If you wander into the bowels of Cobo Hall, there’s a service corridor where the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame hides. In the back of that hallway, you’ll stumble upon one of the few, perhaps the only, local public commemoration of Detroit’s greatest athlete—Sugar Ray Robinson.
Ty Cobb, Joe Louis, Gordie Howe, Walter Hagen, and Barry Sanders are Detroit immortals, but Sugar Ray Robinson stands above them all. Virtually every ex-fighter and boxing expert rates Robinson as the sport’s all-time greatest pound-for-pound champ. There may be no other athlete so universally recognized as the greatest of his sport.
Yet, in his hometown, a city that generally loves its sports legends, Robinson is all but forgotten. Even the portrait above his Michigan Sports Hall of Fame plaque—parked next to flash-in-the-pan-turned-pension-grifter Denny McLain—is a poor likeness.
Why has the sports crazed city of Detroit so forgotten the greatest champion it ever produced?
Robinson was a middleweight in a sport that revers heavyweights. Robinson, who was born Walker Smith, Jr. 92 years ago today, left Detroit for Harlem as a boy. Much of his career took place before tv cameras captured great athletic performances for all the world and future generations to see. These thing are all true. Nonetheless, Sugar Ray Robinson was a Detroit native who became history’s greatest fighter while fighting in what was boxing’s golden era.
Robinson first acquired an interest in the sport watching a young Joe Louis train at the Brewster Recreation Center on Detroit’s east side. When Robinson, still Walker Smith, joined a Harlem church boxing team, he is said to have bragged to the other kids about knowing Louis and watching him train. Robinson also fought in Detroit 12 times over his career, including the two historic bouts against Jake “Raging Bull” LaMotta in February 1943.
The producers of “Moneyball” last year announced they’ve begun development on a biopic based on Washington Post writer Wil Haygood’s book “Sweet Thunder: The Life And Times Of Sugar Ray Robinson.” It’s entirely possible the country will be reintroduced to this Detroit native son in a year or two, but no real monument or mention of the champ will stand in his first hometown.
Haywood tells me that Watertown, NY, where Robinson earned the “Sugar” nickname during a Golden Gloves tournament, is looking for a way to honor the champ. Detroit should do the same. I asked Haygood how he thought Detroit should remember Robinson.
“Sugar's connection to the city is deep,” he told me in an email. “He fought LaMotta there; he met Joe Louis there; and he saw the racial turmoil of the country right there in Detroit. I think the city should name a stretch of highway after him, or name a recreation center after him.”
Given the demise of Brewster and, more recently, Kronk, Detroit's foundation community should think about a new Sugar Ray Robinson Recreation Center as a fitting tribute and much-needed asset to a Detroit neighborhood.
By any objective standard, Detroit can claim at least a share of Robinson’s legacy, but the connection between this fighter and his hometown’s history runs deeper than that. Robinson was born in Detroit to parents who joined the Great Migration of black southerners looking to escape Jim Crow and find economic opportunity in northern cities. Robinson’s life story embodies the promise of that historic demographic shift.
Thanks to the trailblazing efforts of earlier black fighters like Louis, Jack Johnson, and Henry Armstrong, Robinson was freed from being the burden of being the proverbial "first."
Like many other black athletes who stood on the shoulders of trailblazers like Louis, Jackie Robinson, and Jesse Owens, Super Ray Robinson was able to demand more than just an opportunity to enter the arena. Think about the great activist-athletes of the 1960s and understand that Robinson was fighting similar battles in the 40s and 50s.
Much like Muhammad Ali, who modeled himself after the earlier champ, Robinson bucked boxing orthodoxy. He developed a unique fighting style that required movement and finesse as much as punching power. In doing so, he changed the fight game forever.
Similar to Curt Flood’s effort to break baseball’s reserve clause, Robinson would battle promoters and the mobbed-up International Boxing Club. Outside the ring, he fought so the fights in the ring would be on the level. He also worked to ensure he and other fighters earned their fair share of the revenue generated by their labor.
Just as Flood paid a personal price for his rebellion, so did Robinson. His refusal to “hold up” fighters at the behest of wiseguys, left him without opportunities to fight in the U.S. for several years in his prime.
Like Jim Brown, Robinson sought an entertainment career beyond the field or ring. He acted and performed as a tap dancer, sometimes with the likes of Gene Kelly. Brown was famous to carrying a briefcase to Cleveland Stadium, believing football was his business and he should treat it as such. Robinson was equally keen on establishing his business bona fides, owning a popular nightclub and barber shop in Harlem.
In Sugar Ray Robinson we have a Detroiter who was the greatest talent his sport ever witnessed and, culturally speaking, Ali before Ali, Curt Flood before Curt Flood, and Jim Brown before Jim Brown.
Detroit, this town that so loves its history and its sports, shouldn’t lose touch with a legend as great as Sugar Ray Robinson.
