Businessman Boxer

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For the professional boxer, fight day is a solemn day, and World Middleweight Champion Sugar Ray Robinson takes it as solemnly as lesser men. There are no high jinks, none of the footloose fun of other days. It is a time for early morning prayer, which Sugar Ray makes in any handy church, denomination immaterial. It is a day for not shaving (to keep the skin tough), a day for a tea & toast breakfast--nothing more. It is a day of long minutes in a narrow, chilly dressing room, while a manager and trainer swap yarns to break the tension.

Last week, fight day for Sugar Ray came in Antwerp, where he was to meet The Netherlands' top middleweight, Jan de Bruin. As always, there was time to kill. Sugar Ray was up at 7, went to Mass in a nearby church at 8, had finished breakfast by 10:30. At 11:30 he shuffled across the Avenue de Keyser from the Century Hotel for the formality of weighing in. After that came a long nap back in the hotel. Not until 3:30 did the real business of the day begin.

In the dressing room of Antwerp's Sportpalais, Trainer Harry ("Papa") Wiley had unpacked the bag, spread a clean linen sheet over the rubbing table, laid out the clean woolen socks, the purple trunks, the boxing shoes with new laces. Robinson gave one dour look at the preparations and grumbled: "It's cold here."

But as fight time approached, the champ began to loosen up. Pacing up & down the room, throwing in a quick skip-step before each turn, he began kidding with Papa and Manager George Gainford, was soon talking baseball and skipping an imaginary rope. By the time he walked down the aisle to the ring, jogging rhythmically to some inner melody, the atmosphere of tension and strained horseplay was gone. From the instant the bell sounded, Sugar Ray Robinson was the master craftsman who knew just what he was doing--the best fighter, pound for pound, in the world.

Bang-Bang-Bang. Relaxed and loose, he cautiously circled the Dutchman, spotted a sudden opening. He threw a left jab to the belly and De Bruin, gaping in surprise, dropped to the canvas. De Bruin picked himself up at the count of one, sparred warily for a moment, then rocked Robinson with a hard right. At round's end Robinson confided to Gainford and Trainer Peewee Beale: "Man, that cat can smoke" (that fighter can hit).

"Bang-bang-bang him in the belly," said Gainford. "Slow him up." Robinson went to work, snakewhipped De Bruin with sharp lefts. Right hooks, crosses, uppercuts and underswung bolos* crashed through De Bruin's blockade of glove and muscle. Robinson was on target, bombarding his opponent with boxing's most effective and versatile arsenal. By the middle of Round Eight, De Bruin had had enough. Pummeled and pounded by a copper-colored whirlwind that seemed to buffet him from all sides, he wearily threw up a hand in a gesture of defeat and ambled out of the ring. It was Sugar Ray Robinson's 125th victory in a string that has stretched for eleven years with only two draws and one defeat.

Relaxing in the locker room afterwards, Robinson shook off the fight-day mood with the air of any conscientious businessman dismissing his office cares. "Thank God that's over," said Sugar. "That boy could punch."

Then he got dressed, in a conservative blue suit, white shirt, black shoes, and turned to tidying up a few other details. He had to pose with a group of doctors to whom he had presented a $10,000 check in the name of the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund. There were some notes to get off to New York--to Runyon Fund Treasurer Walter Winchell, to Jim Farley, to Crooner Billy Eckstine. Soon after midnight he was yawning off to bed, thinking of his golf (middle 70s). "I got a date to play at St. Cloud [near Paris] tomorrow."

Celebrity in Residence. By last week Sugar Ray Robinson had gone through three fight days since he arrived in Europe last month for his second triumphal tour of the Continent. In the process he has handily polished off some of the best of Europe's middleweights: De Bruin, Kid Marcel, Jean Wanes. At week's end he made it four in a row by defeating France's ex-welterweight champion Jean Walzack. Far from resenting it, Europeans have made "Le Sucre Merveilleux" their newest, most clamorously idolized hero. As a combination boulevardier, Damon Runyon Fund frontman and one-man boxing stable, Robinson is Paris' No. 1 celebrity in residence.

Whenever Sugar's fuchsia Cadillac convertible pulls away from the Claridge and heads up the Champs Elysees, grinning gendarmes wave ordinary traffic to a stop. Bicyclists swarm behind him, like gulls after a liner, happily shouting his name, "Ehh-Ro-Bean-Song!" While Sugar Ray, once a skinny little kid growing up on the street corners of Harlem, grandly replies with his newly acquired French: "Yeah, c`a marche"

Since he first stepped off the boat at Le Havre, invitations have been pouring in at such a rate that it takes two secretaries to sort them into categories--"yes," "no," and "maybe." Among the "yes" occasions recently was a white-tie benefit where Amateur Dancer Robinson's high-flying buck & wing stole the show from Edith Piaf and Louis Jouvet. Again, there was a plaque to be unveiled in honor of France's late Middleweight Champion Marcel Cerdan and Sugar Ray presided at the ceremony. Again, Boxer Robinson turned out to receive an Oscar from a French boxing magazine as the "best fighter of the year," and made a modest acceptance speech.

Business Comes First. Frankly reveling in all the acclaim, Sugar delightedly skims the Paris Page One stories reporting his progress. But Robinson is too good a businessman to forget his main purpose in life for long. "Boxing is my business," he likes to explain, "and I enjoy my business." With Sugar Ray Robinson, business has always come first.

Fight week or not, Robinson and Papa Wiley are up each morning at 6 a.m., to pound out four to six miles of roadwork along the shady bridle paths of the Bois de Boulogne. Three times a week Sugar's gaudy Cadillac winds into a narrow courtyard off the Rue du Faubourg St. Denis for a 3 p.m. workout in the Central Sporting Club, where Sugar gets seriously down to work: three minutes of shadow boxing; six rounds of boxing, two with each of three sparring partners; three minutes with the body bag, and three with the light punching bag. In a final three minutes with the skip rope, Robinson goes into a spring-legged jitterbug routine that would spring the cartilages of most boxers.

But it is evidence of the kind of razor-edge conditioning that has helped to make Sugar Ray Robinson the best fighter in the ring today. At a time when boxing is suffering from a sad lack of topflight performers, Sugar is a sparkling exception to the rule.

"I'm a Boxer." Despite his unquestioned ability and the success of his European tour, Ray Robinson is neither the world's richest fighter nor its most popular. For one thing, even at a time when such a club-fighting brawler as Rocky Graziano was drawing $100,000 gates, Robinson had trouble lining up opponents good enough, or foolish enough, to step into the same ring with him. For another, U.S. crowds, always preferring a slugger to a boxer, were almost bored by his cold, businesslike perfection in the ring. "I'm a boxer," says Robinson, "not a fighter."

But Boxer Robinson has whipped some of the ruggedest fighters of the day. Most fighters are "one-handed." They have a good right cross or a good left jab, but rarely combine the two. Robinson's repertoire, thrown with equal speed and power by either hand, includes every standard punch from a bolo to a hook--and a few he makes up on the spur of the moment.

Fighting from a stand-up position which has lured a whole generation of young boxers away from Joe Louis' shuffling, deadpan approach, versatile Ray Robinson varies his style to suit his opponent. Against France's Robert Villemain last year, he solved Villemain's famed defensive shell by shucking him like an oyster, ramming uppercuts between the Frenchman's gloves. With hustling leather-thrower Kid Gavilan, Robinson danced nimbly out of range, picking the punches off with his gloves, then took his man with a fancy exhibition of counterpunching.

Whatever the talent of his opponent, Robinson can always count on a sure sense of rhythm and the ability to cut loose with a stunning flurry of punches with both hands. Tommy Bell, the last man to stand between Robinson and the welterweight (147 Ibs.) crown, describes his defeat with the uncompromising clarity of a man speaking from brutal experience: "He come at me with two punches, a left and a right. I didn't know which hit me first. The punches didn't hurt me, but when I started to move, my legs wouldn't go with me, and I fell over on my head."

Board of Strategy. Robinson is the first to admit that a good part of his success in the ring comes from careful planning beforehand, and shrewd coaching from his corner. During the fight Manager Gainford and Trainer Beale keep a sharp watch on both fighters, looking for trouble before it starts, quick to spot an enemy weakness. Says Robinson: "They can see better than me. I'm always watching my man. But they can see that he drops his right hand a little bit after throwing a right punch. They tell me to draw his right and then I'll have an opening."

Such teamwork pays big dividends. When Robinson won the middleweight title (160 Ibs.) from Jake LaMotta last February, the fight was a classic example of close teamwork, careful strategy and calculated risk. Against the "Bull of The Bronx," a stolid, crowding fighter with menacing strength and a stubborn pride in never having been knocked down, the Robinson strategy board settled on the dangerous game of the bull ring, with Robinson dancing out of the way of LaMotta's angry charges, prodding back to weaken his opponent.

In the eleventh round, the strategy shifted. Robinson stood his ground, purposely absorbed the best punches a tiring LaMotta could throw. Satisfied that LaMotta was no longer dangerous, Robinson moved in for the kill. It never quite came off. In the 13th the referee stopped the fight with LaMotta beaten to a pulpy mass of bruised flesh, his championship lost by a technical knockout.

The news of the victory made Page One all over Europe. It was LaMotta who had won the middleweight title from France's Marcel Cerdan, four months before Cerdan died in a transatlantic airplane crash on his way back to the U.S. for a try at recovering his title. The victory made "Le Sucre Merveilleux" a European hero overnight. It also marked the distance the combination of Sugar Ray and Big George Gainford had come since the day an unknown 14-year-old dropped into Gainford's hole-in-the-wall Harlem gym, begging for a chance to fight.

Education in HaHem. Looking back on his early years, Sugar Ray likes to tell about the days when he and Joe Louis were growing up together in Detroit's brawling "Black Bottom" district. Whenever Joe was in the gym," says Robinson, "so was I. He was my idol, and still is." That memory is a convenient bit of fiction that his mother, Mrs. Leila Smith, dispels with a single word: "Baloney." Actually, Robinson's story sticks a lot closer to the traditional boxer's mold--the hungry, ambitious kid who had to fight for survival from the day he was born plain Walker Smith on May 3, 1921.

As a youngster in Detroit, Robinson may well have gawked admiringly at a 17-year-old boxer named Joe Louis Barrow, who lived in the same block. But the relationship never got much closer than that. When Ray was eleven, his mother packed the kids (two sisters) off to Harlem, leaving their father for good, and set about supporting her children as a seamstress on $14 a week. "Ray learned early you don't get nothing for nothing," Mrs. Smith says. He never forgot it. Traveling with a rowdy street gang, shooting crap in Harlem gutters, dancing for dimes on Broadway street corners, the harum-scarum kid got into more than the normal amount of trouble, including a marriage when he was 16,* a divorce when he was 19.

"Sweet as Sugar." It was the kind of rough & tumble background from which the best fighters have always come. By the time of his divorce, Ray had already convinced George Gainford that he was a fiercely determined comer. He was well known and well traveled in the bootleg circuit (i.e., unlicensed fights held in small clubs) around New York and Connecticut. One day in 1936 "Smitty" borrowed the amateur fight card of a fighter named Ray Robinson for his first official fight, got stuck with the name. A year later, after watching the lanky kid in action, a sportwriter said to Gainford: "That's a sweet fighter you got there." "Sweet as sugar," Gainford replied, and Sugar Ray Robinson's full name was set.

The bootleg bouts ended when Robinson turned professional in 1940. As an amateur he had never lost a fight, had won 85 straight, including Golden Gloves titles in the featherweight and lightweight divisions. Robinson's first professional bout was a four-round preliminary at Madison Square Garden. He won (a second-round knockout), and the $100 he earned was the equivalent to four bootleg bouts, where wristwatches were the currency.

The feature attraction at the Garden that night was Henry Armstrong v. Fritzie Zivic. While the 19-year-old kid watched wide-eyed, Zivic gave the great Henry Armstrong-the worst drubbing of his career. Robinson, so the story goes, resolved revenge then & there. A year later, further infuriated when Zivic referred to him as "a punk amateur kid," Robinson got his chance. Though his detractors still claimed that Robinson was a weak counterpuncher, the skinny (139 Ibs.) kid, just half an inch under 6 ft., outgunned ex-Welterweight Champion Zivic at his own game: counterpunching. Sugar Ray was on his way.

He was not stopped until his 41st fight, in 1943, when Jake LaMotta won a close decision after knocking him through the ropes, a decision that Robinson has convincingly reversed five times.

What's in It for Me? Two weeks after LaMotta licked him, Robinson was inducted into the Army. His career in the service was short (15 months) and not always sweet. At Camp Sibert, Ala., he got into a row with MPs who prodded Joe Louis out of the Southern "white" waiting room in a bus station. Robinson refused to fight exhibitions unless Negro soldiers were allowed to watch. He was accused of jumping ship when the Louis troupe embarked for Europe.

Robinson insists that he was in the hospital with a perforated eardrum at the time, and has an honorable discharge to prove it. But the whole affair left a bitter taste in his mouth.

In the first postwar years, still smarting from his Army experiences, Robinson seemed determined to make himself the most unpopular man in the ring. He snapped at sportwriters, took to running out on promoters, got a reputation as a cold, calculating type, with an icy "What's-in-it-for-me?" attitude to everything. But his second marriage (to ex-Cotton Club Chorine Edna Mae) and a growing sense of his new stature as a world champion soon began to smooth off some of the rough edges. The reform of Sugar Ray Robinson reached some sort of climax when he phoned Walter Winchell a year ago and offered to give the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund his cut of the gate in the championship fight with Charley Fusari.

It was a little difficult at first for some to believe that the offer was not just a pressagent's stunt. A New York Times sports columnist summed up the reaction: "Fight for nothing? Who? Sugar Ray Robinson? Oh, no! It can't be. There must be some angle there!" But if there was an angle, Robinson rounded the corner on two wheels, gunned down a new straightaway. He now thoroughly enjoys his new personality as the responsible citizen. He is a big man in Harlem, a political power, who is often on the phone with his good friend Mayor Impellitteri ("I call him Vince"). Walter Winchell buzzes him constantly. Edna Mae (on her way to join Robinson in Paris this week) often has Mrs. Winchell "baby sit" for Ray Robinson Jr., 2 1/2.

"It Gets You." At ease in his Paris suite last week, Sugar Ray was riding th crest of the wave. He is surrounded by an admiring entourage of eleven, including a French midget (for the laughs), a personal golf pro, and a private barber who spends hours touching up Robinson's unscarred good looks with facials and hair-straightening treatments. Unlike many, another boxer, Robinson has invested his ring earnings in a series of profitable businesses: Sugar Ray's Cafe, a barbershop, a drycleaning establishment.

"You know," Robinson mused philosophically, "it's a funny thing. Those crowds, those autographs, having everybody say, 'Hey, Robinson,' being somebody, it gets you. Some people can't understand that. And you know one day it's got to go. Boxing is a young man's game."

He looked about the room thoughtfully, as if he always wanted to remember this precise minute of this particular day. Then he went on: "Now take Joe Louis. Maybe he needs money. But it's the crowds, it's being the champ he misses. This isn't no easy life. Man, there's temptation. You don't know what temptation. Temptation, it eats away a man's will power. Will power don't last forever, you know." Robinson, using his expressive hands, showed will power going, temptation growing. "That's why you've got to put that money into something. A man can't live off capital, no matter how much he makes."

For a moment Robinson almost sounded like a man getting ready to retire. At 30, he is wise enough to know that one lucky punch could mean the beginning of the end, that "any man with two hands can beat you." But he is nowhere near ready to quit yet. It's too much fun.

Ahead of him are more Runyon Fund tours, to Italy, Scandinavia, possibly Israel. And this week Sugar Ray is settling down to the serious business of getting ready for a title defense against British Empire (and European) Middleweight Champion Randy Turpin next month. Turpin, at 23, is a real challenge to the champion, a fighter with the power, if not the ring-wise skill of Robinson himself. In 50 fights, young Turpin has been beaten only once (by France's Jean Stock). Since he won his title last October, Turpin has knocked out seven opponents in a row, including France's Stock and Holland's De Bruin.

But Robinson is already looking past Turpin to another title--the light heavyweight championship now held by Joey Maxim. Robinson says he will not fight Heavyweight Champion Ezzard Charles under any circumstances. But Maxim is something else again. Though Robinson is too politic to mention it, the light heavyweight crown is the only major world title not held by a Negro. Besides, says Good Businessman Ray Robinson, "it's a good money match."

* Blows thrown with almost the same motion as that used by a softball pitcher. More spectacular-looking than the shorter, deadlier uppercut, the bolo is telegraphed by its windup, hence is not normally effective as a knockout punch.

* A child, now 13, lives with his mother, is supported by Robinson.

* Hammering Henry, a leather-throwing little gamecock, is the only man ever to hold three titles (featherweight, lightweight and welterweight) simultaneously. Today, a fighter automatically vacates one title when he wins another.

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