Without too much fanfare, Sugar eased out of retirement and back into the ring with a six-round exhibition fight against Gene Burton, his stablemate, one bone-chilling night in Hamilton, Ontario, on November 29, 1954. Burton was no match for Sugar. Nor would Joe Rindone present any real opposition as a new year dawned. Sugar called Rindone the “ugliest guy I ever fought,” and he dispatched him in the sixth round with a booming left-right combination, thereby avoiding any further clinching with the mauling, flat-nosed, hairy-chested ex-Marine from Roxbury, Massachusetts. So overwhelmingly loud was the crowd of nearly twelve thousand at Detroit’s Olympia Stadium that Sugar never heard the count.
It had been a while since Sugar had performed in Detroit, where the boxing cognoscenti included Emanuel Steward, a promising bantamweight and future trainer; vocalist Jackie Wilson, once a Golden Gloves champion in the city and at that time lead singer with the Dominoes; and Berry Gordy, who’d boxed on the undercard of a Joe Louis bout as a featherweight in 1950 but was now dreaming of owning his own record company. “Friends drove us over to Canada, where Sugar had been invited to be a guest at the ice hockey match,” Edna Mae remembered. “He was introduced and cheered enthusiastically by the crowd…he was given a hockey stick and a puck by the team’s captain. This was what Sugar missed—being loved by the crowd.”
Still, Sugar was not exactly pleased with his performances against Burton and Rindone. There was evident rust that needed to be brushed away, and not until Joe Glaser told him everything was going to be all right, that he was making progress, was Sugar reasonably assured. “He had been in retirement for a couple of years, and in boxing it takes a while to get your timing back,” said the Reverend Dino Woodard, who had joined Sugar’s stable of sparring partners during the early days of his comeback. “I was brought into Sugar Ray’s camp by Harry Wiley, his trainer, who was also my manager. I was there to help Sugar prepare for his fights against Gene Fullmer, Carmen Basilio, and others. I never feared him while I was sparring with him and getting him ready, but I was aware that I was in the ring with one of the greatest fighters of all time. My job was to get him ready, make him miss, make him learn from his mistakes…Sugar hired other sparring partners from time to time, but during the last years of his career I was the main one.”
Woodard’s main objective was to imitate Fullmer, Basilio, or whomever, to mimic their style. “I like to think I helped him in his victory over Fullmer, when he delivered that left hook that put Fullmer to sleep. There were times when we were sparring when we would really tear into each other, when Sugar wouldn’t pull his punches and I would try to stay right with him. These moments only made him better, more confident when the real deal went down.”
Toward the end of 1954, however, rather than approximating the styles of Fullmer and Basilio, Woodard should have been giving Sugar a better facsimile of Ralph “Tiger” Jones. On January 19, 1955, in Chicago, two weeks after Sugar came out of retirement with the victory over Rindone, Jones was every bit his nickname as he ripped into Sugar with a savage attack. Almost from the opening bell, Sugar knew he was in over his head, and he barely remained on his feet. (A premonition of the defeat to Jones had come in a remark made by Sugar’s six-year-old son, Ray II. “We were dining one day in Chicago,” Edna Mae recalled, “when a sportswriter asked Ray, Jr., who would win the fight between his dad and Tiger Jones. Our son answered ‘Tiger Jones’ as seriously as he could. We were stunned, and equally happy that Sugar was out of earshot. What a prophecy!”)
Respected sports columnists Arthur Daley and Jimmy Cannon wrote blistering commentaries on Sugar’s performance. He was not the Robinson of old, but an old Robinson, Daley summarized. Cannon said that Sugar could not face the truth of his new situation. “He was marvelous, but he isn’t anymore,” he wrote. “That’s no disgrace, either. The years did it to him, and not Tiger Jones, but the records don’t include such information.” Even his cornermen were disappointed in Sugar’s performance against Jones, and both Gainford and Wiley walked out on him, telling him he should retire. But Sugar got the last word: “Gainford and Wiley weren’t walking out on me,” Sugar asserted. “They were walking out on my money. All these years, they had lived off me, lived high, lived like millionaires, but now they thought that there wasn’t going to be any more money. They were deserting the sinking ship. And right there, I vowed that the ship wasn’t going to sink. I vowed to prove that I wasn’t through, to pursue my comeback, to show Gainford and Wiley, to show everybody.”
It took weeks before Sugar was able to fan away the funk over his defeat by Tiger Jones and the “desertions” of Gainford and Wiley. But through Edna Mae’s ministrations and counseling, he finally agreed to allow them to return as he prepared for a March 29 bout against Johnny Lombardo in Cincinnati. Once again Sugar’s performance was lackluster, as he narrowly edged Lombardo in a split decision. He possessed neither his normal quickness nor the crisp punches that had once overwhelmed opponents. And once again his handlers and manager were dismayed, and all the more determined to convince Sugar to call off his comeback. But Sugar was already slated for another match, with Ted Olla on April 14 in Milwaukee.
A short walk and talk with Edna Mae around this time proved to be a revelation. “You don’t look like you used to, Edna Mae told me,” Sugar recalled. “You look like you’re trying to knock out everybody. You’re so anxious to fight again, you just want to show everybody how great you once were by knocking out all of your opponents. But that’s not how you were great. You’re not using the bag of tricks that made you great. That was your gift, the tricks were what God blessed you with—the tricks, the science. You don’t use that anymore. You don’t look like the Ray Robinson anymore.” Edna Mae also provided spiritual nourishment to her troubled husband, praying with him and reading him passages from the Bible.
Reading from Proverbs and Psalms had their healing effects, but Edna Mae didn’t rely on them exclusively. “He could not sleep without pills to induce it, and I dreaded any kind of artificial assistance to gain normal emotions or activity. I’d seen other athletes go under because of such dosage. I’d try sexy or funny ‘show time’ routines for him in our bedroom. That always would break the spell of gloom. He loved to see me dance and loved looking at me unclothed,” she wrote.
It was about this time that Sugar pledged his undying, everlasting love for Edna Mae. “We have been married eleven years now, and believe me, this is one marriage that is going to stick,” he told a writer for Tan magazine. “It is so easy for persons in the sports or entertainment world to drift apart for one reason or another, but that is not going to be the case with us. We are married to each other for life and nothing is going to pull us apart.”1 Indeed, nothing didn’t pull them apart; it was something.
Soon another source of solace and inspiration entered their lives. On the train trip to Milwaukee, Sugar and Edna Mae had met a Franciscan priest who was sharing a breakfast table with them. The priest was such a warm and endearing person that Sugar invited him to come by the hotel before the fight, if he had a chance. Father Lang accepted the invitation and showed up hours before the fight, and prayed with Sugar and Edna Mae. Sugar’s lightning-fast jabs, his renewed focus on using his “tricks,” and Father Lang’s good wishes were too deadly a combination for the overmatched Olla, who crumbled under a barrage of blows in the third round. At ringside was Joe Louis, who was the first to hug and congratulate Sugar.
It appeared as if the Sugar of old, newly refined, had returned. In Detroit, Garth Panter, living up to his surname, could hardly catch his breath toward the end of the fight, as Sugar bested him in ten rounds. This was quite a birthday present—Sugar had turned thirty-four on May 3, a day before the fight. To toast the victory and his birthday in a city he was fond of, he held a celebration, to which he invited his father, who was the life of the impromptu party. “You know where Junior got his punch?” his father told Gainford, who had returned to the fold. “From me. When I was working my farm in Georgia before I came to Detroit, I had a big ole mule I used to ride around. One day we were out in the fields and that mule didn’t want to go back to the barn. Didn’t want to budge. I balled up my fist and hit him between the eyes, and that mule went to his knees. When he got up, he knew who was the boss. He trotted right back to the barn. And that’s where Junior got his punch.”
Partying with his friends and his father was great fun, but there was more ground to cover in his march toward the championship, and none of it rougher and tougher than the upcoming bout against Rocky Castellani. San Francisco was the site of the fight, and the city was enduring an unseasonably cold spell, so much so that at the end of July a pregnant Edna Mae called home and had a fur piece flown to her. It was a particularly difficult pregnancy, and one day she experienced severe pain and had to be rushed to the hospital. Sugar insisted on remaining at his wife’s bedside, even if it meant canceling the fight. Eventually, however, she convinced him to leave and go on with the bout. Sugar did, and won in a unanimous ten-round decision.
He salvaged the victory, but Edna Mae’s pregnancy could not be saved. “When Sugar did not want to leave me to go to fight Castellani,” she wrote in her memoir, “I assured him that I felt great, but we did not let him know until after the fight…that we’d lost the baby.”
It wasn’t the first baby she had lost, nor would it be the last. “I think one of the reasons my mother had so many miscarriages was because of the abuse she suffered from my father,” Ray II said. “I can recall him hitting her on several occasions, often for no reason at all.”
Sugar was soon skipping rope and wearing out punching bags at Greenwood Lake, getting ready for Bobo Olson, the current middleweight titleholder. He had his own camp at the lake now and didn’t have to depend on working out at Joe Louis’s; he also had his own special visitors, including Langston Hughes, who admired Sugar. (Although the writer’s stays would be limited nowadays, since he was virtually secluded in his 127th Street residence, revising a memoir and collaborating with Milton Meltzer on a pictorial history of black Americans. “Nicest thing about going away,” Hughes said in a letter to his alter ego, Arna Bontemps, “is to get back to Harlem again.”)2
Meanwhile Edna Mae had recovered from the miscarriage and was back to her normal routine of taking care of Sugar’s demands. Her disciplined approach to things rubbed off on him just when he needed it. She was as unflinching and steadfast as ever, not only whispering words of encouragement and cooking the steaks that Sugar craved days before a fight, but also, once he finished up at Greenwood Lake, taking over the duties of two parents in raising their son. “I had to teach our son sports, because Sugar had no time for this sort of parenting,” she explained, “and though Sugar loved his son passionately, he had never enjoyed a close relationship with his own father, who just could not share himself with his son. He thought sincerely it was the mother’s duty. Hadn’t his mother done it? So after I taught Ray II how to run track, I tackled baseball, until he broke two large bay windows in our home. But he was superb doing it.”
When asked if she would want her son to follow in his father’s footsteps as a boxer, Edna Mae wrote a lengthy reply for publication: “I certainly would not. The champion seems to lead such a glamorous and beautiful life, with so much financial security, but the anxiety and heartaches which beset his wife are difficult to describe. Half of everything that is beautiful is missed by the fighter. Once he reaches the top, he meets too much temptation. Since he has the necessary money for pleasure, he seeks it in a driving, eager manner to compensate for the years of work and punishment he has received in the ring. It really isn’t fun. I wouldn’t want to inflict the cruel things that go with professional fighting on my son.”3
On the same topic, Sugar, too, told a reporter in London that he would not like to see his son follow in his footsteps. “I would try to dissuade him. There are too many risks in the game, unless you’ve really got what it takes to take them.”4
With his training in place, Sugar could envision being seen as a top-notch contender against Bobo Olson, even if he was not as sharp as he wanted to be. When he and his entourage arrived in Chicago, it was a crisp, windy December 9, 1955. There was even a slight chill in the arena as Sugar and Olson paced nervously about the ring, waiting to be announced.
The peal of the bell starting the fight was still resonating above the crowd’s roar when an unusually aggressive Sugar stunned Olson. Having such an early opportunity to finish off an opponent almost caught Sugar by surprise, but the opening was too good to ignore. “I planned to box him and take potshots at him at every opportunity,” he told a reporter from Ring right after the fight. “I knew I could hurt him, because he had difficulty making weight, but he made it easy for me by altering his style.” A right uppercut set Olson up for a finishing left hook. He tried to stand at the count of eight, but it was to no avail. Sugar had regained the middleweight championship, holding it for the third time. And as he watched Gainford, Wiley, and the others leap around in joy, he felt a special jolt of satisfaction, and wished he could have screamed out loud to them, “I told you so.” As ever, except for the disastrous thumping he’d taken from Tiger Jones, Sugar had conquered the Windy City. “Emotionally, I collapsed,” Sugar said after the fight. “I was sobbing so much that my body shook. I felt the tears rolling down my face. They were tears of happiness but also tears of anger. They were tears of pride but also tears of revenge. Wrapping a towel around my face, George led me out of the ring. I let him do it, even though I had really wanted to walk out of that ring alone, the same way I had made my comeback.”
Even the grim shadow of the Internal Revenue Service could not dampen the extreme exhilaration he derived from the moment. With his businesses in a steady decline and employees embezzling money from his various operations, Sugar had trouble paying his taxes. As a result, the IRS put a lien on his earnings for eighty-one thousand dollars. Still, as he had proven in his fight against Olson, he was back on top, and the IRS was not going to rob him of the pleasure of being the champ again. He missed and needed the adoration of fans, many of whom crowded around him, wanting his autograph, wanting to touch their idol, wanting to smother him with affection. He was back in the spotlight he adored and that adored him. So brilliant was his iconic glow that it radiated all up and down the train that carried him back to New York City. So powerful and engaging was his celebrity that rather than speeding into Grand Central Station, the train made an unscheduled stop at 125th Street to allow Harlem’s hero to be closer to his office.
A victorious Sugar was swamped with requests—for personal appearances, award ceremonies, luncheons, photo sessions, interviews—and a desk overflowing with business matters begging for his attention. Among the television appearances that brought him national exposure was his appearance for the second time as a mystery guest on CBS’s What’s My Line. Dressed nattily in formal wear, Sugar signed his name to the blackboard with his usual flair and answered the questions put to him in a fairly fluent French as a way to avoid detection. But it didn’t take comedian Jack E. Leonard long to identify him, after his colleagues had chipped away at the disguise with their queries; plus, Sugar’s high-pitched voice gave Leonard a tonal clue. (But the national exposure didn’t always work in Sugar’s favor. During the mid-fifties, Sugar was also a frequent guest on The Ed Sullivan Show, or he would sit in the audience, where on one occasion he was introduced and asked by Sullivan to stand with his wife; Sullivan was informed later that the woman with Sugar had not been Edna Mae.)
Still, a few hundred dollars from guest spots on television variety shows was a long way from the bundle of money he needed to square things with the IRS; moreover, electrical, plumbing, and personnel expenses had accumulated in his multiple businesses. Then there were Edna Mae and his son. Suddenly, there was not enough money to sustain his household and businesses, nor enough hours in the day or night for him to relax. Even his habits of carousing and gambling had to be put on hold while he tried to bring order to the chaos of his life.
But a fighter is a fighter, and so Sugar entrusted others with handling the mundane affairs—he had to get ready for a return match with Olson in May. He thought his record, especially his conquest of Olson and the regaining of his middleweight belt, warranted the Fighter of the Year Award for 1955, but it went to Carmen Basilio. Basilio? Sugar made a mental note of this emerging contender as he wore out the bags, the road, and sparring partners at the lake. Maybe in the future.
In the meantime he had to prepare for his rematch with Olson. “It was to be fought in Los Angeles,” Edna Mae wrote of the planned encounter, slated for Friday, May 18, 1956. In Los Angeles Sugar had engaged Gilman’s Training Camp in San Jacinto, on the edge of the California desert. Edna Mae stayed in Los Angeles until two weeks before the fight, when her presence was requested by Gainford to release some of the Sugar’s tension. Specifically, she was to have a conjugal visit with her husband. “One of the big sacrifices in being a champion is sex,” Sugar related. “If you’re a fighter you need your energy. You can’t leave it with a woman, even if she’s your wife.” Ordinarily, Sugar would abstain from sex six weeks before a fight, and if he hit his peak early, a “break” would be necessary; then, a few days before the fight, the peak would be reached again. Sugar welcomed the opportunity, and so did Edna Mae.5
Sexual abstention was the boxer’s first commandment, and it wasn’t until three years later, in 1959, that enforced chastity was soundly banished. Author Roger Kahn said that he heard this rule spouted for years in boxing camps, where women were considered taboo. Then, in 1959, Ingemar Johansson of Sweden arrived to challenge Floyd Patterson for the heavyweight title, accompanied by a lissome blonde, Birgit Lundgren. “After taking steady body punches and losing the first two rounds, Johansson suddenly threw what he called ‘Toonder,’ his overhand right. The wallop landed squarely between Patterson’s eyes. Six knockdowns later Johansson had become champion.”6 Johansson’s “Toonder” dispatched Patterson and put sexual abstention forever on ice.
Harry Wiley, Sugar’s trainer, when asked about sex and the boxer told this story about Sonny Liston’s sex drive and what he did to curb it: “Liston used to take his sex drive out on opponents. I heard they told Liston that Lena Horne would see him if he whipped (Floyd) Patterson…He slaughtered Patterson in the first round in both fights…They used to tease Liston, telling him that a beautiful woman was out there waiting for him, but if he wouldn’t knock his opponent out by the third round she wouldn’t see him. Then they’d set a woman at ringside, and at the end of the second round she’d get up and walk down the aisle and they’d whisper to Liston, ‘Well, there you go. You lost your chance.’ Liston would hurry to get the fight over.”
As for Sugar, Wiley said he never had any trouble with him on this matter. “At his peak, Sugar Ray was the best-disciplined fighter in the trade. He valued his looks too much to take a chance getting hurt in the ring. When it came time for him to stop, his willpower was like iron. He could sleep next to Venus without touching her.”7
There’s an incident in Ali’s autobiography related by Bundini Brown, who was a trainer with Sugar before he joined Ali’s team. He writes about his sleeping with “a champ” who is the best fighter in the world, “pound for pound.” “I was green,” Bundini said. “First time I’d been with a champ. No woman ever told me to get in bed with her husband before, and I didn’t know what to make of it. ‘Just lie in bed with him,’ she says…He’s lying there in the bed and I get in and lie next to him, and he cuddles up with my arms around him and goes to sleep. And the wife peeks in the door and sees me with my arms around her husband and says, ‘That’s good.’” By all indications, the man Bundini is cuddling is Sugar.8
As smooth as things were progressing with his comeback, Sugar was not happy with the business side of things. A dispute had arisen over the allotment of ringside seats Sugar had been promised for the Olson fight. Sugar had requested five hundred seats but received only two hundred fifty, with just ten ringside seats in the package. This snub came on top of a previous disagreement Sugar had had with the promoters of the fight—the IBC (International Boxing Club)—and the Hollywood Legion Stadium group. Sugar was furious with Truman Gibson, the IBC secretary, and with his friend, Joe Louis, who was acting as a functionary for Jim Norris, the IBC’s honcho, for attempting to pressure him into fighting Olson in Miami. Ernie Braca, one of Sugar’s managers, said that the Robinson team would not cooperate in any future fights with the IBC. “I suppose the IBC would like to see us lose the title,” Braca told reporters. “If they think we’re hard to get along with now, wait until after we win this fight. Then, we’ll really be hard to get along with.” He said: “We owe the IBC the return match with Olson. But we’ll take command when this obligation is paid. We’ll have no tie with the IBC, and we’ll fight where, when, and for whom we please.”
Sugar’s gripe with the IBC can be traced back to 1949, just two years after the organization was established. Ironically, Joe Louis, Sugar’s lifetime friend, was a key player in the formation of the IBC, receiving $150,000 in cash for facilitating exclusive promotion rights to such prominent heavyweight fighters as Ezzard Charles, Jersey Joe Walcott, and Lee Savold. Thus empowered, the IBC bought exclusive leases to Yankee Stadium, and St. Nicholas Arena, as well as Sugar’s contract, which until then was held by Mike Jacobs. “This virtually assured IBC control of nearly half of all championship boxing in the United States,” noted Jeffrey Sammons, a boxing historian. “For example, from 1937 to 1949, 45 percent of all championship bouts were held in Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds, or St. Nicholas Arena. No wonder the IBC became known as the ‘Octopus.’”9
And a tentacle of this “octopus” choked Sugar’s chances at a middleweight championship bout in the mid-1940s, after he had held the welterweight title for three years and wanted to move up to the next weight division. Because he refused to cooperate with the IBC and its mobster connections, Sugar was often bypassed; and none of the snubs was more hurtful than when the IBC offered LaMotta a championship shot, even though Sugar had beaten him four out of five matches. Not until their sixth and final fight in 1951 was Sugar given an opportunity to beat LaMotta for the belt. Now, with the IBC denying Sugar the seats he had been promised, his ire was refueled.
“The bout was held in broad daylight (to make up for the three-hour time difference on the East Coast) in Los Angeles at Wrigley Field,” Edna Mae wrote, “and the crowd was loud and enormous. Both boxers were very cautious at the beginning. Olson constantly clinched with Ray, more like a wrestler than a fighter. We wondered why the referee, Mushy Callahan, didn’t break them apart and caution them to move and fight. Sugar had said that he’d observed previously that Olson would drop his right arm when he delivered a good punch with his right hand. In two minutes and fifty-one seconds of the fourth round Olson did just that, and faster than lightning, Sugar delivered a punch with his left hand to Olson’s right jaw that must have made him see stars as he sagged to the canvas like a bag of cement. The roar of the crowd was music to my ears.” And the roar of twenty thousand fans was in sharp contrast to the boos that had greeted the fighters for the first three rounds. It was the fourth and final time Olson lost to Sugar.
There was also the sound of cash registers, as the two fighters raked in more than six figures apiece, including what they racked up in television rights for a fight beamed across the nation. The IRS stepped in immediately and snatched the bulk of Sugar’s $150,000 purse—nearly $90,000—while Olson’s estranged wife, Helen, got most of his. The lien against Sugar stemmed from an accumulation of taxes and penalties dating from the years 1944 through 1949, plus 1953.10 But Sugar wasn’t thinking about the money yet—he was still too busy savoring the victory and criticizing his performance. “I didn’t get a chance to test my legs, because the fight didn’t go long enough,” Sugar told reporters outside his dressing room. “I was hit well in the body in the third round, and that punch was Bobo’s ruination. Why? Because I then encouraged him to open up. After he hit me in the body, I lagged my left, and that gave him confidence. He got brave and came on in the fourth, and when he started to punch the body again, I hit him flush on the jaw with the left. It was hard, but I wasn’t sure I had him until the count reached ten.”11
“I guess he’s just got a jinx on me,” a battered Olson told reporters, slumping on his bench the same way he did the summer before after Archie Moore knocked him senseless. It had been another boo-boo by Bobo.
According to an article by the famed columnist Louella Parsons, motion picture editor for the International News Service, there was a phone call from Frank Sinatra, then in Madrid making The Pride and the Passion, to Sugar that in her estimation “clinched the deal for Frank to make the prizefighter’s life story.” Sugar, who had always yearned to be an actor, would play himself in the film, Parsons continued. “Frank will produce it as one of his independent pictures,” she wrote. She said the picture would be made that winter “while Sugar is between fights and Frank has some free time.” The two never got around to making the biopic, but they did share the screen in a couple of other productions, including The Detective, in which Sugar had a small part as a police officer. Sinatra often said that Sugar was the best fighter he had ever seen.