Sugar Ray Robinson

The Full Biography

Sugar Ray Robinson. Boxer. The Ailey boy who borrowed a name, earned the word Sugar, and made pound-for-pound a sentence the sport still has to say out loud.

This is his story.

The image most people still carry is a welterweight in satin, waist small, shoulders fast, a left hook that looked like a dance until it was not. The year might be 1946 and the welterweight title, or 1951 in Chicago against Jake LaMotta, the fight they still call the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. What the still cannot show is Walker Smith Jr. of Ailey, Georgia, a borrowed amateur card, a Harlem nightclub, five middleweight championships the record book had not imagined, a retirement that did not hold, and a last decade in which the greatest fighter many people ever saw had to be cared for.

He was born Walker Smith Jr. on May 3, 1921, in Ailey, Georgia, to Walker Smith Sr. and Leila Hurst. The family went north, first to Detroit, then to Harlem. The first pressure was a boy’s body in a city that had gyms, and a mother who did not want the gyms to have him. He wanted to fight anyway. Too young for a card of his own, he used an Amateur Athletic Union identity that already belonged to a friend named Ray Robinson. The name stuck. A sportswriter, watching the style, said it was sweet as sugar. George Gainford, who would be in his corner for the long run, did not argue. Sugar Ray Robinson is a borrowed name completed by a compliment. He kept both. He never went back to Walker Smith in the ring.

The amateur record was a rumor of invincibility: Golden Gloves, a long unbeaten stretch, the kind of kid the New York gyms talk about before the public has a ticket. He turned professional on October 4, 1940, at Madison Square Garden, a four-rounder, a win. He ran to 40–0. On February 5, 1943, Jake LaMotta beat him in Detroit, the first loss, the second of what would become six fights between them. Robinson won five of the six. The rivalry is the plot of the welterweight and middleweight years, not a footnote. LaMotta was the bull. Robinson was the thing the bull could not quite catch except once.

He won the world welterweight championship on December 20, 1946, at the Garden, a fifteen-round decision over Tommy Bell. He held that title until he moved up. He was, for those years, the most complete small man in the sport: speed, power, a jab that set a table, a hook that cleared it. The Ring named him Fighter of the Year in 1942, before the belt, which tells you what the gyms already knew. He lived like a man who expected the money to keep arriving — a pink Cadillac, a Harlem nightclub called Sugar Ray’s, a retinue, clothes that photographed. The flash was not a disguise. It was the style taken off the canvas and put on a street.

On February 14, 1951, at Chicago Stadium, he took the middleweight title from LaMotta in thirteen rounds. The beating was so complete the papers reached for a massacre. He lost the belt that July in London, to Randolph Turpin, a British middleweight who did not read the American script. Sixty-four days later, on September 12, 1951, at the Polo Grounds, Robinson took it back. The rematch is the correction. The London loss is the proof he could be beaten. Both belong. He retired in December 1952 after failing to take Joey Maxim’s light-heavyweight title in the Yankee Stadium heat, a fight he was winning until the heat took him. He tried dancing. He tried the stage. The money went out as fast as the flash had promised. In 1955 he came back.

The second middleweight life is the one the record book had to invent a phrase for. He beat Bobo Olson in December 1955 and was champion again. He lost to Gene Fullmer, then knocked Fullmer out with a left hook people still slow down on film. He lost to Carmen Basilio, then beat Basilio in March 1958 at Chicago Stadium and became, for a fifth time, the middleweight champion of the world. No one had done that in a division. The phrase pound-for-pound — the argument about the best fighter without regard to size — attached itself to him so tightly that younger fighters inherited it as a measurement. Muhammad Ali, who did not borrow praise lightly, called him the king, the master, his idol. The professional record, when he finally stopped, was 174–19–6, with 109 knockouts. He had a stretch of ninety-one fights without a loss. The numbers are not a statue. They are a shop. Between the titles he fought the names a welterweight or a middleweight of that decade had to fight: Kid Gavilan in the argument, if not always in the ring; the long list of Garden main events that did not become civic objects and still paid the Cadillac. He was a businessman of his own flash — the nightclub on the street, the retinue that ate the purse, a man who understood that a face could be a storefront. Trainers who watched him in the 1940s said the jab was a measuring tape and the hook was a verdict. Film of the Olson and Basilio fights still teaches that combination. Young fighters still copy the stance and miss the patience that made the stance possible.

To be a champion you have to believe in yourself when nobody else will.Sugar Ray Robinson

He fought into 1965 and retired at forty-four, which is old for a man who had been hit by LaMotta, Turpin, Fullmer, and Basilio. The International Boxing Hall of Fame took him in its first class, 1990, after the sport had already been calling him a hall of famer for two decades. The turn is not the fifth title. The turn is the life after the last bell, when the Cadillac and the nightclub were gone and the name still had to eat. He acted a little. He danced a little. In 1969 he founded the Sugar Ray Robinson Youth Foundation in Los Angeles, a civic object that outlasted the satin. He had been a flash man in Harlem. He became, in the second half, a man who tried to put the famous name on children who needed a gym more than a story.

He married. He divorced. The private life was as public as the Cadillac when the papers wanted a headline. Friends from the Gainford years describe a professional who could make a sparring session look like a rehearsal for a dance and then end it with a hook. The man in Los Angeles after the last fight kept the courtesy and lost the money. Both are the file. Ali’s praise is in every documentary. Robinson’s own sentence about believing in yourself when nobody else will is the one that fits a boy who fought under someone else’s card.

The later years

Los Angeles was the last hometown. The Youth Foundation gave him a reason to get up that was not a comeback. He made television appearances, the kind of guest shot a famous face takes when the face is still recognized and the legs are not. He was honored in rooms that had not seen him fight: banquets, civic dinners, the slow conversion of a boxer into a monument. He did not always have the cash a monument is supposed to have. The flash years had spent themselves. Friends and the foundation kept a floor under him. He accepted the help the way a proud man does — not loudly, and not without knowing what it meant.

Diabetes arrived. Then the long fade that the family and the papers named as Alzheimer’s disease. The fastest man many trainers had ever seen became a man who needed to be guided through a room. Edna Mae Robinson, and then the people around the foundation, did the daily work the highlight reels never film. He was not a recluse in the cinematic sense. He was a patient. The difference matters. A recluse chooses the door. A patient has the door chosen. Visitors still came. They found the courtesy, and then they found the gaps. He had been, for twenty-five years, the standard other fighters were measured against. The second half asked him to be measured against a body that would not take an order.

On April 12, 1989, he died in Culver City, California, at sixty-seven. The obituaries led with pound-for-pound and the five titles and Ali’s old praise. The better ones remembered Ailey, the borrowed card, Turpin in London, and the foundation in Los Angeles. The funeral was a boxing town’s funeral, which is to say the gyms sent people and the nightclubs sent stories. He was buried in Inglewood. The Youth Foundation continued. The phrase pound-for-pound continued, attached now to whoever the new century wanted to argue about, always with Robinson as the first definition.

What the late years were, in full, was not a farewell tour of the satin. They were a man who had been the best, who had spent like the best, who had tried dancing and acting and a comeback, and who then put the name on a youth gym and lived long enough to need care. The 1965 still — older, the face a little wider, the elegance still there — is the honest photograph of the last chapter’s beginning. The 1947 still is the one the posters want. A complete life holds both. The hook remains on film. The foundation remains in the city. The borrowed name remains the name, which is the strangest immortality in the file: Walker Smith Jr. is the boy. Sugar Ray is what the boy became, and what the sport cannot put down.

Trainers still teach the combination as if he were in the room. Middleweights still get asked if they can move like him, which none of them can. The fifth title is still the record the books reach for when they need a sentence that is not an argument. He did not live to sit in a modern hall of fame induction as a guest of honor in the television sense. He lived long enough to be poor, ill, and still Sugar. That is a harder ending than a knockout, and it is the one that happened. The sport owes him the phrase. The city of Los Angeles owes him the gym. Ailey and Harlem share the beginning. The film of the LaMotta fight shares the middle. The last years share nothing with the satin except the name, and the name was enough to keep the door opening. People who sat with him in the 1980s have said he could still tell a round from 1951 as if the bell had just rung, and then lose the thread of the morning. That is the disease, not a moral. The Youth Foundation staff kept the civic work going when the founder could no longer run a meeting. Los Angeles still has children who learned a jab in a gym that carries his name without knowing the Cadillac or the sixth LaMotta fight. That is a quieter immortality than a highlight, and it is the one he chose when the satin was done. The International Boxing Hall of Fame induction in 1990 was posthumous in the television sense; the sport had inducted him in its mouth decades earlier. The plaque caught up. The film of the hook did not need the plaque.

After he was gone

The documentaries kept the hook and the Cadillac. The foundation kept the children. Ali’s sentence kept being quoted because it is accurate. New pound-for-pound lists still start the argument by nodding at him, even when the nod is only a clause. The six LaMotta fights remain a syllabus. Turpin remains the proof. The Youth Foundation remains the civic object that does not need a highlight.

He came out of Ailey, borrowed a card, earned Sugar, beat LaMotta five times, lost to Turpin and took it back, won the middleweight title until the record book had to make a fifth time, spent the flash, founded a gym, and died in Culver City needing care. If you only remember the satin, you have the still. If you remember Walker Smith, London, the fifth belt, and the foundation, you have him.

Portrait: ACME · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

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