Sugar Ray Robinson battles Jake LaMotta for the middleweight championship at Chicago Stadium, in this 1951 photo.The Associated Press
Here is proof that a book can we wonderful, maddening, magnificent and disappointing all at once.
It ought to be a perfect match; the story of a boxer who the sport's aficionados regard as its transcendent genius, as well as an important transitional figure in sports and African American culture, and the fine Washington Post writer Wil Haygood, who among other things is responsible for Black and White, an acclaimed biography of Sammy Davis Jr.
The author rightly casts Robinson's life history in a social/political/artistic context. Sugar Ray was an evolutionary link between Joe Louis, the first African American athlete to be widely beloved by white America while forced to maintain a deferential, non-threatening posture, and Muhammad Ali, who defiantly declared, "I don't have to be who you want me to be", and paved the way for all of those who came after.
Robinson certainly wasn't a confrontational or overtly political figure, but he was a large personality who wasn't afraid to express himself and did his best to exert control over his professional career. He dressed in high style, travelled with an entourage that at one point included a hairstylist, a manicurist, and a midget, he wowed crowds in Europe, and briefly retired from boxing to pursue a career as a nightclub entertainer.
Haygood ties all of those threads together with the rapidly shifting political and social forces of the time, albeit by employing what becomes an increasingly awkward conceit, trying to interlace the story of Robinson (born Walker Smith Jr.) with those of the poet Langston Hughes, the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, and the singer/actress Lena Horne. While the four were contemporaries, and while they certainly crossed paths - Davis, especially, loved the fights and loved Robinson - the connections soon begin to seem laboured and unconvincing, and the tangents badly bog down the main narrative.
(And for all of the attempts to link Robinson to his times, to find the place where sport and the larger culture intertwine, where's the most obvious one? At exactly the same time as Robinson was rising to prominence, both as a fighter and as an entrepreneur - his businesses at one point filled an entire block in Harlem - Jackie Robinson was breaking baseball's colour barrier across town with the Brooklyn Dodgers. And yet the baseball Robinson is limited to just two passing mentions in more than 400 pages.)
Haygood's prose is highly-stylized, with a self-conscious, jazzy rhythm, and it soars in places. At other times it seems florid, overwrought, repetitive, and in need of a good edit (for instance, nearly every mention of Robinson's first wife, Edna Mae - and there are a whole lot of them - includes the reminder that she was "lovely").
But the most glaring problems are two: Haygood doesn't write like someone with a genuine feel for the sport, inside the ring or out. His fight descriptions might satisfy those who think Rocky is realistic, but will irritate anyone who really knows boxing; and his passing references to the mob-influenced International Boxing Club, which largely controlled the sport during Robinson's career, are far less authoritative than they ought to be.
And more significantly, his subject seems forever illusive, stylish, skilled, handsome and all, but where is Robinson's beating heart, what made him tick, where are the humanizing flaws? Haygood never met Robinson (who died after a long battle with Alzheimer's - perhaps boxing related - in 1989) and relies heavily on press clippings, including making good use of the African American newspapers of the time, like the Chicago Defender. He did talk to people who were close to Robinson, but he certainly hasn't talked to all of them (a boxing person immediately notices the absence of Don Elbaum, one of the sport's great characters, who was the "boy promoter" during the final, sad stages of Robinson's career, and who is still very much alive and active in the game) and most of those quoted directly seem peripheral to the story. The book feels very much as though it were researched in a library, and not in the gym.
There are two other essential texts when it comes to Robinson's life and art (in addition to a handful of minor memoirs from those who knew him): Dave Anderson's excellent - especially given the genre - as-told-to biography Sugar Ray, published in 1970, and of course A.J. Liebling's descriptions of Robinson the fighter, most famously in the compilation The Sweet Science.
Only by reading those volumes and then reading Haygood is justice done to one of the major sports figures of the 20th Century, now largely forgotten outside of the ever shrinking circle that follows and loves the fights.
Stephen Brunt is a sports columnist with the Globe and Mail.