Sugar Ray Robinson

Walker Smith Jr. was born on the third of May 1921 at Ailey, Georgia, the youngest of three children of Walker Smith Sr. — a sharecropper — and Leila Hurst Smith, a domestic worker. The family moved to Detroit in 1924 and to Harlem in 1931. He took up boxing at the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church gymnasium at Harlem at thirteen under the trainer George Gainford. He fought his first amateur bouts at fifteen under the borrowed Amateur Athletic Union card of the older fighter Ray Robinson, whose name he assumed at the weigh-in and never relinquished. He acquired the additional name Sugar from a sportswriter's observation that he had as sweet a fighting style as one could imagine.

He compiled across 1937 to 1940 an amateur record of eighty-five wins, no losses, with sixty-nine knockouts — sixty-five of those knockouts in the first round. He turned professional at the Madison Square Garden on the fourth of October 1940. He ran a string of forty consecutive professional wins, including the knockout of Tony Galento, before his first professional loss to Jake LaMotta at the Olympia Stadium of Detroit on the fifth of February 1943.

He won the welterweight world title from Tommy Bell on the twentieth of December 1946 and defended it across the following three years against the principal welterweight contenders. He won the middleweight title from Jake LaMotta on the fourteenth of February 1951 — the fifth meeting of LaMotta and Robinson, in which Robinson stopped LaMotta in the thirteenth round and which was subsequently named by the boxing press the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. He lost the title to Randolph Turpin at Earl's Court Arena in London on the tenth of July 1951 in fifteen rounds, then regained it from Turpin at the Polo Grounds in New York on the twelfth of September 1951.

He retired in December 1952 to pursue a stage and ballet career — appearing in nightclub revues with Tap-dancer Bill Bailey across Europe and North America. He returned to the ring on the twentieth of January 1955. He won the middleweight title five times across the following decade — making him, at his retirement in 1965, the only fighter to have held the same world title five times.

He fought professionally for twenty-five years and compiled an aggregate record of one hundred seventy-three wins, nineteen losses, six draws and two no-contests across two hundred professional bouts.

He died of complications of Alzheimer's disease at Culver City on the twelfth of April 1989, at sixty-seven.

He is honored here as the greatest pound-for-pound boxer of his century.