THE MYTH OF SUGAR RAY
Springs Toledo tells the story of the men who the great Robinson avoided
SUGAR RAY ROBINSON took his sweet time showering after a workout. He took even more time dressing and primping his conked hair in the mirror. The Uptown Gymnasium in Harlem was emptying out by the time he slung his bag over his shoulder and walked out to W 116th Street, into the darkening afternoon. Twelve days later a blizzard would dump 20 inches of snow on the city, but December 7 1948 saw a breezy 50 degrees, nature’s idea of a feint. The door hadn’t quite clicked closed behind him when someone emerged from the shadows. Robinson recognised the five-foot-five fire-hydrant frame of his chief sparring partner, Aaron Wade.
“I want all the dough or none,” Wade said. There was liquor on his breath.
Earlier that day, Robinson told Wade he’d have to accept less money than promised. The ticket sales for his fight Thursday at Jersey City were lagging and Robinson wasn’t one to put anyone’s interests above his own, least of all a sparring partner’s. He was the welterweight champion of the world, a flashier embodiment of the hopes and aspirations of the black community than Joe Louis, and his star power commanded $20,000 for the upcoming match. Wade was expecting to get a fraction of that, but he was broke and needed every nickel. He started to object, then relented. “What can I do? You’re the boss,” he said. “I’ve got to take it.”
Wade left the gym. Where he went wasn’t recorded, but it’s a pretty good bet he stopped off in a bar. He came back in a whiskey sour mood.
“I’m just a punk in this business but I want my money.” He was edging closer now.
Robinson was imperiously dismissive. He told Wade he’d be “lucky to get anything” and furthermore — Crack! Wade fired his Sunday punch and down went Robinson.
I found a report of this incident in the nowdefunct Boston Post and the details told me that the unnamed source could only have been Wade [inset] himself. And let’s be unambiguous, Wade didn’t just knock Robinson down — he beat the hell out of him. Robinson suffered a separation of his ribs with swelling “the size of a pullet egg” around his heart and was out of commission for two months. The Jersey City card was cancelled, as was that $20,000 purse, and Robinson lied about how he got the injury to protect his reputation.
There were others who knew Robinson’s reputation was not all it was cracked up to be and a few who would have cracked him themselves had he been willing to mix it up with those particularly vicious and intemperate fighters now known as “Murderers’ Row.” Wade’s Sunday punch had their names on it.
Murderers’ Row was boxing’s roiling, broiling underclass. They were eight of the most dangerous middleweights of the 1940s — all black, all in the top 10 at one time or another, and every one of them denied the chance to fight for a world championship or spoil the records of celebrity contenders. So they spoiled each other’s records and crisscrossed the continent like nomads, their triumphs unsung, their tragedies private.
Robinson had known of them for years. In 1943, he agreed to come to California and his handlers bragged that he was aiming for the best; that “the bars will be down.” Charley Burley, Holman Williams, Jack Chase, Eddie Booker, and Lloyd Marshall were campaigning in California at the time and all of them were ranked and ready in the top 10. But Robinson had second thoughts. He would not fight in California until 1947, when the coast was clear.
Burley was the best of them. The Robinson-burley bout that never happened is discussed on internet forums today as if it had. It should have in 1946, when Robinson came to Burley’s home town of Pittsburgh, when Robinson’s handlers agreed to a $25,000 purse to face Burley. But then Robinson stepped in and doubled his price to $50,000, which halted negotiations on the spot. Burley himself claimed that a local boxing promoter told him he might be able to get a three-fight contract, “but part of the deal,” he said, “would be that I’d have to go down in the first one.” A few days later, in October 1946, Robinson faced Bulldog Harris at Forbes Field, “a guy he knew he could beat easily.”
In November 1946, Bert Lytell fought a riot squad up in Brooklyn. Apparently, he was in some clip joint when two patrons decided to give him a hard time and within about a minute they were hollering for help, as were the police officers who ran to the scene and got tossed around themselves. Bert was reportedly going blow-for-blow with the riot squad until their night sticks put a crevice in his skull and he collapsed from blood loss.
This berserker was born in the West but campaigned in the East — Robinson territory. He went life-and-death with Wade, split a pair against Burley, and looked like he could have been Mike Tyson’s true father. He had a contract to face Robinson in Boston in July 1945 but Robinson ran out on the contract. Robinson might have seen an
AP report that said Jake Lamotta, whom he’d beaten three out of four times, earned a split decision over Lytell before signing and found out only later that Lytell schooled Lamotta and got robbed by the judges. In August, Lamotta was ranked by The Ring at No.1 and half the ranks of Murderers’ Row were raging behind him at 2, 3, 4, and 5.
In September, Robinson beat up a white fighter with an 8-11 record, Jimmy Mandell, and then met Lamotta for the fifth time in Chicago and collected a king’s ransom. Lytell fought six times that summer just to eat. In late 1948, Robinson was offered $15,000 to square off with Lytell for the “Negro Middleweight Championship” in Boston and passed again despite the fact that he was campaigning hard to get a shot at division king Marcel Cerdan and Lytell was the number-one contender.
Lytell was mentored by Cocoa Kid, whose story is tragic even by the measuring rod of Murderers’ Row. In 1929, he was 14 and fighting professionally in Atlanta for loose change. Long, lithe, and carrying a lightning bolt in his right hand, Cocoa Kid would
WADE DIDN’T JUST DROP ROBINSON, HE BEAT THE HELL OUT OF HIM”
become a top contender in three divisions. He was ranked number-one when Henry Armstrong was welterweight champ but Armstrong skipped him to defend against lesser (and whiter) opponents. He had over 200 bouts when he was inducted into the naval reserves in 1943, though he was soon discharged due to a medical condition. I got a hold of his service record through the Freedom of Information Act and when I saw his diagnosis I had to take a walk. It said dementia pugilistica. Cocoa Kid kept his condition a secret and fought at least another 38 times. In 1949, a dream fight appeared on his horizon. A promoter in Texas reached an agreement with Sugar Ray to face Cocoa Kid in April after it was discovered that Robinson’s original opponent was under suspension. Cocoa Kid was left high and dry when Robinson never showed up. The Deputy Boxing Commissioner recommended that he face immediate suspension until he fulfilled the contract or reimbursed the promoter. “This runout is certainly no credit to Robinson,” he said. Robinson agreed to reschedule the bout for May 24, and didn’t show up for that either.
Robinson wouldn’t risk his record against Murderers’ Row, but he wasn’t shy about using them to hone his skills in sparring. Cocoa Kid appeared with “Little Tiger” Wade in Robinson’s training camp that summer and he too got a measure of revenge. “Sparmate Floors Champ Robinson,” said the wires on August 21. It was Cocoa Kid’s signature punch that did it, a hard right to the jaw.
Robinson went on to win the middleweight crown a record five times and would have taken the light heavyweight crown too had not nature itself landed a telling blow in the form of heat stroke. Even before he retired he was being touted as the greatest fighter who ever lived. The fact that only weeks ago Raymundo “Sugar” Beltran was on ESPN and “The New” Ray Robinson was on Showtime makes his death in 1989 seem like a hoax, which it was as far as boxing is concerned. Sugar Ray Robinson is immortal. But whatever happened to Murderers’ Row? Cocoa Kid disappeared into the mists of history. But I found him. The first clue was a scrap of information in a 1961 edition of the Police Gazette: “The Cocoa Kid, great welterweight of the 30’s and 40’s is a wino derelict along New York’s Tenth Avenue.” He wasn’t a wino, he was punch drunk. Homeless and living off his veteran’s benefits, he ended up in Chicago’s Dunning Asylum. The staff there didn’t know who he was, and neither did he anymore, so administrators sent his fingerprints to the Naval Record Management Center in St. Louis — the same office I contacted to identity him again over 50 years later. He died bewildered and quite alone in the world in 1966.
Bert Lytell’s career was over in 1951. He was 27. “I was blackballed,” he told his niece, likely by a mobbedup managers’ guild after he refused to throw a fight. He became yet another one of Sugar Ray’s sparring partners and drifted west to Oakland in the late 1960s where he shined shoes in a laundromat and later found work in a foundry. He did time in prison. As he aged he didn’t calm down; he was arrested several times for possession of drugs and a loaded firearm, struggled with alcoholism, and at one point was living in his car. He died of cancer in 1990.
Charley Burley became a garbage man. As a youth, playwright August Wilson lived across the street from him and years later based the “magnificent spirit” of Troy Maxson from Fences on the uncrowned champion he idolised. The film adaptation was nominated for five Academy Awards and won one in 2017. When I watched Denzel Washington in the leading role, I saw Charley Burley. It’s been said that Burley, unlike Maxson, wasn’t bitter about opportunities denied him, but a friend of his told author Harry Otty something different. Burley, he said, considered meeting and beating “the s**t out of Sugar Ray” not just for “screwing Charley Burley, but other people.”
In 1950, two years after Wade did to Robinson what Burley wanted to do, Wade fought Robinson again — this time in a Georgia prize ring. He was the sole member of Murderers’ Row to do so. It was a fiasco. The Savannah Evening Press said Wade “began hitting the canvas for apparently no reason at all” in the second round and the Savannah Morning
News observed that when Robinson finished him in the third, he “seemed willing to cooperate.” Wade was paid a few hundred dollars to take a dive. He admitted as much to his son, who told me. When I heard that, I got uneasy. Did Robinson know? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. Despite my research, despite my commitment to accept the truth for what it is, for whatever it is, I wanted to remain in awe of him. It turns out Alan Wade asked his father that very question. His father shook his head. It was the promoters who made the arrangements, he said. “Robinson had nothing to do with it.”
Didn’t he? There are shadows in his spotlight, and they’re lengthening with time. “Strong men,” said poet Sterling Brown, “…coming on.”
Springs Toledo is the author of Murderers’ Row (2017); now available at Amazon and Amazon UK.
THE STAFF THERE DIDN’T KNOW WHO COCOA KID WAS, AND NEITHER DID HE ANYMORE”