In the early spring of 1952, Sugar was in camp again at Pompton Lakes, getting ready to defend his title in San Francisco against Carl “Bobo” Olson in March. He hadn’t fought in six months. Each time he peppered the heavy bag, it was an attempt to erase the memory of his buddy, Joe Louis, being vanquished by Rocky Marciano. The image of his idol and friend sprawled between the ropes had moved him so much that he’d leaped onto the ring apron and begun consoling the fallen warrior. “You’ll be all right, Joe, you’ll be all right,” Sugar almost chanted after Louis was counted out. Louis’s head on the ring apron haunted him almost as badly as the ghost of Jimmy Doyle, the boxer his punches had killed in 1947. “Some people were belittling Joe,” Sugar wrote, “saying how maybe he hadn’t been that good after all. And, someday, I realized, they would be saying the same thing about me if I overextended my career.” It was a prophetic insight, but one given only a passing thought by Sugar.
Beyond the Brown Bomber and Olson, Sugar had another thing on his mind when he arrived in San Francisco: He wanted to visit Alcatraz, the island prison in the bay. Two inmates—the notorious Bumpy Johnson and Skeets Cabella—were lifelong friends who had attended all of Sugar’s fights and were often big-time spenders at his various establishments. Johnson, a native of Charleston, South Carolina, arrived in Harlem in 1919 when he was thirteen, and within a decade had manipulated and strong-armed his way into the fledgling numbers racket. His quick success as a kingpin in this illegal operation was facilitated by Madame Stephanie St. Clair, who was considered the Queen of Numbers. (The numbers then were like the lottery of today, only now the state controls the game and the winning numbers are determined by various forms of random selection, not from horse races, as in the past.) Together they staved off attempts by such infamous underworld mobsters as Dutch Schultz to take over their “business” in Harlem.
Johnson had been incarcerated at Alcatraz a year when Sugar went to see him. They had a lot in common: Just as Sugar was virtually unstoppable with his gloves on, Johnson was unrivaled with a knife or a machine gun in his hands. Harlemites respected Johnson and saw him as a modern-day Robin Hood. Like his predecessor, Casper Holstein, Johnson shared his accumulated wealth in a variety of ways. Many students were provided scholarships by Johnson, who was well read and somewhat of an intellectual. He was often in the company of Madame St. Clair, who was twice his age. “She and Bumpy both loved music, especially opera, and regularly attended concerts at Carnegie Hall,” said Abiola Sinclair, who wrote extensively on Johnson’s life before her death in 2001. “She enjoyed walks through Central Park on the arm of her young confidant, and the two shared a love of poetry, music, art, and money.” Helen Lawrenson, a former editor at Vanity Fair, spoke of her affair with Johnson in her memoir, Stranger at the Party, noting that he had other white lovers as well.
Johnson was sent to prison for drug dealing after appealing his case all the way to the Supreme Court, Sinclair wrote. He maintained that he had been framed. No drugs were actually found on him or in his home, the case being made against him by several “informants” who claimed they ran drugs for him. He was released from prison in 1963, and died five years later while dining in a Harlem restaurant.
“We had been skeptical about whether permission would be granted,” Edna Mae wrote about their first visit to Alcatraz, “because [Johnson] was the acknowledged and accepted head of all alleged illegal or questionable activity above 110th Street. Skeets was also a well-known sportsman, who spent money lavishly and wined and dined the most beautiful women, a real Beau Brummell.” But they had no problem getting permission; Sugar’s visit was a joy to all of the prisoners, Edna Mae noted, and most of the papers raved about Sugar’s compassion and loyalty to his friends.
After the visit to Alcatraz, Sugar prepared to meet Bobo Olson, a native of Hawaii. It was to be a rather lackluster bout. This was Sugar’s first defense of his second title reign, and he donated all but one dollar of his purse to the Damon Runyon Memorial Fund for Cancer Research. Sugar’s magnanimous gestures to the Cancer Fund were universally praised, though there were some who felt that he could have given equal contributions to the NAACP and the National Urban League.1
Sugar won a unanimous decision, but it was not the Sugar of old, not the refined boxer who many were beginning to call one of the greatest fighters of all time. Maybe Sugar, at thirty, was past his prime. Or perhaps it was the long layoff—he hadn’t been in the ring since his victory over Turpin in September. A five-month layoff for a fighter who had been averaging two fights a month might have upset his rhythm.
Down the road, a match was slated that would clear up this issue. Like Louis, Sugar had a formidable Rocky to deal with.
Sugar versus Rocky Graziano: This was the fight everybody was demanding. Even Hollywood couldn’t top this for excitement.
Once more, as when Sugar faced the Bull, it would be a simple case of the boxer against the slugger. Fortunately, the bout was slated for Chicago Stadium, Sugar’s lucky venue, on April 16, 1952. It promised to be a thriller between two thirty-year-old boxers, each of them wondering if he had been around too long or wouldn’t be around much longer, to paraphrase a quip popularized by comedienne Moms Mabley.
“Fight night was a stellar evening,” Edna Mae enthused. “Sugar and Rocky faced each other in the ring. You could see the mutual respect. They waded into each other and Rocky landed a hell of a blow on Sugar’s head that hurt me more than Sugar.” Sugar recalled the same punch: “When the bell rang, Rocky was scowling instead of smiling. He came out of his corner with curly black hair flopping on his forehead, and with his right hand cocked like a revolver. While I watched that right hand, he caught me with a good left hook in the first round.”
Edna Mae resumed, “It was all I could do to stay in my seat. The round was rough and I was so relieved when the bell rang. Round two was equally rough. It was apparent that Rocky was hoping for a knockout. Sugar was able to outsmart his sudden lunges and stay balanced.” Still, according to Sugar: “He whacked me on the side of the neck and I went down. Some of the sportswriters claimed that one of my legs had merely brushed the canvas, that it wasn’t an official knockdown. None of them had been swatted by that right hand. I was down, and Rocky put me there. When he saw me down, his instinct was to move in for the kill. That was a mistake…I’ve met many tough fighters in my long career, but no one ever stung me more than Rocky did.”
Edna Mae added: “Sugar was up quicker than I, but…seconds later, Ray had Rocky on his back on the ring canvas. He attempted to rise but was in big trouble! He fell down again and his body lay there jerking with the worst twitch I’ve ever seen. The full count ended, and his corner rushed in to get him.” Sugar had hit Rocky so hard that his mouthpiece flew out of the ring and landed in someone’s lap. The punch also almost literally knocked Graziano into retirement—he would have only one more fight. When Graziano got up just as he was counted out, he leaned against the ropes and kicked his legs as if to get some feeling back into them, to get the blood circulating again. He had been bashed so hard, and so repeatedly, that the blows apparently had affected his nerve endings below the belt.
“Graziano and his aggressive style, leading with his chin, was perfect for a fighter like Sugar Ray,” said boxing enthusiast Clint Edwards. “After the fight his face looked like it had gone through a meat grinder…he was chopped liver.” Scholar Gerald Early cast the fight in a deeper, metaphorical gloss: “The fight was symbolically the war machine, the white natural man against another type of natural man, the noble savage made American slick. Fictive psychopathic rage against fictive animal cunning.”2 Like LaMotta, who called Sugar a “black bastard” while taking his blows, Graziano admitted he too had cursed Sugar and called him out of his name.
In Graziano’s final fight before he stepped out of the ring for the last time, he lost a decision to a soft-hitting southpaw, Chuck Daley, out of Michigan in December 1952. He became a comedian and actor, later writing a successful autobiography, Somebody Up There Likes Me. The quick-witted Graziano offered a sample of his humor during a television interview in recalling the time he floored Sugar: “After he knocked me down,” he said, “Sugar Ray tripped over my body.”
For a moment, after Graziano had walloped Sugar, fans of Ralph Ellison, whose Invisible Man had just been published to great acclaim, might have wondered if he was the lucky yokel of Ellison’s imagination. “Once I saw a prizefighter boxing a yokel. The fighter was swift and amazingly scientific. His body was one violent flow of rapid rhythmic action. He hit the yokel a hundred times while the yokel held up his arms in stunned surprise. But suddenly the yokel, rolling about in the gale of boxing gloves, struck one blow and knocked science, speed and footwork as cold as a well-digger’s posterior. The smart money hit the canvas. The long shot got the nod. The yokel had simply stepped inside of his opponent’s sense of time.”