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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.