(5 of 7)
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.