Review by Choice Review
Perhaps no boxer ever had a nickname that was more apt. Sugar Ray Robinson--the name lingers on the tongue like syrup. In the ring Robinson moved like a dancer, truly turning a boxing match into an exhibition of the "sweet science," a performance as graceful and moving as a classical ballet. He won the welterweight and middleweight crowns and came within a hair of capturing the light-heavyweight title. In a professional career that lasted 25 years, he earned consideration as the greatest pound-for-pound fighter of all time. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wil Haygood beautifully recounts the high and low points of Robinson's life (1921-89), from his youth in Detroit and Harlem to his boxing wars with the likes of Jake LaMotta and Gene Fullmer to his short careers on the dance floor and movie screen. But Haygood's greatest contribution is situating Robinson into the context of "sepia America." His comparisons of Robinson to Lena Horne, Langston Hughes, and Miles Davis--three individuals who were profoundly shaped by Sugar Ray Robinson--suggest a leitmotif for black America in the 1940s and 1950s. Style, jazz, and liberation were the ingredients that made Sugar Ray so sweet. Summing Up: Essential. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates, professionals, general readers. R. W. Roberts Purdue University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Sugar Ray Robinson in front of his club and restaurant on 124th Street in Harlem, 1950. BY PETE HAMILL THIS is an ambitious portrait of an American legend. Ray Robinson was not just a prizefighter. He was an extraordinary fighter. Someone once said: "There was Ray Robinson. And then there were the top 10." He was certainly the greatest prizefighter I ever saw. But Wil Haygood has written more than a simple chronicle of a sports career. He wants to place Robinson as a central figure in the rise of urban African-Americans in the 20th century. At the peak of his success, in the 1940s and '50s, Robinson epitomized the tough grace and style and confidence of an entire generation. He would display those qualities all over the United States and Europe. Haygood chooses to tell this tale, in part, as a kind of prose ballad. In lyrical language, he traces the life of Robinson from his birth in Detroit in 1921 as Walker Smith Jr. to his truest home, in Harlem, on the great glittering island of Manhattan, to California, where he died in 1989. The elements of his early exodus are familiar: the father who goes off alone and is changed by his life in the Black Bottom section of Detroit; the mother who follows her man and soon finds herself humiliated by his antics, a situation worsened by the onslaught of the Great Depression. In 1932, when her son is 11, she gathers him and her two daughters and travels by bus to New York. They stay in a dump in Midtown, and the boy earns small change dancing for strangers in Times Square. Then they find a place in Harlem. "But there existed two Harlems," Haygood writes. "In one Harlem there were poetry readings and social teas; there were gatherings that featured notable speakers who talked about national affairs and the doings they were privy to in the Roosevelt White House." The Smiths lived in the other Harlem, "a rough place, a lower-class enclave of broken families, of flophouses and boardinghouses. Of racketeers and gangsters, of big crime and petty crime. Of handouts and hand-me-down clothing, of little boys often scampering about like lambs being hunted." One of those boys was surely Walker Smith Jr., and his mother wanted to save him from the fate of so many others. She found refuge for him in the basement of the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, where a man named George Gainford was helping to start a boxing club. Back in Detroit, the boy had glimpsed young Joe Louis (they would become friends much later). But he didn't then imagine himself as a prizefighter. In Harlem, he often fought in the streets. In the gym of the Salem Crescent Athletic Club, Gainford began to shape him as a fighter and a man. The boy was getting taller, learning the moves, showing very fast hands and, especially, the sense of a contest - the need for strategy, the anticipation of what the other guy might do. He constantly asked Gainford questions about his craft, and Gainford did his best to answer. He couldn't teach everything, particularly the quality that fighters call "heart": the ability to endure pain in order to inflict it. In the gym, Gainford saw that his student had that quality. In Kingston, N.Y., one night in 1936, the boy filled in for another fighter and won his first competitive bout. He had to use another fighter's Amateur Athletic Union card, because Gainford had still not acquired one for Walker Smith Jr. The other fighter was named Ray Robinson. The name would last a lifetime. The tale that follows is a long story of success, and much early frustration. Robinson wins Golden Gloves titles in 1939 and 1940, then turns pro and is undefeated for 40 fights as a welterweight (147 pounds) before losing a decision to tough Jake LaMotta in 1943 (he was outweighed by 16 pounds and would beat LaMotta in a rematch three weeks later). He stays free of the mob and is frequently called "the uncrowned champion" but never gets a shot at the welterweight title until after the war. Haygood, a staff writer at The Washington Post and the author of a biography of Sammy Davis Jr., is not simply repeating this familiar boxing story. He chooses to weave through his account three subnarratives about Robinson's era: the lives of Lena Horne, Langston Hughes and Miles Davis. Like Robinson, each symbolizes racial pride, individual accomplishment and high urban style. Sometimes the device gets in the way of the main narrative and feels forced. Hughes talks to Robinson not far from Sugar Ray's, the popular bar that Robinson established after the war, but we don't really know the subject of the conversation. Miles definitely became a friend in the '50s, training at Harry Wiley's Gym (established by an assistant to Gainford), but as a horn player whose lips were precious, he never boxed. After the war, he also developed a heroin habit, which must have caused pity and compassion in Robinson. THERE are some curious omissions, too. Haygood doesn't mention the historic cultural role of Minton's Playhouse, on 118th Street, where young musicians (including Miles Davis) gathered for jam sessions and invented the freer, more original and absolutely urban music called bebop. He doesn't even mention bebop. More important, he doesn't mention the Harlem riot of August 1943. This took place while Corporal Robinson was touring with Louis, the heavyweight champion, entertaining troops. An African-American woman was arrested by a cop who said she was disturbing the peace. A black soldier tried to intervene, a physical struggle began, and the cop shot the soldier in the arm. The soldier was taken away in an ambulance, and street rumor said he was dead; he wasn't. The riot erupted anyway. This followed by two months the Detroit race riot, which had killed 34 people, 25 of them black. The Harlem riot, a two-day affair, was not strictly a race riot, pitting whites against blacks. It was a riot against property, directed at hundreds of white-owned businesses, with damage of about $5 million. Still, six people died and hundreds were wounded. It's hard to believe that Louis (from Detroit) and Robinson (from Harlem) didn't discuss these horrific events, and call home. When Robinson disappeared from Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn for six days in early 1944, on the eve of sailing for war-torn Europe, claiming he must have fallen and suffered amnesia, was he really questioning whether he should risk death for his race-sick country? We don't know. He missed the sailing but was given an honorable discharge. He wouldn't discuss the subject in any detail for the rest of his life, not even with Dave Anderson of The New York Times, who helped him write his 1970 autobiography, "Sugar Ray" (on which Haygood draws heavily). Still, Haygood has given us a lot to ponder in this multilayered biography, about a complex man who epitomized so much of his era. For those who don't know the story, it will have plenty to teach, about style, grace, intelligence and heart. Pete Hamill, the author of more than 20 books, covered Ray Robinson's last fight. He is a distinguished writer in residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 20, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Haygood follows his award-winning biography of Sammy Davis Jr. (In Black and White, 2003) with an account of another African American who carved a unique place for himself in pop-cultural history. Boxer Sugar Ray Robinson was not only one of the greatest fighters of all time (179 wins against 19 losses over a career that stretched well into his forties), he was also a trailblazer, the man who brought style and grace to the ring and who became Muhammad Ali's role model. Haygood's account of Robinson's rise from the mean streets of Detroit and New York to international celebrity is cast alongside the parallel stories of three other innovative African American artists whose paths crossed Robinson's: poet Langston Hughes, singer Lena Horne, and jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. Though the story focuses on Robinson's remarkable ring career he was middleweight champion five times and engaged in classic bouts with Jake LaMotta (six times), Rocky Graziano, and Carmen Basilio, among others Haygood shows how each of his featured artists refused to accept the limiting roles that others expected of them. Like Davis, who resisted being pigeonholed into one jazz style and who rejected the minstrel-show approach to music, Robinson took boxing to a new level of class and style. Patterning himself after Davis and the other jazz greats he idolized, he brought rhythm and swing to the boxing ring and sartorial splendor to his life beyond the ropes. As club owner, piano player, dancer, and philanthropist, he carved out a new model for himself: the boxer as Renaissance man. Haygood brings this remarkable twentieth-century story to life in all its myriad shades of meaning.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The captivating life of the African-American champion who brought grace and style to the boxing ring in the 1940s and '50s. Born Walker Smith Jr. in rural Georgia, Sugar Ray Robinson (192189) grew up poor in Detroit and Harlem, where he fought his first amateur fights out of a church boxing club and won the New York Daily News' Golden Gloves tournament in 1939. With his lightning speed and matador moves, the handsome welterweight created a sensation, earning the monikers "Death Ray" and "Sugar Ray," which stuck. In this insightful, highly readable biography, Washington Post staff writer Haygood (In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr., 2003, etc.) chronicles the intriguing life of this gifted boxer and dandy, who toured Jim Crow America in World War II with fellow serviceman, and heavyweight champ, Joe Louis; had a long-running feud with fighter Jake LaMotta; and pursued the savage sport that held "a kind of sacredness" for him until 1965, when he retired with 173 wins, 19 losses and six draws. No one ever knocked him out, notes Haygood. All the while, the jazz-loving Robinson ran a popular Harlem nightspot, zipped around Manhattan in a flamingo-colored Cadillac convertible with his midget chauffer, Chico, and hung with leading African-American artists and entertainers. Haygood weaves in stories of the boxer's ties with Lena Horne, Langston Hughes, Miles Davis and others who emerged in the postwar years in the singular "convergence of men, music, and style" that was celebrated by Arnold Gingrich in Esquire. Surprisingly, there has never been a Sugar Ray biopic, but Haygood's narrative is chockfull of movie-ready scenes: Robinson challenging military-base segregation; knocking out Killer Jimmy Doyle, who died 17 hours later; touring with Count Basie in an ill-advised nightclub act; being received like a movie star in Europe. Always enigmatic, Robinson was an absent father, had a volatile marriage, went mysteriously AWOL in World War II and wound up near-broke. Sportswriter Red Smith called him "a brooding genius, a darkly dedicated soul who walks in a lonely majesty, a prophet without honor, an artist whom nobody, but nobody, understands." A wonderful book that deserves a wide audience. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
