On June 16, 1941, Sugar was once again in Philadelphia, pulverizing Mike Evans’s head and putting him away in the second round. Thus far, it had been a very busy and successful year for him, with an impressive string of twelve victories, including seven first-round knockouts. In only the second year of his professional career, Sugar had lived up to even the most glowing reports of his ring prowess. Sugar was not one to look too far down the road, anticipating a fight or a particular opponent, but there was a real test waiting for him at the end of October: Fritzie Zivic. Sugar’s training sessions became strenuous. His body was soon as taut as a piano wire, and he was as focused as he could be. There would be no distractions—except one.
The workouts leading to the bout with Zivic were grueling, but there were moments when he needed to tone down the adrenaline and to allow his steel-coiled tension some relaxation. Such a moment of release happened one hot day in the summer of 1941 at Lido Pool, not far from Coogan’s Bluff and the Polo Grounds.
Often after a hard workout Sugar would go to the pool, more to take a dip and cool off than to swim, though he was smooth off the diving board and an adequate swimmer. One day, to get the attention of a gorgeous young lady with a pair of amazing legs, he pushed her in the pool. She was furious as she climbed out of the water. Her long shiny black hair heavy with water, she glared at Sugar, took his measure, and stormed off in a huff. (Sometime later, when asked to recount the incident, Sugar said he dived into the pool and apologized.) There was no way she could have known that this gentle shove for recognition would one day evolve into physical abuse. Nor could she have predicted the glamorous high life they would lead as the Prince and Princess of Harlem.
“That walk of hers was something else,” Sugar recalled. Later, some of the Sugar’s gang told him that the pretty lady’s name was Edna Mae Holly, a dancer at the Cotton Club and other popular nightspots in Harlem. Sugar made a mental note when informed that she was currently performing at the Mimo Club on 132nd Street. A week later, accompanied by his usual rowdy entourage, Sugar invaded the club and took a table near the stage. For the next several weeks, the club would be Sugar’s nightly haunt, though Edna Mae, still bristling from the shove and splash, kept him on a string, playing him like a yo-yo. Her continued rejection of his advances only fueled Sugar’s determination. At last she relented, and the aggressive Sugar, just as he did with opponents in the ring, took full advantage of her dropped guard.
Dining, dancing, and romancing Edna Mae throughout the summer did not interfere with Sugar’s ring domination. During this phase, he recorded his longest string of consecutive knockouts, nine in a row beginning with Gene Spencer in Detroit in February and ending with Pete Lello in New York City in July. Edna Mae attended some of these fights, and Sugar often threw her a kiss while the referee was raising his other hand in victory.
Their courtship continued when Sugar went to Greenwood Lake to train for his fight against Zivic, who had battered Henry Armstrong into submission the year before. “All that year,” Sugar said, “I had thought about Zivic every so often and about how someday I wanted to humiliate him for Henry.”1 Sugar would call Edna Mae every night “just after bed check at the camp,” Edna Mae wrote in her unpublished memoir. “I guess you can say that was the beginning of our love story.” On some of the calls, which caught Edna Mae between shows at the Mimo Club, Sugar would serenade her as though he were Billy Eckstine or Herb Jeffries, crooning “I’m just a prisoner of love,” his voice still soft and mellow and without the nasality it would acquire in the later stages of his life.
Before Sugar’s star rose and he was anointed the “pound for pound” best boxer on the planet, that accolade could have described Armstrong. In several ways, Sugar was just a taller, faster replica of Armstrong, as Muhammad Ali would represent a larger, stronger, more powerful version of Sugar. A measure of Armstrong’s character and stamina surfaced very early when the boy, born Henry Jackson, had to fend for himself following the deaths of his father and mother. In 1929, he was seventeen years old, living with his grandmother, and working for the railroad company in St. Louis, but rather than ride the handcar that picked up workers for the ten-mile trip to their destination, Armstrong chose to run. One day he read an article about the Cuban fighter Kid Chocolate making seventy-five thousand dollars for a half hour in the ring, and felt he could do the same. He teamed up with a trainer named Armstrong, adopted his surname, and compiled an enviable amateur record, winning all but four of his sixty-two fights. (It was fairly common in those days for a fighter to accumulate a large number of amateur fights before embarking on a professional career.)
Armstrong, like Sugar, had more amateur fights than most boxers of his day had professional bouts, and one is left to wonder what impact this might have had on the two men’s longevity in the ring. Armstrong’s beginning as a pro was not as auspicious as Sugar’s, but by 1936 he had dethroned the California and Mexican world featherweight champion, Baby Arizmendi. They had fought twice before, with Armstrong being cheated out of his victories both times. Entertainer Al Jolson, famous for smearing burnt cork on his face and singing “Mammy,” witnessed the third fight, bought his contract, and became his manager. Under Jolson’s front man, Eddie Mead, Armstrong won all twenty-seven of his bouts in 1937, twenty-six of them by knockouts. Then his managers concocted a plan for him to hold three championships in different weight classes simultaneously. Step one for “Hammering Hank,” as he would be universally called, was a breeze, as he stopped the world featherweight champ, Petey Sarron, in the sixth round. Unable to get a match with the lightweight belt holder, Lou Ambers, Armstrong leaped to the welterweight division to challenge the champ, Barney Ross. Doing this required making the weight, which meant he had to put on twelve pounds. With a regimen of beer and glass after glass of water at the weigh-in, he had the added pounds. But it was a good thing that rain delayed the fight, Armstrong told the press, “because one punch in the belly and the ring would have been flooded.” By the time the rescheduled fight occurred, he was twenty-seven pounds lighter than Ross. It was a lopsided fight, and Armstrong mercifully carried the fatigued champ the last four rounds. Now Armstrong had two belts, and within ten weeks a date was set for a showdown with Ambers for the lightweight title.*
The contest with Ambers was furious, and Armstrong spit so much blood on the canvas that the referee warned him to stop or he was going to have to halt the match. Rather than spit any more blood from his busted lip, Armstrong asked his cornermen to remove his protective mouthpiece, and for the last five rounds of the fight he swallowed his blood. At the end of the bout, Armstrong had achieved his mission—for the first and last time, one fighter held three championships at once. And, even more astounding, he came close to winning a fourth one, but his 1940 match with middleweight champion Ceferino Garcia was ruled a draw. The glorious run came to an end with two defeats to Zivic, and it was the last one, in which he was kayoed in the twelfth round, that was the source of Sugar’s lust for revenge.
Sugar’s showdown with Zivic was set for Halloween night. Joe Louis, in a column in the New York Post written with a reporter, predicted that Sugar would win in a decision over Zivic. “Robinson will probably be bobbing around Zivic jabbing that snaky left hand of his into Zivic like a rapid-fire rifle,” he wrote. “I think Robinson’s youth and speed will turn the trick for the Harlem flash.” Edna Mae was again at ringside, and recalled the fight: “They battled on fairly even terms for most of the bout but Sugar was clearly ahead…and took the win in ten.” Just as the Brown Bomber had predicted.
Hammering Hank had been avenged, and Sugar was fifteen thousand dollars richer. After the fight, a large suite at the Hotel Theresa, Harlem’s most prestigious hotel, was the site of the big victory party, Sugar’s first. A member of his coterie was sent to fetch Edna Mae from the Mimo Club. Once more the fighter and the nightclub dancer were planning to meet—to the chagrin of Sugar’s mother, who wanted something better for her son than a cabaret dancer, and to the disgust of Edna Mae’s aunt Blanche, who felt that a fighter was below the station of a young woman from such a prominent and highly educated family.
As Sugar had heard repeatedly from Edna Mae’s guardian—her mother died of tuberculosis when Edna Mae was three—“Edna Mae is the fourth generation of college-bred members of our family, which includes doctors and lawyers. And her great-grandfather came out of slavery and graduated from Harvard, studied for the ministry, and was the first Negro to be consecrated a bishop in the United States: the Right Reverend James Theodore Holly, an Episcopal bishop.” Holly was the first black Episcopal bishop in America. Edna Mae, who was born in Miami and attended Hunter College, had followed the family tradition of getting a higher education.
Blanche almost had it right. The Holly family tree is not a simple chart of genealogy. Edna Mae’s great-grandmother, Emma Webb, gave birth to a daughter, Lucia, who was fathered by a married white man, her employer. “Emma had left to keep anyone from learning about the child, but the news reached her employer’s ears,” Edna Mae noted. “It seems it didn’t stain a white man’s honor or his life to father a black woman’s child. It was dealt with as a necessary evil, tolerated and then ignored.”
Later, Emma would marry a Mr. Poitier and they would have three children, the youngest of whom was Reggie, who would father Sidney Poitier. “He was my cousin and so was Lincoln Perry, later to be better known as Stepin Fetchit, the actor, who was the exact opposite of the image he projected through his movies,” Edna Mae wrote.
Edna Mae’s grandmother, Lucia, would first marry Erskine Edden, and four children came from this union, including Vernon Rose, Edna Mae’s mother. Lucia’s second husband was Alonzo Potter Burgess Holly, the son of Bishop Holly; he studied four years in England and subsequently took a medical degree from New York Homeopathic College.2 Dr. Holly was divorced and had children, one of whom, James Theodore Holly, Jr., would later marry Vernon Rose, Edna Mae’s mother.
Another Holly of future prominence was Ellen Holly, Edna Mae’s younger cousin, a critically praised actress who would be among the first blacks to appear in a regular role on the television soap operas. The bishop was her great-grandfather. “My maternal Uncle Bill’s father-in-law was William Stanley Braithwaite, one of the extolled poets of the [Harlem Renaissance],” Holly wrote in her autobiography, One Life. She had a small role in Spike Lee’s School Daze in 1988.
If Edna Mae chose not to elucidate to a great extent on her most famous relative, others, including a contemporary of her great-grandfather’s, the venerable Alexander Crummell, did. Crummell extolled the virtues of Reverend Holly and remarked on the contributions he made to black nationalism. No one spoke more fervently about emigrating to Haiti in the 1850s than Reverend Holly, the essence of which was published in 1857 and dedicated to Reverend William C. Monroe, rector of St. Matthew’s Church in Detroit. Arguing for the inherent capabilities of black people and their civilized progress, with an emphasis on the Haitian revolution, he wrote: “I have summoned the sable heroes and statesmen of that independent isle of the Caribbean Sea, and tried them by the high standard of modern civilization, fearlessly comparing them with the most illustrious of men of the most enlightened nations of the earth, and in this examination and comparison the Negro race has not fell one whit behind their contemporaries.”3
While Edna Mae could boast of a lineage with an abundance of accomplished men and women, Sugar had only his prestige as a boxer to offer. He was also blessed with a gift of gab that had often bailed him out of sticky situations. Now his words would get him around the barrier of class and pedigree, and nail the alluring lady. He tactfully sweet-talked and charmed Aunt Blanche, and then set out to convince Edna Mae to give up show business. Soon, the two lovers were inseparable, careening through Harlem in Sugar’s manager’s car or his own, sharing drinks at the swanky Smalls’ Paradise, where the waiters zipped about on roller skates, or holding hands during long walks in the Catskill Mountains when Sugar was in training. “We saw each other as often as we could with his busy fight schedule,” Edna Mae said. “He carried me with him on as many trips as could be arranged; they included Philadelphia, Washington, and Baltimore, and when I could not go he’d manage to get George’s car and come to my house, pick me up, and we’d drive through Central Park, which was only a few blocks from my house. We’d go into small restaurants to eat sandwiches or Chinese food. He’d use these warm loving outings to assure me of his love before leaving me.”
On October 30, the day before Sugar edged Zivic, the U.S. destroyer Reuben James was torpedoed and sunk off the coast of Iceland by a German submarine. It was the first American warship to be sunk in the emerging war, and over a hundred lives were lost. A little over a month later, on December 7, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, sinking four battleships and incapacitating several others. Overall, some nineteen ships were damaged and 2,388 military personnel and civilians lost their lives. For two months, as the nation grieved and geared up for war, there was a lull in Sugar’s fight schedule. Still, a number of fight fans desired a return match between Sugar and Zivic, and the bout was arranged for sometime near the top of the new year. Meanwhile, Sugar took it easy, spending much of his free time with Edna Mae.
By 1942, Sugar was back in action, dispatching with relative ease a roster of forgettable fighters. The fighters may not have been ranked contenders, but they couldn’t be taken for granted, and Sugar had to be focused, though like many Americans he was occasionally distracted by the war raging in the Pacific, where the Japanese were demonstrating their military might, taking one island after the other—Manila, Bataan, Corregidor. Meanwhile, Sugar and the Brown Bomber were on similar paths of conquest with their gloves on, though their personal lives took divergent paths. While Louis, with an incredible number of romantic liaisons to account for, was divorcing Marva Trotter, Sugar was contemplating marriage to Edna Mae, wooing her with expensive gifts like a $650 mink coat.
“Edna Mae was simply gorgeous,” recalled Delilah Jackson, who has diligently chronicled Harlem’s entertainment history for several decades in such local publications as the Amsterdam News and The Beacon. “All the men would stare and whistle at her when she walked down the street. She was every black man’s dream, with her light skin, long black hair that hung down her back, and beautiful legs. I knew many a man who would have thought they were in heaven to have her by the arm, strolling down 125th Street. The way she sashayed, throwing her shapely hips, she knew she was something special. I guess she had every reason to be vain. You could tell by the expression on her face that she just loved people noticing her. When I was with her, she loved to show off her legs. Even when she performed almost nude at Connie’s Inn in 1932, when she was about sixteen or seventeen, she was proud of her body. She used to show me pictures of her dressed in nothing at all. I have to admit she had a fantastic body. But she also had class, culture, and sophistication.”4
Like most young men in Harlem, Clint Edwards, a photographer who followed Sugar’s career with a passion, was dazzled by Edna Mae’s beauty, but he was not so blinded that he couldn’t, at the same time, appreciate Sugar’s magnificent aura. He saw them as much on the streets as he saw them at the arenas. “There was no one like Sugar Ray,” he began. “Just about everything about him was unique. His style, the way he walked, the clothes he wore, the car he drove—all of that set him apart from the rest of us. He was always sharp as a tack. No matter where he went, there was a bunch of onlookers…Sugar would walk down the street in a colorful suit with a silk shirt, a mean hat, and his shoes were always shining. I know he had his own tailor, because you couldn’t buy the kind of clothes he wore off a rack, no way. And he was as arrogant as he could be. He was bad and he knew it.”5
Sylvia Dixon, longtime Harlemite, recalls how “when they walked down the street together, they were like the prince and princess of Harlem. They were a matchless pair. In a way, they might have been meant for each other. It was like one was trying to outshine the other, and the light they created together was absolutely radiant. Whenever they walked into a room, all eyes focused on them. They seemed to reflect each other in so many ways; they were mirror images. And depending on the situation, they took turns soaking up the spotlight, reveling in that moment of attention. I don’t think they ever tired of this, though in time they seemed to have tired of each other. But while they were young and riding high, they were a unique duo. It’s a wonder they never made a movie together; I’m sure it would have been sensational, even better than Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge. Sugar Ray and Edna Mae—their names even rhymed. To some degree they were star-crossed lovers, like Romeo and Juliet, but that was part of their appeal, part of their magnetism. There may never be a couple like them again. They were…well, Sugar and Spice.”6
On the return engagement with Zivic, on January 16, Sugar gave his foe a lesson in fisticuffs. He picked him apart with snappy jabs and crushing combinations that kept his slender opponent off balance. Sugar’s dominance was so overwhelming that even his mother, who often discussed what he did wrong in the ring, had to praise him. She was even more full of praise when she learned that her son had pocketed another big purse from the fight.
Now that Sugar was beginning to make more money, he attracted elements of the underworld who sought to horn in on his good fortune. But it was not these menacing outsiders who thought nothing of showing Sugar that they were brandishing arms who worried him; it was the insiders, including Horrmann, his manager, who Sugar felt wasn’t getting the best deals on fights. Horrmann’s tendency to cave in to promoters during negotiations perturbed Sugar. Rather than demand what Sugar requested, he would make up the difference out of his own deep pockets. If the promoter welched on paying Sugar the contracted amount, Horrmann wouldn’t complain but instead would pay Sugar himself. This was no way to do business, charged Sugar, who even at twenty years of age was already showing an entrepreneurial sensibility. When he finally reached the breaking point, he borrowed ten thousand dollars from Mike Jacobs and bought his freedom from Horrmann. What had begun as a promising relationship was over before it had had a chance to mature. Sugar put a different spin on the break several years later in Sport magazine: “The way I understood it from his sister, who came to me to talk about it,” Sugar claimed, “his family thought he was spending too much time running around the country with me. Maybe they didn’t like the idea of his being a fight manager at all, I don’t know.”7
Gainford thought he was in line to take over, but Sugar had other plans—he would become his own manager, keeping Gainford as his trainer. During Sugar’s amateur days, Gainford took the lion’s share of the bootleg payoffs, believing his fighters should be satisfied with whatever he paid them. Sugar no doubt remembered this when he denied Gainford the opportunity of becoming his manager. He would never underestimate Sugar again.
Nor would any of the promoters. They found Sugar to be just as tough at the bargaining table as he was in the ring. Like an independent film director, Sugar reserved the rights of final cut; he would determine what the bottom line was. This was the attitude he evinced in preparation for a fight with the number one contender, Jake LaMotta, the “Raging Bull.” LaMotta, a rugged Italian-American from the Bronx, had compiled a fairly impressive record, though it was marred by four defeats. Even so, he was a powerful puncher who never took a step backward in the ring, plodding forward, his fists up by his head like horns. Moreover, he was a colorful crowd pleaser. He had gathered a reputation for his ability to deliver numbing body punches, but he could also take them. The Bull had never been knocked off his feet.
Before taking on the Bull, Sugar had a few household matters to finalize. At the start of his professional career, Sugar had promised his mother a new house, and he lived up to that vow right after ending his relationship with Horrmann. “I paid eighty-five hundred dollars for a big brick ten-room on 238th Street in the Riverdale section of the Bronx,” he wrote in his autobiography. And before they moved in, another three thousand dollars were spent redecorating it. With the house purchased and ready to live in, Sugar had two other goals to accomplish: goring the Bronx Bull and corralling Edna Mae of Harlem.