The Man Who Comes Back

Just before the bout began, the fighters touched gloves. But after their ritual handshake in Chicago's Stadium, not another friendly gesture marred the festivities. Aging (30) Middleweight Champion Carmen Basilio and aged (37) ex-Champion Sugar Ray Robinson were so eager to clobber each other that they both kept swinging after the first round ended. By the time the referee got between them, everybody in the stadium seemed anxious to pitch in.

While Robinson was winning back his title with brutal skill for the fourth time in six years (never from the same man), one of his handlers was in Basilio's corner screaming that Carmen's seconds were smearing their boy with doped Vaseline. It took a couple of cops to shut him up. Then an Athletic Commission inspector closed in on Robby and took a suspicious swig from the Thermos bottle that contained the challenger's between-rounds refreshment. (It was only orange juice.)

Behind the Eight Ball. Heedless of the confusion, the two fighters worked hard with their fists. Basilio plodded forward, willing to soak up punishment as he pushed close enough to pound Robby around the short ribs. Sugar Ray stabbed and ran. Whenever the Chittenango (N.Y.) onion farmer caught him, Robby covered himself nicely in the clinches. The handsome Harlem hot shot was a reasonable facsimile of the man who was once the fanciest fighter in the prize ring, but he was no longer the swift-punching dancing master who had moved up from the welterweights to terrorize the middleweights. He was not even as sharp as he looked last September when Basilio took his title away. But Robby was more than good enough.

At the end of four rounds, it was the younger Basilio who first showed signs of wear. His strength was ebbing; in close, Robby tied him up with ease. When Basilio stood off and tried to box, stinging jabs thrust him off balance. Then a vicious uppercut landed flush on his left eye. Within seconds it swelled shut. Basilio was lost behind that ugly, blue-black eight ball for the rest of the fight.

Blinder Than Basilio. Carmen kept punching. And the beaten little man was not the only one who had trouble seeing straight. Referee Frank Sikora watched him wade into punch after punch, yet gave him round after round. ("What else was you going to do? Body punches? Wooh! He made the fight with them, so I give it to him.") The New York Herald Tribune's Jesse Abramson, a ringside veteran, insisted that the judges who finally overruled Referee Sikora were blinder than Basilio. The punch that closed Carmen's eye, wrote Abramson, was an "incredible piece of luck."

But it was Robby who threw the eye-closing punch, and came closer to the basic objective of boxing: to separate the other man from his senses. A couple of times he connected so cleanly that Basilio's knees seemed almost to come unhinged. Robby looked as exhausted as his opponent when the fight ended, but the man who comes back had come back again, and he had done it with authority. "Daddy is the greatest," exulted Ray's lovely wife Edna Mae. "Nobody ever beats Daddy twice."

Sandwiched between the judges' score cards that made Sugar Ray the middleweight champ once more, Referee Sikora's astigmatic observation served one purpose: he started an argument that should pack the house for a return brawl--if either fighter is ever up to it.

Fewer than 20,000 fans crowded into the Chicago Stadium, but nearly 400,000 watched the fight in 38 states and four Canadian provinces. Piped to 174 separate audiences by Manhattan's TelePrompTer Corp., the fight was boxing's biggest closed-circuit theater-TV presentation. Often fuzzy and unfocused, the large-screen picture even lit up some regular boxing arenas with the flicker of new-style programs to come. In Texas, and in upstate New York, where Basilio is a popular local hero, enterprising matchmakers put on live preliminaries before they dimmed the house lights, hooked up projectors, placed screens in the ring, and tuned in the main bout. Only in Grand Rapids, Mich., and Orlando, Fla., did equipment fail, and force promoters to return their take. When all the receipts were counted, the TV take of $1,500,000 gave Basilio and Robinson each more than $100,000 to add to their $81,869.76 Chicago paychecks.

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