To overcome the weight advantage of his next opponent, light heavyweight champion Joey Maxim, Sugar would have to step inside Maxim’s “sense of time,” solve the rhythm of his attack without losing his deft, scientific boxing skills. “Rhythm is everything in boxing,” Sugar had once said. “Every move you make starts with your heart, and that’s in rhythm or you’re in trouble.”
Nelson Mandela, who admits he was never an outstanding boxer, eschewing its violence, offered a similar analysis. “I did not enjoy the violence of boxing so much as the science of it,” he wrote in his autobiography, A Long Walk to Freedom. “I was intrigued by how one moved one’s body to protect oneself, how one used a strategy both to attack and retreat, how one paced oneself over a match. Boxing is egalitarian. In the ring, rank, age, color, and wealth are irrelevant.” While one may not concur with the South African leader’s conclusions about age, Sugar would probably have agreed with him on the subject of pacing, especially when he went up against the bigger and stronger Maxim. Maxim, however, would have another ally on that fateful evening at Yankee Stadium—the humidity. At ringside, the temperature would approach a torrid 105 degrees.
On the night of the fight, June 25, 1952, the rain was the first bad omen; then came the humidity. Perhaps most ominous of all was the fact that on the day before the fight, Sugar dreamed that he—not his opponent—was going to die. The stadium in which Sugar and Maxim were to fight was packed and, according to Edna Mae, “felt like a Turkish bath.” Moreover, Sugar was not in the best frame of mind going into a fight with a man who outweighed him by more than fifteen pounds.
The early rounds belonged entirely to Sugar, as he danced around the slower Maxim, beating him to the punch, working his strategy to perfection. He was also expending an enormous amount of energy in the process. The sweltering heat was so overpowering that referee Ruby Goldstein had to quit during the fight and Ray Miller was brought in to replace him. Even the spectators were drenched in sweat. “The pants of some of the men were soaking, as if they had wet on themselves,” recalled Carl Jefferson, a longtime Harlemite who was at the fight and sat in the right-field bleachers. “No matter where you sat, it was scorching hot.”1
“Fighting out of a crouch, ignoring the weight handicap, Robinson blazed through eleven,” New York Times sportswriter James Dawson reported. “He punched Maxim almost at will, with left jabs, lefts to the head and body. In the third, seventh, and eighth rounds, Robinson jolted Maxim’s head and he kept up a two-fisted fire to the midsection.”
By the eleventh round, with Sugar well ahead on points, the heat was taking its toll on the smaller, more mobile fighter. Maxim barely moved from the center of the ring, wisely conserving his energy. In the twelfth round Sugar jolted Maxim with a right to the jaw but could not take advantage of it, as the bell sounded. It would be his last significant punch. Sugar was on the verge of heat exhaustion by the thirteenth round, his limp body almost pushed through the ropes by one of Maxim’s lesser attacks.
At one point Sugar fell to the floor after missing a sweeping right. He was too tired to be embarrassed. Clinging to the ropes at the end of the round, Sugar had to be dragged to his corner by his handlers. Ice packs and smelling salts failed to revive the exhausted fighter, and when Dr. Alexander Schiff leaped into the ring and asked him if he could go on, Sugar shook his head and said no. This was the first and only time Sugar would ever be stopped. And it took a day for him to recover from the heat, which had left him barely able to function, his eyes glazed over. Gainford thought a cold shower would help Sugar’s condition, and with the assistance of the other handlers dragged Sugar to the shower. “One of the main reasons Maxim won that fight is because he used his weight advantage at every opportunity and he leaned on Sugar Ray,” said Clint Edwards.
“Having a killing lead,” the legendary Grantland Rice reported in the Sunday Mirror, “Sugar could have afforded to take things easier after the tenth round. But there is still the chance that the collapse hit suddenly. The heat wasn’t all of it. Punching a much bigger man is a heavy burden. I recall at Toledo that many critics wondered why Jack Dempsey got so arm weary just before Jess Willard surrendered.”2
The bout resembled the 1909 match between middleweight champion Stanley Ketchel, “The Michigan Assassin,” and heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. On that occasion, Ketchel was the smaller fighter, giving away more than thirty pounds to his opponent. For eleven rounds it was a rather polite fight, as they had agreed it would be. But in the twelfth round, Ketchel let loose a wallop that stunned Johnson, and he tumbled to the canvas. He picked himself up, glared at Ketchel, and within seconds landed a withering uppercut that dislodged five of Ketchel’s teeth. It took an hour to revive him. As with Sugar and Maxim, a good big man had triumphed over a good little man.
“He didn’t knock me out, did he?” was the first question a still dazed, half-conscious Sugar asked before the flood of cold water chilled his feverish body. “No,” came a chorus of responses from his handlers and admirers. “It was the heat.” But Sugar thought otherwise: “The heat didn’t beat me, God did.”3
Political activist Ron Daniels, who boxed a bit himself before joining the civil rights movement, watched the fight at the New Granada Theater in Pittsburgh. “That was the first time I’d seen Sugar Ray fight, and he was sharp with precision punches, a pretty stylist that I tried to emulate later in my brief career in the ring. He had the fight won until he ran out of gas.”
Sugar was totally dehydrated after the fight, his son recalled. “People don’t know how near dying Dad was,” he said. “His body was covered with blisters. He could not retain anything in his stomach for two days; and he was delirious and was not well for six months after the fight.”
Given Sugar’s state of mind and limp condition, the rules forbidding women in the dressing room were suspended and Edna Mae was allowed to enter. She immediately began to massage her husband and console him with soothing kisses. “Sugar was still groggy and was fighting anyone who came near him,” Edna Mae said of the people milling about, wanting to get close to their hero. “Ray demanded that he not be taken to the hospital and I told him that we were taking him home to Riverdale. He was so thirsty and begged for more juice, but the doctor advised me not to give him more than a spoonful at a time. Sugar took two spoonfuls, then quickly took the large glass out of my hands and emptied it before he put it down. He immediately threw it up all over the bed. While the housekeeper hurriedly changed the bed, I took off my wet outfit. Sugar yelled, ‘Honey, I forgot to tell you how beautiful your outfit was!’”
Sugar had a restless night, and Edna Mae’s was not much better. The next morning she was alarmed to discover that Sugar’s body was covered with fever blisters, which were the result of his boiling blood. Despite reports to the contrary in his autobiography, for several days Sugar was ill, unable to go anywhere, Edna Mae insisted. “The fight had been a sobering experience for Sugar,” she wrote. “He later announced his retirement and was now ready to listen to some of the wonderful offers that were being waved in front of his face to try a career in show business. I thought with the right teachers Sugar could do anything.”
Sugar announced to the press that he was going into show business because he had always loved to dance; he stopped short of saying he was retiring from the ring. Film footage of Sugar twisting and spinning attests to his nimble footwork, though he would be the first to admit he wasn’t Fred Astaire or Bojangles, who had taught him a few nifty moves. An opportunity to strut his stuff before a national audience occurred on November 2, when he was invited to appear on Toast of the Town, which by 1955 would be renamed The Ed Sullivan Show. Sugar did his tap-dancing routine, applying some steps taught to him by Ray Bolger and Hal LeRoy, and this was perhaps a wise move, given that his singing was only mediocre. Singing would have been out of the question during this appearance, since he was sandwiched between the powerful voices of Frankie Laine, with his rendition of “Jezebel,” and pianist/vocalist Alec Templeton, presenting arias from Samson and Delilah. Sugar’s version of “Mr. Success” during one of his television appearances revealed his ability to at least carry a tune, although his high-pitched voice was rather ordinary and unappealing. The rousing applause at the end of the performance sounded as if it had been canned.
Later that year, on December 5, Sugar was hanging out with Roy Campanella and other celebrities, including popular cowboy movie actor Gabby Hayes, at the grand opening of Jackie Robinson’s men’s apparel store at 111 West 125th Street. During a confidential moment, Sugar warned Jackie about the challenge he faced selling men’s apparel in Harlem. He particularly stressed how terrible Edna Mae’s lingerie shop was doing, though his ever-popular café seemed to be doing reasonably well.4