Sugar Ray Robinson Story , livre ebook

Pitch Publishing - John Jarrett

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153 pages

English

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Over 25 years Sugar Ray Robinson ruled three divisions, from lightweight to middleweight. As a kid he had danced for pennies on the streets of Harlem, and he danced again in the ring from New York and Vegas to Paris and back again. After a brilliant amateur career he turned pro in 1940 and won his first 40 contests before Jake LaMotta snapped his streak of 123 fights. He was unbeaten over the next nine years and would beat LaMotta in five of their six fights, taking his middleweight title. One of Ray's toughest fights was with Uncle Sam over his $4 million fight earnings. He built and lost a Harlem business empire before retiring from the ring and entering showbiz. The great fighter eventually settled down with his third wife, Millie, in California where he set up the Sugar Ray Robinson Youth Foundation.

Sujets

Boxing

Xian de Boxing

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Publié par	Pitch Publishing
Date de parution	09 septembre 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781785316135
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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First published by Pitch Publishing, 2019
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
John Jarrett, 2019
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 978-1-78531-535-0 eBook ISBN 978-1-78531-613-5
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CONTENTS
1. In the Beginning
2. Beating a Champ
3. Meet Jake LaMotta
4. Sugar Ray s Revenge
5. In and Out of the Army
6. Sugar Ray is the Champion - Official
7. Kid Gavilan and Steve Belloise
8. The Flamingo Pink Cadillac
9. Le Sucre Marvilleaux
10. Taming the Raging Bull
11. Paris in his Legs
12. Getting the Title Back - One!
13. A Fight Too Far
14. Those Dancing Feet
15. The Comeback
16. Sugar Ray Owns Bobo
17. That Punch!
18. A Good Little Un Beats a Good Big Un
19. Sugar Ray - Super Champ
20. Sugar Ray - Not So Sweet
21. Pender Does the Double
22. The Last Chance Saloon
23. Still Chasing the Title
24. Have Gloves, Will Travel
25. Twenty-Five Years - the Last Mile
26. All Over, Like a Wedding
Epilogue
Bibliography
1
IN THE BEGINNING
AILEY IS a city in Montgomery County, Georgia, USA. According to the US Census Bureau, the city has a total area of two square miles.
In the 1920 census, the population numbered 385. Under Notable Persons are the names of Hugh Peterson, lawyer, and Sugar Ray Robinson, boxer. Ailey s claim to be the birthplace of Robinson is somewhat tenuous at best. Of nine sources, three list Ailey as Robinson s birthplace and six Detroit. There are seven birthdates in 1921 and two in 1920.
In his 2007 book Being Sugar Ray, author Kenneth Shropshire wrote, When Sugar Ray was born 3 May 1921 [that is the most consistent birthdate cited] the Smith family already had two girls, but many of the details of his early life are speculative. We can t be sure when or where he was born. To some extent, that is the way Robinson chose to live his life. Spinning a yarn, holding back on details, telling the story the audience wanted to hear - that was part of his genesis legend. It is also possible that he simply did not know.
In his autobiography [ghostwritten by Dave Anderson] he says that he travelled to Detroit from Ailey, Georgia in his mother s womb. That certainly makes for a more compelling account about where his life began. In fact, many traditional explanations have him born in Detroit. Robinson s birth certificate says that he was born in Ailey in 1921. 1 Walker Smith had grown up on a farm just outside Dublin, Georgia. He married a local girl, Leila Hurst, who had worked on a farm, and together they raised cotton, corn and peanuts, and children. Marie was born in 1917, followed by Evelyn two years later. Leila s sister and her husband lived in Detroit and they wrote back telling of plenty of good paying jobs. That sounded good to Walker Smith and he decided to go to Detroit, get a job and send for Leila and the children when he had saved enough money. Working on a construction site, he was soon making $60 a week and was able to send for Leila and the girls to join him.
Pop had rented the first floor of a wooden frame house on McComb Street in Detroit s Black Bottom section, Robinson would recall. It was Black because we lived there, Bottom because that s where we were at. That s where I was born on 3 May 1921. No hospital for me. No doctor, either. I arrived in Mom s bed with a midwife officiating at my first weigh-in. Seven pounds, 12 ounces. When Pop got home that night, he had my name picked out. Junior, he told Mom. My first boy baby has got to be a junior. Walker Smith, Junior. No middle name. Pop always called me Junior. Nobody ever called me Walker. 2
Walker Smith worked hard and he played hard. A sharp dresser, he liked a drink or two and Leila would argue with him about spending money. Junior was almost six when his mother packed him and his sisters on a train headed back to Georgia, to her mother s farm at Glenwood. Pop wasn t with them because Leila hadn t told him they were leaving. She returned to Detroit, where she worked at a big hotel. About a year later, Leila was back in Georgia. She wanted a divorce but she had to have the children living with her, so she went back to her mother s farm, gathered up her brood and headed back to Detroit.
Junior had loved being on the farm, but now he was back in the city, back in Black Bottom, and it still looked black. Leila had a new job as a seamstress and she worried about Junior getting into trouble with the street gangs. Actually, the kid had started hanging around the Brewster Centre, which pleased his mother and she would give him the 25 cents, the monthly dues, which she really couldn t afford. Walker Smith Jr was taking his first steps on the road to fame and fortune.
Located at 637 Brewster Street, between St Antoines and Hastings, the two-storey red-brick building was Detroit s first community centre for blacks, opening in October 1929. Every day the basement gym was jammed with young men skipping, sparring, hitting punch bags of all size and weight, watched by older men chewing unlit cigars, a dirty towel slung around their neck, shouting rough instructions to their favourite fighter. Becoming one of the favourites was a husky young fellow named Joe Louis Barrow. Joe was a particular favourite of Walker Smith Jr. Joe couldn t get rid of the kid. He would follow Joe to the gym, tagging along behind the big fellow, and if Joe let him carry his gym bag, Junior was walking ten feet tall. He broke his heart when Joe, at that time a 17-year-old middleweight, took a whipping in his first amateur fight from Johnny Miler, a more experienced light-heavyweight who dropped Joe seven times and took the decision. Joseph Louis Barrow would later become Joe Louis, possibly the greatest heavyweight champion of all time.
Shortly after that, in early 1932, Leila loaded her family on to a bus headed for New York City. In her handbag was a letter she had received, with the address of a three-room flat. Four-nineteen West Fifty-third Street, that s near Times Square, she told the kids. After paying the rent, she had exactly 40 cents left in her purse. That same day, dusting the shelves in her new home, she found 35 cents. With the 40 she already had, it was enough for supper that first night in New York.
Leila Smith had been a field hand in the South, wrote Wil Haygood in his 2009 biography of Robinson. She did not have a fragile psyche: she was coarse and blunt and aggressive with her language. She argued with grocery store clerks over bills and she argued with rent collectors. When little Walker seemed to need a hug, he often received more tough words from his mother, stinging language about standing up, about pride. Economic miseries were everywhere. In 1932, millions of Americans were losing jobs by the month. Wages were down 40 per cent compared to just three years earlier. Impoverished children were especially vulnerable. Little Walker Smith, who always seemed to be hungry, took free lunches at the local Salvation Army - hot dogs and beans, he would sadly remember. 3
Junior was 13 years old and weighed about 85 pounds when he hammered some kid called Shake. When his sister s boyfriend pulled him off, the other kid s blood was all over the sidewalk and Junior felt pretty good about himself. He felt better a couple of days later when a little guy named Benny Booksinger stopped him in the street and said he had heard about him fighting and would like him to box on one of his amateur bills for the Police Athletic League. Junior beat a boy called Harmon over three rounds and was ready to fight the kid s big brother when his mother stepped in and chased him home and chased Benny Booksinger off the street.
But Benny liked what he saw of young Smitty and kept matching him on his cards around the city. He won most of them but a tough little Irish kid beat him over three rounds one night. Years later, Billy Graham would remind Junior of that fight. You know who the kid was? he asked the fighter who had become Sugar Ray Robinson. I never saw him again, said Ray. You re looking at him now, said Graham, who had become a top welterweight contender. Before the fight all the kids thought you were Joe Louis s nephew, because you had known him from Detroit. I was scared stiff. You didn t fight like it, said Robinson. 4
When young Walker Smith Jr was a pupil at Cooper Junior High School, a boy in his class named Warren Jones, an amateur boxer, told him his uncle was a trainer at the Salem-Crescent gym, which was in the basement of the Salem Methodist Church at 129th Street and Seventh Avenue. Leila Smith and her family were now living in Harlem, and one thing she noticed in her new community was the number of churches. Now it looked as though the church was going to save her son from the dangers of this new concrete jungle. Now he found himself in a neighbourhood rough at the best of times and now battered by the Depression, a place that could gobble him up, but he wouldn t let it. That descent into a church basement offered a kind of clarity he had never felt before. The boy - whose independent mind seems to have sprung directly from his strong-willed mother - could not allow a moment s worth of fear down where the fists were flying. The officials explained to him what was expected of a member of the S