SUGAR RAY ROBINSON

The glory of Sugar Ray Robinson will be told succinctly in The 1959 Ring Record Book, which will list his five winnings of the middleweight championship and note that he is the only man ever to win it that many times. But it was told wordlessly by Sugar Ray himself on the March night he beat Carmen Basilio at Chicago Stadium to regain once more, and surely for the last time, the crown Basilio had taken from him the year before. On that night Sugar Ray told the story with his fists, with ring generalship and with the courage of a champion. A man of strange quirks—he is afraid of elevators, for instance—he is also a man of unquestioned bravery in the ring. No one wins easily against Basilio, and Robinson took severe body punishment that a lesser man could not have endured. Here is one of the great fighters, of the year 1958 and of all time.

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