Preamble:
This series will serve to highlight the individuals who inspired me to take up sportswriting as a hobby. (and perhaps eventually a career) The following pieces are dedicated to sportswriters who have been instrumental in painting the American and international sporting landscape for posterity. We will look a bit at their lives but I do not intend these pieces to be mere biographies. Instead, I want to use this space to explore what made these people such great sportswriters and why they left behind such a powerful legacy to those of us who write and read about sports today.
Bert Sugar
My blog revolves chiefly around baseball so it may perhaps perplex you why I would dedicate an installment, especially the very first, to a man predominantly known as a boxing writer. Well, Herbert Randolph Sugar was much more than that. He also wrote authoritative historical literature on wrestling, Harry Houdini, cigars and Bert Sugar's Baseball Hall of Fame: A Living History of America's Greatest Game. This is considered one of the very best of the many histories written about our fair game. But yes, he is mainly known for his extensive writing on boxing and that is how I, like so many others, came to encounter him. I chose to profile him first because as far as sportswriting is concerned, he is probably my biggest influence for reasons I will discuss in the ensuing paragraphs.
Sugar was born in the shining city on a hill, Washington DC, in June of 1936, a son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants. He accurately predicted that would become "a radio announcer or sports writer" in his high school yearbook and would go to pursue his education at the University of Maryland first and then the University of Michigan where he would earn a law degree. He never practiced law but as far as sportswriting is concerned, there is little debate that he laid it down as far as setting, and keeping a standard of excellence in writing mostly unmatched by modern sportswriters.
By the time “The Eternal Referee”, as he called Him, counted him out in 2012 at the age of 75, Sugar had written well over eighty books, many of them classics of American sporting literature. He had also become something of a cultural icon, making cameos in various movies and being interviewed for many documentaries, especially boxing related. He is also an inductee of the International Boxing Hall of Fame (Class of 2005) who ditched a stable career in advertising spanning about a decade to become an icon of American journalism and literature.
Why is Sugar’s writing so prized? There are many reasons but to me what comes to mind is the fact that he wrote with the elegance, grace and punch of a Sugar Ray Robinson or a Sugar Ray Leonard. For example, when recounting his first connections to boxing, he referred to himself as “the great white hopeless”, a clever self-deprecating jab but also an elegant reference to the so-called “white hopes” who attempted to regain the heavyweight world title from Jack Johnson in the early decades of the last century. I should add that this is also a haymaker at the blatant racism that existed in early 20th century boxing. White hopes were fighters who were supposed to reclaim the heavyweight title for the white race from Johnson, the first black boxing world champion. It never sat well with many at the time that “the white man’s burden had become his master” as Sugar put it.
He was also playful and adventurous in his writing. His word-play is some of the sharpest I have ever seen in a writer, sportswriter or otherwise. Roberto Duran’s early opponents were “the also-rans that also ran”. Harry Greb’s defeated opponents looked like “second place finishers in knife fights”. His dispensations on other matters are fun to read also. On fashion, he offered: “As someone who dresses like a Goodwill box just threw up on him, it’s difficult for me to tell anyone else how to dress. But if you choose a tie, add some color …”. On the subject of handling people hitting on your girlfriend there was the following gem: “Be advised, as an old Portuguese proverb holds: Girls and vineyards are hard to guard. So hold on to your glass and your lass before you lose something else that rhymes”. It is difficult to read Sugar without cracking a smile at the ingenuity of his prose, or in the case of these last two quotes, straight up bursting into laughter.
There was also clever use of imagery. The Original Joe Walcott, a man of barely five feet in height but a formidable physique, was the “sawed-off Hercules”. Diminutive Argentine boxing legend Pascual Perez was a “Lilliputian” from Gulliver’s Travels. Famous trainer and manager Doc Kearns, known for his sadism, was “the man characterized as the only living heart donor”. The famously elusive Willie Pep was described by Sugar as pitching no-hitters and so on.
Sugar’s writing skillfully dances away from the danger of being overly intellectual and pretentious whilst remaining erudite in much the same way Sugar Ray Leonard danced around Roberto Duran in the No Mas fight. It has the “mental energy” of Benny Leonard and also the zing of Rocky Maricano’s infamous Suzie Q punch when called for. He was never afraid to go after the judges or boxing commissions, even calling the draw decision in the Chavez-Whitaker fight “as fake as a sitcom laugh”. Of one fight, he remarked the judges were “in need of seeing eye dogs”.
Sugar is a legend of his craft because his writing was honest, precise and skillfully crafted. There is humor in his work, annoyance at times, erudition and cleverness. But most of all, there is playfulness. In a society gone overly serious and where information is so readily available, a good sportswriter is not just a narrator or even a historian. A good sportswriter must also be a master storyteller who can inject you with laughter, insight and indignation at all the right times. In a way, he must play as Rachmaninoff would have played a piano with those massive hands of his. Sugar did that, and in so doing brought to life for the new generations the characters that dotted the American sporting landscape throughout his long life.
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