Today in sports history -- Sugar Ray Robinson

On this date 50 years ago, Walker Smith Jr., aka Sugar Ray Robinson, beat up Carmen Basilio and took his middleweight championship. That made Robinson the first boxer ever to win a title for an individual weight class five different times. The relevant bouts were as follows:

1. Feb. 14, 1951: Knocked out Jake LaMotta in the 13th round to take the middleweight belt, after moving up a weight class because he was having trouble staying at 147 pounds.
2. Sept. 12, 1951: Knocked out Englishman Randy Turpin in the 10th round to regain the title, which he had lost to Turpin in a 15-round decision in July. The fight Turpin won was in London; the fight Robinson won was in New York. So they split a home-and-home, each winning in front of his own home fans.
3. Dec. 9, 1955: Knocked out Carl "Bobo" Olson to regain his middleweight crown, which he'd given up after moving up to the light heavyweight class to fight Joey Maxim in 1952. Maxim won by TKO, and Robinson retired to become a singer and tap-dancer. Realizing he wasn't cut out for that kind of work, he went back to the ring. He gave Olson a rematch in May '56, and beat him again.
   
4. May 1, 1957: Knocked out Gene Fullmer in the fifth round to regain the belt he'd lost to Fullmer in a 15-round decision four months earlier.
5. March 25, 1958: Beat Carmen Basilio in a 15-round decision after losing his title to Basilio in September 1957.

Robinson lost his title for the last time on Jan. 22, 1960, to Paul Pender in a 15-round decision. Pender gave him a rematch and held onto the title; and after Fullmer regained the title from Pender, Fullmer beat Robinson twice in title bouts, in 1960 and 1961. Robinson never got another title shot, though he kept boxing until 1965, when he was 44 years old. He retired with a career record of 175-19-6, with two no-contests.

Those five middleweight titles were not the only belts Robinson ever wore. Before all of the above fights, in 1946, Robinson defeated Tommy Bell in a 15-round decision to win the vacant welterweight title. In his first title defense, he literally beat Jimmy Doyle to death. Like Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini, whose fists killed Duk Koo Kim, Robinson struggled with that for some time.