Product Description

From the author of the critically acclaimed In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr., comes another illuminating socio-historical narrative of the twentieth century, this one spun around one of the most iconic figures of the fight game, Sugar Ray Robinson.

Continuing to set himself apart as one of our canniest cultural historians, Wil Haygood grounds the spectacular story of Robinson's rise to greatness within the context of the fighter's life and times. Born Walker Smith, Jr., in 1921, Robinson had an early childhood marked by the seething racial tensions and explosive race riots that infected the Midwest throughout the twenties and thirties. After his mother moved him and his sisters to the relative safety of Harlem, he came of age in the vibrant post-Renaissance years. It was there that—encouraged to box by his mother, who wanted him off the streets—he soon became a rising star, cutting an electrifying, glamorous figure, riding around town in his famous pink Cadillac. Beyond the celebrity, though, Robinson would emerge as a powerful, often controversial black symbol in a rapidly changing America. Haygood also weaves in the stories of Langston Hughes, Lena Horne, and Miles Davis, whose lives not only intersected with Robinson's but also contribute richly to the scope and soul of the book.

From Robinson's gruesome six-bout war with Jake "Raging Bull" LaMotta and his lethal meeting with Jimmy Doyle to his Harlem nightclub years and thwarted show-biz dreams, Haygood brings the champion's story, in the ring and out, powerfully to life against a vividly painted backdrop of the world he captivated.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #377 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-13
• Released on: 2009-10-13
• Format: Deckle Edge
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 480 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781400044979
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Gerald Early Between 1945 and 1960, the three black male icons of cool were singer Nat "King" Cole, trumpeter Miles Davis and boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. It was the era of the rise of the dark-skinned black man, as critic Stanley Crouch has pointed out, especially so if one throws in actor Sidney Poitier for good measure. In "Sweet Thunder," his noteworthy biography of Robinson, Washington Post staff writer Wil Haygood calls them "Esquire men," after the famous men's magazine that started during the Depression. Esquire men dressed well, carried themselves with a muted masculine flair, were aficionados of jazz, sports and the nightlife, and were cosmopolitan in their taste for liquor and ladies. Davis, Cole, Robinson and other black men like them were, in short, the new urban sophisticates, black celebrities who had crossover appeal to white elites as style-setters. Haygood evokes this world of black glamour with interludes on Davis, singer Lena Horne and writer Langston Hughes. These refined scenes make a stark contrast with his accounts of the world of boxing, where Robinson made his living, a tooth-and-claw Spencerian demimonde of laissez-faire capitalism and savage competition. Robinson's ability to negotiate these worlds was not terribly surprising. Champion boxers, especially of an earlier era, were considered celebrities, hung around with other celebrities, and were expected to be well-dressed, exciting, larger-than-life figures who fanned their money around like the nouveau riche and oozed masculine cool. Robinson was born Walker Smith Jr. in Detroit in 1921 during the era of the great black migration from the South to Northern, Midwestern and upper Southern cities. (In Detroit, he once carried Joe Louis's bag, as just one of the street urchins who already saw Louis, an amateur fighter then, as a grand hero.) It was the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, the time when blacks became an urban people. After a brief return to the South, Smith, with his mother and sisters, wound up in Harlem in 1932. There his career as a boxer took off. Smith took the identity of an absent kid named Ray Robinson in a match, and a boxing legend was born. Robinson was one of the greatest amateur athletes in American sports history. He was ornery and basically became his own manager as a pro. That is rather like being one's own lawyer in a trial, but Robinson made this work. He was one of the few black boxers who spoke for himself and negotiated his own contracts. He was an irritant to boxing promoters, but he seemed to enjoy that. He did not handle his money any better than other boxers: He had an entourage of over a dozen people in his heyday. He strolled the streets of Harlem and Paris like a prince. Robinson, as Haygood points out, was a romantic: "He had an almost messianic drive, and wherever others saw limitation, he saw opportunity. Where others saw the confinement of the athlete, he saw the athlete in transcendence." Most boxing historians consider Robinson pound-for-pound the greatest fighter in history: explosive power in either of his amazingly fast hands, balletic feet, a man who fought over 200 bouts in the most competitive divisions in boxing -- welterweight and middleweight -- and lost only 19 times. Thirteen of those losses occurred from 1960 on, when he was 40 or more years old and way past his prime. His most famous battles were his six wars with LaMotta and his fights against Carmen Basilio, Randy Turpin and Kid Gavilan. Robinson won the middleweight title five times, but he lost it four times. Because of this, some have argued that Carlos Monzon and Marvelous Marvin Hagler, who were able to keep the title for a long period of time, were superior middleweights. Robinson tried to cross over by retiring from the ring for a time to become a dancer. It was not so unusual for a boxer to try to be an entertainer: John L. Sullivan, Jim Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons played on the stage; Jack Johnson did stage and screen, as did Jack Dempsey. Joe Louis starred in a film. Even Muhammad Ali tried acting. But Robinson failed, just as he failed in running race businesses, which dealt almost exclusively with a segregated black clientele that could not take its patronage elsewhere. Haygood does not discuss as much as he should the limitations of the shadow institutions that blacks created during the days of segregation. (These institutions did not succeed very well because they were limited by racism and by structural issues in the black community. A good examination of these limitations can be found in Neil Lanctot's "Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution.") Yet Haygood's book is certainly one of the best biographies of a boxer ever written, although it is not quite the tour de force that is David Margolick's "Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink." Like Margolick, Haygood seems to run out of gas, and Robinson's end (he died in 1989) is not nearly as richly evoked as his early life. But Haygood's book is an important contribution to both sports literature and African American studies.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review
"This book is a wonderful mix of reporting and grace, inspired by the thunder and speed of a much forgotten champion. Deeply researched, superbly written, thankfully devoid of dripping sentimentality, Wil Haygood takes an old broom to Harlem history and sweeps out the corners. This is the boxer we never knew."
–James McBride, author of The Color of Water

"The best is always fragile, Sugar Ray Robinson once said, and it took a writer of Wil Haygood's magnificence to appreciate what this meant in bringing the great boxer back to life. Sweet Thunder is a jewel from beginning to end."
– David Maraniss, author of When Pride Still Mattered and Rome 1960

"Finally, a biography worthy of a great athlete and social force, Sugar Ray Robinson."
– Larry Merchant, HBO World Championship Boxing


From the Hardcover edition.

Review
"This book is a wonderful mix of reporting and grace, inspired by the thunder and speed of a much forgotten champion. Deeply researched, superbly written, thankfully devoid of dripping sentimentality, Wil Haygood takes an old broom to Harlem history and sweeps out the corners. This is the boxer we never knew."
–James McBride, author of The Color of Water

"The best is always fragile, Sugar Ray Robinson once said, and it took a writer of Wil Haygood's magnificence to appreciate what this meant in bringing the great boxer back to life. Sweet Thunder is a jewel from beginning to end."
– David Maraniss, author of When Pride Still Mattered and Rome 1960

"Finally, a biography worthy of a great athlete and social force, Sugar Ray Robinson."
– Larry Merchant, HBO World Championship Boxing

Customer Reviews

"And let thy blows, doubly redoubled, fall like amazing thunder
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

At Last!!!!
At last a biography worthy of the Pound for Pound Greatest Fighter that ever lived.
Sugar Ray Robinson was a true original, as a fighter he had it all,Speed..Power..and courage in the ring.
As a man he was flamboyant,flashy,and class personified..
Wil Haywood has done an amazing job in recounting the life of this Boxing Legend.

Haygood's Left Hook Draws Sugar Ray A Man In Full
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.