Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson [Paperback]

on the casque of thy adverse pernicious enemy" King Richard II, Act I Scene iii

Two ancient bits of personal history came flooding back to me when I read Wil Haygood's "Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson".

First, when I was growing up in the late 50s and early 60s a big group of kids in my neighborhood used to gather into one tiny apartment to watch the boxing on Friday nights. In between fights, we'd strap on big gloves and stage our own 1 round fights. That ended the night we watched Emile Griffith kill Benny "Kid" Paret during a bout.

Second, I remember my father (a musician) talking about how so many of the performers he worked for loved fighters and the fight game. When asked why they seem to have such a close relationship with each other he said basically musicians and fighters (and other athletes) tended at that time to live on the margins or outside the margins of `acceptable' society. They are admired by society even while society sometimes thinks of them as somewhat off. He also indicated that when you get into the ring or put a sax to you lips or put a violin on your shoulders you become judged by your peers solely on merit. In the internal world of boxing and music there was something approaching a meritocracy that society generally was far from adopting. He noted that the best fighters in the world could be viewed as the jazz artists of boxing; you could compare a Robinson fight to a Miles Davis performance if you looked closely enough. The great fighters and the great jazz musicians could respond with fluidity and grace to their environment even if that environment was changing during a fight or a performance.

Both these memories came back to me because Haygood has done such a good job recreating the great Ray Robinson's life and times. He captures the brutality of the sport in a lengthy chapter on Robinson's six gut-wrenching bouts with the raging bull Jake LaMotta and another chapter on the fight against Jimmy Doyle in which Doyle died after a brutal beating at the hands of Robinson. At the same time, Haygood has gone outside the boundaries of the ring and done a fine job talking about Ray's life and times; including the symbiotic relationship he had with the great performers and artists of his. That would include amongst others Josephine Baker, Lena Horne and Langston Hughes. In so doing Robinson is revealed to be much more than a gladiator.

Sweet Thunder provided me with an awful lot of information about Robinson's life that I simply did not know before hand. His description of is early life in Detroit, his move with his mother to Harlem and especially his time in the Army during WWII alongside Joe Louis were eye openers. Haygood's account of Robinson's approach to a hostile segregated south was in stark contrast to his idol Louis' approach. Haygood manages to set out those different approaches without doing a disservice to either Louis or Robinson. Also fascinating was Robinson's lifetime demand on controlling his own ring career. He made no concessions to the mobsters who controlled much of boxing and was one of the first fighters to insist on having the final say in who he fought and when he fought.

I always admired Robinson the fighter but Haygood's excellent biography also caused me to admire the man. The fact that Haygood managed to do this without stooping to a hagiography filled with nothing but praise is to his eternal credit.

All in all this was a fine book and one that can be enjoyed even if you are not a fan of boxing.

L. Fleisig

I hate to be somewhat less than adoring among all these excellent reviews, but there was something I found lacking in this otherwise very interesting biography.

I understand and applaud the contextualizing of Sugar Ray and his place in the evolution and emergence of African-American culture and independence in the post-WWII era. I found the relationship between Ray and Miles or Hughes to be fascinating, his many business ventures and efforts outside the ring to be worthy of discussion, and even liked the jazzbo style of the author.

However, there were times when -- if not a "monotonous linear narrative" as one reviewer calls it -- how about at least some sense of the chronological arc of his fighting career? You just don't get many details and are left wondering exactly when did he win the belt, who was he fighting at the time etc. I personally would have like more of that, though I agree Haygood covers The Raging Bull matches well.

In sum, there were parts of this book I really liked, and parts of this book that I wished were in there so I could have liked them too.

Complaint:

Could Use More Pictures Next Edition.

Praise:

For me, as I suspect it is for most, the name Sugar Ray Robinson is synonymous with boxing glory, and therefore before picking up Haygood's treatment I was dreading a dry, technical account of the fighters exploits in the ring, loosely tethered by anecdotes, I should have known better.

Though boxing, like Sugar's jab, leads the narrative it is not what you come away remembering him for. Instead, Haygood draws a much wider arc, and as a consequence, interesting and profound account of the passions, insecurities, trials, and triumphs of Sugar outside the ring, as an individual and in the context of his time. We are lead to believe that for Sugar, boxing was the place where he both discovered, and when necessary, reinforced his self-worth but that boxing was to significant extent merely a launching pad that could propel a man like him from the rough Harlem streets to the galaxies and stars that really touched his soul. People like Langston Hughes, Miles Davis and the lovely Lena Horne, meant more to his existence than his epic battle with the Raging Bull, though Haygood spares no expense in recounting that piece of boxing lore.

In sum, the only readers who will be disappointed are those who come seeking monotonous linearity of the jab; Haygood, like Sugar, comes from the outside with the lucid, lyrical left-hook and wins with a knockout I never saw coming.