Sweet Thunder

No surprise that Christmas deposits a few books on the night table. The additional good news is that they usually are something I really want to read. This is not due to any clairvoyance on the part of family members, but can rather be traced to their ability to read a list, only too happily furnished by myself. It is the thought that counts.

High on the list for getting, and giving, was the biography of Sugar Ray Robinson, Sweet Thunder by Wil Haygood. I can put an exact date on when I became a boxing fan, and when I stopped being a fan.

The start was $20 last row blue seats to the Ali-Frazier fight at Madison Square Garden on March 8, 1971, the first of their three meetings. The Fight. Tickets were obtained by advance planning and mail order. Imagine that!

The end was when I was in my living room with friends watching the pay-per-view telecast of Mike Tyson going cannibal on Evander Holyfield's ears, June 28, 1997.

As a kid growing up, I always heard about famous fights and fighters, who was good, and who was a bum. My father pointed out Paul Berlenbach, The Astoria Assassin, one night at the subway station cutting newspapers loose from a bundle that had just been tossed from a truck that barely seemed to stop. Paul had fought as a light heavyweight and held that title for a little over a year, 1925-1926, only one title per weight division then. He had earlier won a gold medal in wrestling at the 1920 Olympics, but was now helping to hawk the early edition. Fame is fleeting.

Despite the current lack of fan interest I've remained interested in the fighters themselves. Anyone who has even done a poor imitation of one of their workouts can appreciate what goes into that sport. So, when the book on Sugar Ray hit the shelves, it also hit the wish list.

I saw Sugar Ray introduced at numerous fights. He always seemed the most popular of those introduced, and he always looked great, gliding through the ropes with a Pepsodent smile, waving to the crowd, a black Clark Gable who really looked good in a suit. I never heard anyone say he was a "bum." Never.

Reading first the book reviews, then the look back stories on Harlem now vs. then and then the book itself I kept wondering why didn't I pay more attention to Sugar Ray when he passed away in 1989? I surely read the obituary. I've always been doing that. I know I didn't save it, though, but I do know how to get at it, and have printed it from a NYPL digital database.

I remember it was a fairly big deal that his son was a star in the professional Roller Derby league that was quite popular in the 1970s. I may have even seen his son at the one match I went to at the Garden when somebody came to town to skate against someone who was the Bombers. Nobody knew then they were watching the beginning of what would be a Jerry Springer talk show, chairs, screams, and punches from people with wheels on their feet. It was great.

But why do I seem to care more about Sugar Ray now, than then?

In this atmospheric cosmos we live in the question seems to have played in one form or another in other people's minds. Perhaps not about Sugar Ray, but about someone who has passed away a good while ago.

Through the marvel of the Internet, audio and video streaming, I was lead to a presentation made at a library by Ms. Marilyn Johnson, author of The Dead Beat. You've really got to be impressed by what is possible. A click of the mouse and I'm tuned into a portion of a lecture Ms. Johnson recently made at a library somewhere. I say recent because Michael Jackson has just died and there's no snow on the ground, but few leaves on the trees, as the camera tracks us through library shelves, the lecture itself and what looks like nice grounds where Ms. Johnson looks like she's about to give a poetry reading to the birds. Tweet, tweet, Twitter.

The same question seems to prevail on her mind as well. She mentions that Picasso died in 1973 and she didn't really pay too much attention. My own answer is that having gotten older by virtue of uninterrupted breathing I've approached the same time on earth as some of the people I now read about with such detail. Sure, some are a lot older, and a few are even younger, but we're covering congruent periods of time. We remember the same presidents.

The poet Phyllis McGinley wrote something called The Seven Ages of a Newspaper Subscriber.

It's something from the 1950s, rhymes, and describes a person's progression of interest in the daily paper as they get older. The poem is not long, and ends with:

But witness how the human viewpoint varies:

Of late he reads the day's Obituaries.

I've re-read Sugar Ray's NYT obituary. As you might expect, it was written by Dave Anderson, their lead sportswriter and golf and boxing maven at the time. It's a good obituary, even touching on a less complimentary aspect of Robinson's life when he went AWOL from the Army stateside before shipping out during WWII. Even given that, I don't remember that people ever took that as a reason to dislike him. He got an honorable discharge.

The lecture clip ends with Ms. Johnson saying something about obituaries that allow us to consider what a life means. And maybe that's the thought we consider more of as we grow older.

I do know that I care more about Sugar Ray Robinson in 2010 than I did even in 1989.

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