Commentary : Sugar Ray’s Legend Larger Than Life, or Death

Sugar Ray Robinson was the first fighter I ever heard of. He was fighting Gene Fullmer, and as we sat down to watch the bout on television, my father, a Robinson devotee, explained to me that Sugar Ray was the best fighter, pound for pound, who ever laced up a glove.

I believed him, of course. He was my father. He knew everything, or so he assured me.

My father told me many things. He told me Ted Williams was the best hitter ever, that Willie Mays was the best player ever, but that Duke Snider, because we were Dodger fans, was our favorite player ever, and we were never to admit to anyone outside the home that Mays might actually be better than the Duke.

These bits of wisdom weren’t lectures. They were pieces of daily conversation that I was expected to absorb. I had no choice, because I would later be quizzed. That’s the kind of family I grew up in.

He told me Johnny Unitas was the best quarterback, Jimmy Brown the best running back, Oscar Robertson the best basketball player, FDR the best president, Hemingway the best writer, Bogey the best actor, Benny Goodman (pound for pound) the best clarinetist.

As a kid, I thought special knowledge was being passed on to me, a secret that no one else knew. When my grandfather would visit, he would tell me how Ty Cobb slid with spikes high or how Babe Ruth pointed to center field or how Dempsey was the best unless it was Jack Johnson, and I felt as if I was there, too.

When I grew a little older and a little wiser (actually, a little more of a wise guy), I started drawing my own conclusions, and if they conflicted with the older generation’s, so much the better. Any of you who were once teen-agers understand what I mean.

Mine was the era of anti-heroes. I liked players with floppy socks and big Afros and whatever else made the over-thirtysomethings nervous. And yet, the names and images stayed with me. Sugar Ray. Duke. Dempsey.

They were the sainted ones in a religion I couldn’t ever quite give up. And when I wonder sometimes about the near-universal appeal of sports, I put it down to religion and to collective knowledge and to fathers and sons, and, now especially, fathers and daughters, too.

And so, whatever I know of the original Sugar Ray is how I imagine him. I see him as slick and fast and with hands that held lightning. When I hear stories of punches that came in blurred flurries, it’s as if I actually saw them, remember them, drew pleasure from them and not just from some scratchy film where the fighters all seem small and slow and not quite real.

Robinson became real to me through Muhammad Ali, who saw in Robinson everything he wanted to be. Ali was my hero, as he was for many of my friends.

He was young and brash and cocky and proud and a rebel, who made a fool of his opponents, who laughed at them. He said he was better than Marciano, better than Louis, the greatest. But he never said he was better than Sugar Ray, whom he called his master.

Ali stole Robinson’s style and embellished it, much as Sugar Ray Leonard stole Ali’s imitation of Sugar Ray Robinson and stole the name, too.

Now, Robinson is dead, at age 67. The sportswriters would say he went down for the count, which may not be the way you want your passing to be described, but it’s all right.

Ray Robinson the real person doesn’t, in the final analysis, matter nearly as much as Sugar Ray the legend. His real-life story, with all the attendant tragedies, is a story told a million times. He was bigger than life, as the front-page obits in newspapers across America attest. And now, he’s bigger than death, too.

When the tragedies that may yet befall Pete Rose are listed, the one that somehow strikes the saddest chord to many is not a life ruined but that he could be eliminated for consideration for the Hall of Fame, taken down from the list of legends, removed from the baseball pantheon. Is death any worse? Is it any different?

Somebody once said there are no heroes close up, and I’m sure that’s true. It’s harder to be a hero today because so little is private anymore, and we know our heroes much too well. And yet, though the sports pages are filled with scandal and tragedy, the stadiums and arenas are still filled with people, more now than ever. There’s a message there, which leads me to suspect that the heroes of today will somehow survive this close inspection, even as the Greek heroes did. And, as of old, fathers will tell their children, and those children their children.