Sport: The Roar of the Crowd

The summer vacationers had vanished, and the juke joints along the shore looked ready to be boarded up. In the little village of Greenwood Lake, N.Y., only the Long Pond Inn showed signs of life. There the champ’s camp followers—boxing writers soaking up free drink, ex-athletes gone fat in the jowls, the kind of women who get their names tattooed on sailors—swapped yarns as they waited for Sugar Ray Robinson, middleweight champion of the world.

Sugar Ray came down to his lakeside training camp trailing a drab crew—a couple of beefy sparring partners and a brace of trainers, all solemn and eager to pound the champ into proper shape for next week’s bout with Challenger Carmen Basilio. Only the boss himself seemed to be a hangover from the high old times when he traveled with a clowning dwarf, a personal barber, his private golf pro and the one man a boxer needs least of all: a bodyguard.

No Worlds to Conquer. Fresh from a financial knockout of Promoter James D. Norris, the promise of $255,000 of television money and 45% of the gate safely in his pocket, Ray was as cocky as ever. A blue, short-billed cap perched on his handsome head, a two-tone windbreaker zipped up against the mist from the lake, he smiled benevolently at his subjects. “After 17 years of boxing, all fights are the same,” said Sugar with unlimited self-assurance. “The burden of proof is on Basilio. I’ve got the title, and he’s got to come and get it. I’m the middleweight champion, and I think I’m best. After the fight I’ll probably feel like—what’s-his-name?—Alexander the Great, who sat down and cried because there were no more worlds to conquer.”

“Alexander dropped dead at 26,”*suggested a learned visitor who had been wondering out loud whether the champ’s aging (37) legs and slowing fists were equal to 15 rugged rounds. But Ray professed not to hear. “We know what Basilio’s been doin’,” said Sugar’s soft-spoken manager, George Gainford. “Practicing bobbing and weaving. We know what to do about that. Look at his face. He’s been hit plenty, so why can’t Robby hit him? When the fight’s over, why I’ll assist Mr. Basilio’s manager to pick his man up off the canvas.”

Big Purse for Faubus. Challenger Basilio thus casually dispatched, Sugar Ray remembered that there were some other folks around, notably Arkansas’ Governor Orval E. Faubus and President Dwight D. Eisenhower. “I never interfere in politics no kind of way,” said Sugar, “but I’d give that Faubus my whole purse and take him on right after Basilio. I think Mr. Eisenhower’s somewhat faulty too. There he is playin’ golf and his country damn near in a revolution.”

Talking up some great fights now, Sugar allowed that after he takes care of Carmen Basilio he might still not be ready to retire. “I’m something of a thespian,” he announced grandly, “and I’ve had offers from stage, screen and television. But first I’d like to fight a few nontitle fights. I’d like to go to Rome and fight for the Pope’s charity. Then I’d like to put on an exhibition in Tel Aviv. Then I’d like the State Department to let me go to Russia and put on a few fights there—undo some of the harm that guy Faubus has done this country abroad.”

After all that chatter, Sugar’s workout with gloves was an anticlimax. A leather helmet complete with chin guard and nose piece protecting the old scars acquired in 148 professional fights, he lazed through four rounds. Sparring partners put on a fair imitation of Basilio’s brawling style while Sugar put on a fair imitation of a man who knows how to defend himself but sees no point in overexertion. “The roar of the crowd will give him a spark,” promised Manager Gainford. “Just wait till Sugar hears the crowd.”

In Syracuse, crag-faced Carmen Basilio, 30, the graduate onion farmer who is now welterweight champion, saw no point in waiting for the crowd. He had no time for small talk, either. Over the door of the dingy Main Street Gym where he plugs away at his own grim routine of training, a cardboard sign warns the curious that visitors are unwelcome. The only fight that Carmen is worrying about is the fight with Robinson; the only strategy he is planning is to wade in punching. Each in his own way, the welterweight brawler and the big-talking middleweight boxer, are getting ready to punch a little life into the cooling corpse of professional prizefighting. They will square off next week at Yankee Stadium in one of the richest fist fights of a generation.

*The learned visitor was wrong. Alexander died at 32.