Sugar Ray Robinson Biography: 201 Fights and a Borrowed Name

Sportswriters had to invent a phrase for him.

There was no accepted way to rank a welterweight against much heavier men, so they built one, “pound for pound,” specifically to argue that Walker Smith Jr. of Ailey, Georgia was the best fighter alive whatever the scales said. The phrase outlived him, the titles, and every dollar he earned. It is still how the sport measures everybody else.

The Card He Borrowed

He was born on 3 May 1921 in Ailey, Georgia. The family moved to Detroit, then, when he was about twelve, to Harlem.

He wanted to fight before he was old enough to be licensed. At around fourteen he went on an amateur card using the AAU membership card of a boxer named Ray Robinson, won, and kept the name. The “Sugar” came from a sportswriter’s remark about his style being sweet as sugar, relayed by his trainer George Gainford.

His amateur record was reported as 85-0 with 69 knockouts. Historians have questioned the figure, though nobody has managed to reduce it by much. He won the New York Golden Gloves featherweight championship in 1939 and the lightweight title in 1940, and turned professional on 4 October 1940.

Ninety-One Fights Without Losing

He served in the US Army from 1943, touring with Joe Louis on exhibition bouts for troops, and received an honourable discharge in 1944.

Around that service he assembled a run of 91 professional fights without defeat between 1943 and 1951, which still ranks among the longest unbeaten streaks in the sport’s history. He took the world welterweight title in December 1946 and held it for five years.

What separated him from the era’s other champions was not durability, though he had that in quantity. It was that he could box and he could punch and he moved between the two without a visible seam, at a speed the surviving film of the period barely captures.

Six Fights With Jake LaMotta

The rivalry that defined both men ran from 1942 to 1951. Robinson won the first, on 2 October 1942. On 5 February 1943 in Detroit, LaMotta knocked him through the ropes and won a decision, the first defeat of Robinson’s professional life and the only one he would take for another eight years.

They fought four more times and Robinson won them all.

The last was on 14 February 1951 in Chicago, remembered as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Robinson battered LaMotta through thirteen rounds until the referee intervened, and took the world middleweight title. LaMotta, who was never knocked down in his entire career, stayed upright through all of it.

Cleveland, 24 June 1947

Six months into his welterweight reign, Robinson defended the title against Jimmy Doyle in Cleveland. He knocked Doyle down in the eighth with a left hook. Doyle never properly regained consciousness and died in hospital the following day.

A coroner’s inquest ruled the death accidental and cleared Robinson of blame. Robinson had reportedly tried to withdraw from the fight beforehand after a dream in which he killed his opponent, and was talked into going ahead. He pledged proceeds from subsequent bouts to Doyle’s mother.

He fought on for another eighteen years and spoke about that night rarely.

London and New York, 1951

He went to Europe in the summer of 1951 as the best fighter in the world, and he lost. On 10 July at Earls Court in London, Randolph Turpin out-worked him over fifteen rounds and took the middleweight title, one of the biggest upsets British boxing has ever produced.

Sixty-four days later, on 12 September at the Polo Grounds in New York, Robinson took it back. Cut badly over the left eye and losing blood heavily in the tenth, he threw everything he had left and the referee stopped it.

Two months, two continents, one title, twice.

25 June 1952: Beaten by the Weather

The only man-made stoppage on Robinson’s record was not really man-made. Moving up to challenge Joey Maxim for the world light heavyweight title at Yankee Stadium, in ringside temperatures reported around 103°F, he built a clear lead over thirteen rounds. The referee had already collapsed and been replaced. Robinson could not answer the bell for the fourteenth.

He retired that December, at 31, and spent two and a half years as a nightclub entertainer.

December 1955: The Comeback He Could Not Avoid

He came back in 1955 because the money had gone, which is the story told in full on his net worth page. That December he knocked out Bobo Olson in the second round and was middleweight champion again, at 34, after two and a half years away.

Very few fighters have ever done that. Almost none have done it out of financial necessity rather than restlessness.

Fullmer, Basilio, and the Long Ending

Then he did it twice more. He lost the title to Gene Fullmer in January 1957 and took it back in May with a single left hook still shown as instruction. He lost it to Carmen Basilio in September 1957 and regained it in March 1958, a fifth reign, at 36.

After that the decline was slow and entirely public. He lost the title to Paul Pender in 1960, failed to win it a sixth time, and kept fighting into 1965 against opponents who would not have been allowed in the building a decade earlier. His last bout was on 10 November 1965, a loss to Joey Archer. He finished 174-19-6 with 109 knockouts across 201 professional fights.

12 April 1989

He founded the Sugar Ray Robinson Youth Foundation in Los Angeles in 1969 and ran it for the rest of his life. In his final years he lived with Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes, and he died in Los Angeles on 12 April 1989, of heart disease, aged 67. He was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in its inaugural class the following year.

The scale of what he left behind is hard to hold. Muhammad Ali called him the greatest and modelled himself on him. Ray Charles Leonard took his name and became Sugar Ray Leonard. Every fighter since described as pound-for-pound the best in the world, including everyone ranked on our richest boxers list, is being held against a yardstick that writers invented, in some frustration, to describe one man they could not otherwise classify.