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By Root 562 0

visit to the pubs of the contending heros, to wish them success. In accordance with this tradition, at six o’clock on the evening of the Robinson—Turpin fight I made my way to Sugar Ray’s, which is Robinson’s pub, on the west side of Seventh Avenue between 123rd and 124th Streets. Improvements in transportation have made it unnecessary to start for a fight days in advance, unless one is to foot-toddle. I approached the pub by taxi, the equivalent of a hackney, but sans Cyprian, and disembarked on the northeast corner of Seventh Avenue and 124th Street, in front of the Citadel of Hope Mission, which was not getting much of a play. I got out there because if I’d got out on the Robinson side of the street I’d have had to step on somebody’s feet. With the time to go to the fight drawing near, the sidewalk in front of his bar-and-grill had vanished. The sidewalk in front of the Hotel Theresa, which extends from 124th to 125th Street on the west side of Seventh Avenue, was similarly jammed with Harlemites, and the narrow traffic island in the middle of the avenue was also filled with Negroes, who were gazing up at the hotel.

A small colored boy, presumably from the Citadel of Hope, handed me a throwaway preaching class war. “There are two classes of people in the world—the righteous and the wicked,” it read. “You belong to one of these two classes. Which?”

“Let me ask you a question,” I said to the boy. “Who is up in that hotel?”

“Randy,” the boy answered. “He’s resting until the fight.”

I looked about me and imagined the trade consequences of a Turpin victory. I could visualize the thousands of shoulders draped in British tweed, and the equal number of feet, now impacted one on another, encased in shoes by Maxwell of Dover Street. In Harlem, fashion follows the brave. It seemed to me I could already detect a slight premonitory change, in the accent of the first man who spoke to me, but he may have been a West Indian. “Randy is superior,” he said. “He’s overconfidence. I mean he feel no fear.”

I crossed the street and worked my way into the lobby of the Theresa, which is the largest hotel under Negro management in America and about the busiest hotel anywhere—a contrast to its moribund last twenty years in white hands. Joe Louis was standing, almost unnoticed, with a group of friends near the door. He’s still a favorite, but no novelty. Everybody was waiting for a look at Randy.

Coming out of the Theresa, I stood on the inner edge of the sidewalk and allowed myself to be propelled slowly half a block downtown, being carried past the Golden Glover’s Barbershop and the store-front office of Ray Robinson Enterprises. (Robinson is in almost as many businesses in Harlem as Father Divine was before that divinity moved to Philadelphia.) I detached myself from the current just in time to duck into Sugar Ray’s, which is a narrow but deep saloon with walls of blue glass chips tastefully picked out with gold. The bar was as crowded as the street outside, but at the back of the place, where the bar ends, Sugar Ray’s widens out enough to permit three parallel rows of tables, one row against each side wall and the third between them, and there were a few empty seats. Since I could find no place to stand up, I sat down at a table.

This rear section of Sugar Ray’s is decorated with four huge photomontages, two on each side wall. Two show him making a fool of Kid Gavilan, the Cuban fighter, who is a competitor of his for local fame. Another shows Robinson bringing an expression of intensely comic pain to the face of the French middleweight Robert Villemain, a muscle-bound, pyknic type with a square head. The fourth shows him standing above Georgie Abrams, a skillful pugilist who is so hairy that when knocked down he looks like a rug. Abrams got up after his knockdown, but from the picture it doesn’t seem as if he ever would.

I asked a man at the table next to mine, who looked like an old colored milling cove, whether the boss was around, and he said he wasn’t. “He left about an hour ago,” he said. “He’s taking this one serious. He was carrying