Once They Heard the Cheers

by Wilfred Charles Heinz

  "I just can't do it, Ray," I said, after we had talked for a while, the others listening, and I had tried again. "There are those conflicting versions of those events in your life, in and out of boxing, and we tried two years ago in your office and we've tried again now, and we still can't resolve them. I'm sorry, but I just can't do the book."

  "That's all right, old buddy," he said. "I understand."

  I doubt that he did—why couldn't we just put it all down the way he said, and possibly even believed it had been, and ignore the conflicts? And when I would see him after that it would always be in camp before his fights and I would be with others. Now I had heard that he was heading up a youth project in Los Angeles, and at ten o'clock on that Friday morning the taxi driver and I found it, finally, on West Adams Boulevard with the sign— Sugar Ray's Youth Foundation—fronting the one-story building.

  "He's in conference with Mr. Fillmore right now," the woman said across the counter, and I had missed her name when she had introduced herself. "I don't think he'll be long, though."

  "That's all right, " I said. "I have plenty of time."

  "Maybe while you're waiting," she said, "you'd like to look at some of our material."

  "That would be fine," I said.

  She introduced me then to Mel Zolkover, who had arisen from behind one of the desks beyond the counter. He is a middle-aged retired mechanical engineer and the foundation's administrative director, and we shook hands.

  She went back to a desk, and while I waited I could hear the even tones of Robinson's voice, still familiar after all the years, in an office on the left. When she came back she handed me the several sheets of publicity and a folder from the 1976-77 "Miss Sugar Ray Teen Pageant." From a photograph I identified her as Thelma Smith, the executive secretary, and elsewhere I noted that Bob Hope is the foundation's honorary chairman, Robinson the chairman, and Wright Fillmore the president. I read about arts and crafts projects, costume making, karate instruction, talent shows, art classes, and workshops in beauty and personal development, drama, band and combo repertory, and dance.

  "Old buddy!" he said, smiling and his face fuller and shaking hands across the counter. "How's my old buddy?"

  "Fine," I said. "And you?"

  "Just fine," he said. "Come on in here and sit down and we'll talk."

  I followed him to the middle desk at the back. He was wearing a blue leisure suit, the jacket over a dark blue-and-fuschia sports shirt. Once I had checked his wardrobe. He owned thirty-four suits, twenty-six pairs of shoes, nine sports jackets and as many pairs of slacks, six overcoats and four topcoats, most of which apparel he said he had never worn even once.

  "You've gained some weight," I said.

  As a fighter he was one of the most lithe and handsome of men. He moved with such grace and rhythm, in the ring and out, that watching him made me think of rubbing silk or satin between one's hands. During his first retirement, in fact, he tried it as a dancer, opening at the French Casino in New York for $15,000 a week. After that, it was downhill.

  "Robinson was a good dancer, for a fighter," a Broadway booking agent told me, after Robinson had come back to knock out Bobo Olson and win the middleweight title the second time. "Maybe no other fighter ever danced as well, but the feature of his act was his change of clothes. He looked good in everything he put on."

  He was leaning back now in the high-backed desk chair. Not only was his face fuller, but at fifty-six he was a lot heavier across the shoulders and chest and at the waist.

  "Yeah, I'm heavier," he said now. "You see, I sit here with something on my mind, and I don't get the exercise I should. Every day, though, I try to take a five-mile walk."

  "How heavy are you?"

  "Oh, 183-84," he said, and he fought best at 147. "You see, you've got a certain ego about having been a champion, and you'd like to keep like that, but it's so difficult. There are temptations, and it takes will power. When you're fightin' you have to live by the rules, because when that bell rings condition is the name of the game. Even then, in camp, Joe Louis and I would go out in the boat and have quarts of ice cream and our trainers would get mad."

  He reached into a desk drawer, and he brought out a package of Danish pastries. He tore one end off the transparent wrapper and took out one and, leaning back again, began eating.

  "My breakfast," he said. "You know, the most important meal is breakfast."

  "And that's your breakfast?"

  "That's right," he said, "and Jack Blackburn used to get after Joe and me."

  Blackburn was Louis's discoverer, teacher, and trainer. He developed Louis so precisely in the image of what he himself had been as a fighter that Louis had the same flaw that Blackburn had of dropping the left arm after a jab. It was what made Louis vulnerable to a straight right counter over the jab.

  "Blackburn," Robinson was saying, "used to tell us, 'You got to eat breakfast.' Then they used to squeeze blood from the meat, and I'd drink that. From Monday through Friday I'd drink it. You have to get that from a slaughter house, and they put this blood in a can and I used to go down there and get it. I'll tell you, that's the most potent thing there is."

  "I remember that you used to do that," I said. "Do you ever drink it now?"

  "Every now and then I think I'll do it," he said, "but I don't."

  He had finished the pastry and folded over the end of the package. He put the package back in the desk drawer.

  "What brought you out here to California?" I said.

  "My wife is from out here," he said. When he was fighting he was married to Edna Mae Holly. She had been a dancer and they had two sons, and I had not known he had remarried. "Joe Louis was goin' with a girl out here, and I met Millie through the recommendation of this other girl. You know, like a dog. You see something, and the ears go bong! We were married in 1965, and that's how I met Mr. Fillmore, and we started this foundation."

  "Tell me about that."

  "We went to London," he said, "and she was having her thirty-third or thirty-fourth birthday party, and . . ."

  "Who was?" I said.

  "Queen Elizabeth," he said. "Millie and I, we were invited and we went to the party. It was a wonderful ceremony, and Prince Phillip and I were talkin'. You remember those strikes?"

  "What strikes?"

  "I think it started in Berkeley," he said.

  "The student protests?"

  "That's right," he said. "We were talkin', and he said, 'Sugar, I believe you could help that.' I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'Youngsters look up to you, and I've got an idea.' I had met Mr. Fillmore, and of all the people I've met—all the Popes and all—I never met a man who believes in God and lives it more than Mr. Fillmore. You never hear the guy say a harsh word, even a loud word, and I want you to meet him."

  "I'd like to," I said.

  "I came back to New York," he said, "and I was goin' with my present wife. She lived upstairs out here and Mr. Fillmore lived downstairs. I talked with him, and we went to the Council of Churches and asked them to help us, and they gave us money. The county saw the potential and funded us. Now we hope to have the State Junior Olympics, and Jimmy Carter was out and I met with him, and he's a nice guy and likes what we're doing, and we hope for Federal funding. We work with the Board of Education and the Department of Parks and Recreation, and there has never been a paid member of the board of trustees. Every dollar goes in, and I'm about the poorest cat on the board."

  "What happened to all that property you owned in Harlem?"

  "I sold that even at a loss," he said, "just to get out. I fell in love with my wife out here, and Harlem was goin' down hill so bad, and now if you see a white face there, you know it's a cop."

  "Did you get clipped?"

  One day, sitting in his office in Harlem, he had told me that he felt he was destined to make a great success in business. It was that afternoon in 1950, when he spoke of how he knew his ring skills were starting to decline.

  "After a man attains all the things he
likes," he had said then, "he has to find some other form of happiness. I feel I'm gonna find that in business. I'm not cocky within myself. I'm an extreme Christian within myself. I just believe. My faith is so strong that I know that someday I'm gonna be the head of some real big business. I thank God for the success I've had, and the investments I've made."

  "Yeah, I got clipped," he said now. "It happened to Joe, too, but that's a part of life. I didn't get out with too much, but I didn't lose too much, either."

  "As you say," I said, "it happened to Joe, too, and it happens so often. They talk about the dirty fight game, but a fighter makes a fortune in it, and when he gets out into the nice clean world of American business they take it all from him."

  "You're so right," he said. "What other fighters are you seeing for the book?"

  "I just saw Willie Pep last month."

  "He was a great one," he said. "When I beat him in the amateurs in Connecticut, they took me to the police station."

  "I remember that story," I said. "Willie's all right. He's working for the Athletic Commission in Connecticut, and he's married for the fifth time."

  "You know how that is," he said, smiling. "When Joe was the champion and I used to go to the airport, they came off that plane like it was a parade."

  "And I saw Billy Graham," I said. "He's doing fine, working for Seagram's."

  "Billy Graham?" he said. "He's my man. He beat me in the first fight I lost."

  "When you were ninety-pound kids," I said.

  He had reached into the desk drawer again. He brought out the Danish, and started on another one.

  "There are so many of your fights I remember," I said. "The night you won the middleweight title from Jake LaMotta in Chicago . . ."

  "Jake wasn't smart," he said, "but he was in condition. He was 'The Bull.' "

  "I know," I said. "I remember that, after your first fight with him, you were passing blood for days."

  "That's right," he said.

  "When you fought him in Chicago for the title in '51," I said, "I watched it at a neighbor's house on TV. Ted Husing was announcing the fight, and in the early rounds he was filled with LaMotta. He kept saying that we were seeing an upset, that LaMotta was running the fight."

  "He said that?"

  "Yes, and I said to my neighbor, 'Husing doesn't know what he's talking about. Watch what Robinson does the next time the referee breaks them, or Robinson backs off from an exchange.' You would back off so far that sometimes you went out of the camera range, right off the screen. I said, 'LaMotta had trouble making the weight, and Robinson is walking the legs off him. When he gets ready to turn it on, Jake won't have much left.' In the thirteenth round you turned it on, and the referee had to stop it."

  "That's right," he said, nodding. "That's exactly what I did. You remember that?"

  "Another fight I remember," I said, "was the one with "Flash" Sebastian, and that one scared me."

  "That scared me, too," he said.

  On June 24, 1947, Robinson knocked out Jimmy Doyle in the eighth round in Cleveland, and the next day Doyle died of brain injury. At the coroner's inquest, Robinson was asked, "Couldn't you tell from the look on Doyle's face that he had been hurt?" Robinson said, "Mister, that's what my business is, to hurt people." Because he was absolutely frank, he caught the criticism. He set up a $10,000 trust fund for Doyle's mother, and two months later he took little more than his expenses to fight Sebastian, the welterweight champion of the Philippines, on an American Legion show in Madison Square Garden.

  "It was right after that Doyle fight," I said now.

  "I know," he said. "The night before the Doyle fight I dreamed what was gonna happen, and I got up the next day and I called the commission and I told them. They said that they'd sold all the tickets, and they went so far as to get a Catholic priest to talk to me."

  "In that Sebastian fight," I said, "you came out of your corner for the first round and he threw a wide hook, and you brought your right glove up and blocked it. He backed off, and came in again and did the same thing. This time you threw the right hand inside the hook and followed it with a hook of your own, and he went back on his head. Then he tried to get up, and he fell forward on his face, and the photographers at ringside were hollering, 'Get this! Get this! This guy may die, too!' "

  "I know," he said. "I said, 'Oh, Lord, don't let it happen again.' "

  "In the dressing room later," I said, "Sebastian was hysterical. Whitey Bimstein had seconded him, and he took a towel and soaked it in ice water and snapped it in Sebastian's face to bring him out of it. I said to Whitey, 'What kind of a fighter is this they brought all the way from the Philippines to almost be killed?' Whitey said, T never saw him before tonight, but they asked me to work with him. After I got him taped, I told him to warm up. He threw one punch, and I stopped him. I said, "Look, fella. When you throw that hook, don't raise your head. You're fightin' Ray Robinson. You do that with him, and he'll take your head right off your shoulders." '

  "Then sometime later I was talking with Ruby Goldstein. You remember Ruby was the referee that night, and Ruby said, 'That Sebastian threw that first hook, and Robinson brushed it away. I was just thinkin' to myself that if he did that again Robinson would cross a right. The next thing I knew he did, and I was saying, 'One . . . two . . . three.' "

  "I was lucky that night," Robinson said now.

  "And Sebastian was, too," I said, "and I'll tell you another night when you were lucky."

  "When was that?" he said.

  "When you got the title back from Randy Turpin."

  In August of 1950 Robinson carried Charley Fusari over fifteen rounds of what was ostensibly a fight for Robinson's welterweight title but was, on Robinson's part, just one of the greatest boxing exhibitions I have ever seen. He gave his entire purse to the Damon Runyan Cancer Fund, of which Dan Parker, the sports editor and columnist of the New York Daily Mirror, was president. This act of charity had the effect, however unintended, of silencing Parker who, whenever the word got out that Robinson intended to go to Europe, would recall that he had missed that opportunity when he had failed to sail with the "Joe Louis Troupe."

  The following May, Robinson left for Paris—Parker merely pointing out that it was "by boat"—and took along his fuschia Cadillac and George Gainford's black one. Included in the party of eleven were Robinson's golf pro, and his barber, and in Paris they acquired an Arabian midget who spoke five languages. They occupied most of one floor of the Claridge, and seldom left to eat in restaurants. There was an almost constant flow of room-service waiters through the suites, and the bill at the end was staggering.

  "You know how the French are," Lew Burston, who had lived for many years in Paris and ran the foreign affairs of the Mike Jacobs boxing empire, said to me one day following Robinson's return. "In the old days they used to see the maharajas arrive with their retinues, and they basically believe that another man's business is bis own. At the end of Robinson's stay, though, even the French were somewhat stunned."

  Robinson fought a half-dozen times in Europe, in Paris and elsewhere, and on July 10 in London he defended his middleweight title against Randy Turpin, the British and European champion. Turpin out-pointed him over the fifteen rounds in an upset so startling that in the fight game on this side of the ocean they found it hard to believe.

  "You may remember," I was saying to him now, "what Lew Burston said after the first Turpin fight. He said, 'Robinson had Paris in his legs.' "

  "That was one of the few fights," he said, nodding, "where I took a chance. Remember what I told you—about temptation and will power? Then he had one of the most unorthodox styles, too. You remember the second fight?"

  Two months after the London fight they met again in the Polo Grounds in New York. Robinson won the early rounds, but then Turpin, awkward, sometimes punching off the wrong foot, lunging with his jab, chopping with his right in close and eight years younger, began to come on. By the tenth round, Robinson seemed spent, and then a wide cu
t opened over his left eye and, obviously fearful that the fight might be stopped and with the blood gushing out of the cut, he took the big gamble. He walked in with both hands going. He shook Turpin with a right, pushed him off and dropped him in the middle of the ring with another right. When Turpin got up at nine, Robinson drove him to the ropes, and there he must have thrown forty punches. Turpin, reeling now and trying to cover, was half sitting on the middle rope, and there were 61,000 people there, and it sounded as if they were all screaming.

  "Of course I remember the fight," I was saying now, "and, as I said, you were lucky that night. When you had him on the ropes and he didn't go down, you reached out with your left, put your glove behind his head and tried to pull him forward. There were only eight seconds left in the round, so if you had pulled him off the ropes and he had gone down, the count would have killed the rest of the round. You had that cut and you were exhausted, and you would never have survived the next five rounds."