How about next Friday?"
"Let me check that," he said, and then, "I'll be here. I'll be lookin' for you, because you're my man."
In his 202 professional fights, he hit fifty or more towns, and I imagine that in most, if not in all, there are still writers today whom he annointed as his "man." He was as smooth outside the ring as he was in it, and under pressing interrogation he was as elusive, but until you found that out he was a charmer.
I met him first in the spring of 1946. Already unquestionably the best welterweight in the world, he was unable to get a shot at the title, and he had hired a press agent named Pete Vaccare. We were sitting, late one morning, in Vaccare's office in the old Brill Building on Broadway, waiting for Robinson as, I was to find out, one almost inevitably did, when we heard singing out in the hall. Then the door opened, and they came in, Robinson and Junius ("June") Clark, whom he called his secretary, both of them in heavy road clothes topped off by red knitted skating caps, for they had been running on the Harlem Speedway, and they finished the song. It was "The Very Thought of You," with Robinson carrying the melody and Clark improvising, and they ended it with a soft-shoe step and a hand flourish, and amid the laughter, we were introduced. We talked, with Robinson telling how he once stole so much from a grocery store that the owner gave him a job as ar delivery boy to protect his stock, and how the minister who caught him in a crap game on the steps of the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church took him inside and introduced him to boxing.
"I've just met Ray Robinson," I said to Wilbur Wood when I got back to the office that afternoon. "He's quite a guy."
"Oh, no," Wilbur said. "He conned you too."
"What do you mean, conned me?" I said.
"Hang around the fight game a little longer," Wilbur said, "and you'll find out."
In the fight game they like fighters who will fight anybody anywhere at any time and leave the business end to their managers. After he won the welt
erweight title, with George Gainford doing the dickering, Robinson made his own deals, and I knew a New York boxing writer who had collected two dozen complaints against him from promoters around the country.
"The trouble with Robinson," another one told me one day at lunch in Lindy's, "is that every time I get ready to bomb him, he shows up at some hospital or at the bedside of some sick kid. He's always one move ahead of you."
"As he is in the ring," I said.
There was about him an air of humble superiority, a contrariety that annoyed and frustrated those who tried to come to know him. He would plead humility and reserve a pew in church for Easter Sunday. At big fights, when other notables gathered for their introductions in the ring before the main event, Robinson would wait beyond the ringside rows and receive his applause apart as he came down the aisle and, all grace, vaulted through the ropes. He was a man who was trying to find something he had lost even before he turned professional.
"The biggest thrill I ever got," he told me once, "was when I won the Golden Gloves and they streamed that light down on me in Madison Square Garden and said, 'The Golden Gloves featherweight champion, Sugar Ray Robinson!' I bought the papers. I read about it over and over. It was more of a thrill than when I won the welterweight championship of the world.
"Once I read," he said—and he even read law, fascinated by its contradictions—"something that King Solomon said. He said, 'The wiser a man gets the less beauty he finds in life.' If I try to explain that to people they don't understand. It's like the first time you go to Coney Island arid you ride the chute-the-chute and you get a big thrill. The second time it isn't so much."
Few fighters have been as disliked within their profession and by its press as was Robinson while he was struggling to make his way, and the fight game was, in part, responsible for that. In this country, from the turn of the century on, boxing gave the black man, because it needed him, a better break than he received in any other sport, but it only gave him what it had to. For years, while Mike Jacobs ran big-time boxing, he refused Robinson that chance at the welterweight title.
"Mike explained that to me," Robinson told me once. "He explained that I'd kill the division. He said, 'I got to have two or three guys fightin' for the title. You'd darken the class.' I understand that. That's good business."
I am sure he understood it, but he did not have to like it. In his early days, in order to get fights, he had to take less money than the opponents he knocked out. Once, after he had trained three weeks for a fight, the promoter ran out. A couple of years later, Jacobs promised him $2,000 beyond his small purse if he would box for a Boston promoter to whom Jacobs owed a favor. When, after the fight, Robinson showed up for his money, Jacobs ridiculed him.
"You didn't think I'd go into my own kick," Mike said, "for some other guy's fight."
They tried to do it to him in the ring too. There was the story that Duke Stefano, then a manager of fighters, was telling me one afternoon in Stillman's Gym.
"I remember Robinson one night when he was just starting out as a pro," Duke said. "Just before the fight, Robinson complained that he had a bad ear, and he didn't want to go through with the fight. It was his left ear, and they looked in it, and you could see it was red and swollen.
"The other guy's manager—he was from New Jersey—looked at it and he said, 'Look, my guy is just an opponent. Go through with the fight, and I promise you he won't touch the ear.' Robinson said, 'Okay, long as he stays away from the ear.' Well, the bell rang, and the other guy came out of his corner and winged a right hand at the ear. Robinson just turned his head and looked at the corner. The guy did it a second time, and Robinson looked at the manager again. The third time the guy tried it, Robinson stepped in with a hook and flattened him.
"The manager," Duke said, "turned right around and went back to New Jersey. He didn't even second another kid he had in the next bout."
Fritzie Zivic did it to him too, as he did to many others. He was the recently dethroned welterweight champion of the world when Robinson, in only his second year as a pro, outpointed him over ten rounds in Madison Square Garden. Ten weeks later he would knock Zivic out in ten.
"Fritzie Zivic," Robinson told me once, "taught me more than anybody I ever fought."
"What did he teach you?" I said.
"He taught me that a man can make you butt open your own eye," he said, and I appreciated the phrasing. He was one of the cleanest of fighters, and what he had learned from Zivic was not something that you did to another man, but that he could do to you.
"And how does a man do that?" I said.
"He slipped one of my jabs," Robinson said, "and reached his right glove around behind my head and pulled my head down on his."
Young Otto, who boxed the best lightweights during the first two decades of this century and was a great student of the science, refereed that first fight. One day in Stillman's I asked him about it.
"In the sixth round," he said, "Robinson said to me, 'He's stickin' his thumbs in my eyes.' I said, 'You ain't no cripple.' After that he give it back to Zivic better than Zivic was givin' it to him. I said to myself then, 'This kid is gonna be a great fighter.' "
So they tried to use him and abuse him, and sometimes succeeded, in and out of the ring. When, in self-defense, he retaliated, he acquired the reputation that provoked The Saturday Evening Post to ask me to do a piece they were to entitle, "Why Don't They Like Ray Robinson?"
"This is a tough assignment for me," I said to him.
"How's that?" he said.
We were sitting in his office at Ray Robinson Enterprises, Inc., in Harlem, and he had his feet up on his triangular glass-topped desk. He owned most of the block on the west side of Seventh Avenue from 123rd to 124th streets, and he had $250,000 tied up in the five-story apartment house, Sugar Ray's Bar and Restaurant, Edna Mae's Lingerie Shop, and Sugar Ray's Quality Cleaners, with its five outlets.
"I have to ask you the tough questions," I said.
"That's all right," he said. "Go ahead."
"I will," I said, "but I want to explain something first. I think this piece can do you a lot of good. You're unquestionably the greatest fighter since Benny Leonard, and there are some old-timers who say you may be the best since Joe Gans, who died ten years before you were born."
"They say that?" he said, as if he hadn't known. "I appreciate that."
"My point is," I said, "that you should be the most popular fighter of your time, but you're not. There are raps against you in the fight game, and they keep bringing up your Army record and you've never made the money that you should. A fighter like Graziano, who's a beginner compared to you and has a dishonorable discharge from the Army while you have an honorable one, has made twice as much as you have."
"That's right," he said.
"Part of that is style," I said. "All his fights are wars, and that's what the public likes, but it's style outside the ring, too. He's open and frank, and you're not, really. What I want to do is explain you. I want you to tell me what it's like to have a fine mind and great physical talents, to be a great artist but to be colored and to have that used against you in the fight game and out of it. It can explain a lot about you, and I'll understand. If I understand, I can make the readers understand, and as I said, that can mean a lot to you, if you'll level with me."
I really believed it. I believed it for about five minutes.
"If you can do that," he said, "I'll appreciate it. Nobody's ever done that for me before. You just ask me the questions, what you want to know."
"All right," I said. "Let's get the Army thing out of the way first."
It wasn't any good. We went around and around, as in a ring, and when Robinson couldn't counter my leads or even slip them, he professed only astonishment that I should hold such documented assertions to be facts.
There was something to be celebrated in his Army record. He had been a member of Casual Detachment 7, known as "The Joe Louis Troupe." Joe and he and four other fighters spent
seven months touring camps in this country and putting on boxing exhibitions. In Florida, Robinson refused to box unless black troops were allowed to attend, and he, an enlisted man, faced down a general. At Camp Sibert, Alabama, a white M.P. saw Louis emerge from a phone booth in so-called white territory, and he threatened to club Joe. Robinson took him on, the two rolling on the ground, and there was rioting by black troops before apologies were made to the two fighters.
It was a matter of Army record and common knowledge, however, that when the troupe sailed for Europe, from Pier 90, New York, on March 31, 1944, Robinson was not aboard. It was also in the record that he had previously declared his intention not to go, and that the Articles of War as they applied to the punishment for desertion had been explained to him.
"But why would a man say such a thing?" he said when I had read to him from the affidavit.
"He not only said it," I said, "but he swore to it."
"I can't understand that," Robinson said. "I never met that officer, and he never read me such things."
Years later, in his autobiography, he would state that he had been suffering from amnesia following a fall, and had been hospitalized for that before his honorable discharge as a sergeant on June 3, 1944. It was a book he had wanted me to write after he had retired for the first time in 1952. Because he preferred to avoid using elevators, as he also preferred not to fly, we had met late one afternoon with my agent and another, not in my agent's office on the twentieth floor of the Mutual of New York Building, but in the cocktail lounge of the Park Sheraton.
Once They Heard the Cheers Page 36