The Cost of These Dreams

by Wright Thompson

  He tells me the story of the boxer who disappeared, starting by explaining his latest mission: collecting the signatures of all 50 men who fought Ali. The first 35 or so came easy. Singer got a professional autograph collector to help. Then, the pro came to a dead end; Singer decided to continue on his own.

  He peered into another world, in which a brush with fame didn’t grant immortality. One by one, he found them. Some took months. He searched dank boxing gyms and dusty public records. He found a man who’d given up the ring for a European carnival. He located a notarized letter from a fighter-turned-Mafia-hit-man. A rabbi acted as a middle man in a small Argentine town for the passport of a fighter who’d been dead since 1964. He was No. 49.

  One fighter remained: Jim Robinson, who’d fought Muhammad Ali in Miami Beach on February 7, 1961?

  Singer tried everything. He contacted boxing historians and even enlisted Ali’s old trainer, Angelo Dundee. He found a boxer in Philly named Jim Robinson . . . who never fought Ali. Private detectives and former FBI agents helped. Robinson was a ghost. He had no known date of birth, no known full name. No known family. No ties. No public records linking him to a place or a time. In the exhaustively well-chronicled life of Muhammad Ali, Singer has stumbled into the one hole, a man who’d shared a moment in time and space with one of the most famous humans ever, only to vanish. An old Associated Press story said Robinson was from Kansas City, which is why Singer is on the phone with the local paper’s feature writer, who happens to be me. He tells me there isn’t much more information to build on; nobody has ever really thought to search for the fighter before. In a way, Jim Robinson didn’t begin to exist until someone realized he was missing.

  HOOKED

  Singer asks me to help, so I collect everything already known about Robinson. Turns out, although sports people throw around the phrase “go down in history” a lot, in real life, history doesn’t amount to much. Jim Robinson’s name appears maybe a dozen times in print.

  The night of the fight, he ran into the Miami Beach Convention Hall, carrying an old army bag full of his gear. The reason he seemed harried? He was a last-minute replacement, used to fighting for pocket change. The guy who was supposed to box that night, Willie Gullatt, didn’t show.

  Ali biographers figure Gullatt got scared. With good reason. Until that point, the old stories say, few considered Ali a great fighter. That all changed the day before he fought Robinson, when heavyweight contender Ingemar Johansson, in town training for a title fight with Floyd Patterson, invited the young Ali, still known as Cassius Clay, to spar.

  They stepped into the ring, and by the time the men climbed out after two rounds, the history of boxing was forever changed. Ali threw a blur of punches, a jab, then two more, his feet dancing, a combination, right, left, right. Each punch landed—hard. Johansson lumbered forward, throwing a roundhouse right, which didn’t come close, and the big heavyweight stumbled and almost fell.

  Ali danced and talked in rhyme.

  The next night, Gullatt, who also seems lost to time, didn’t show up. Jim Robinson got the call, even though Ali outweighed him by 16½ pounds. Robinson came out fast, throwing wild punches, which Ali dodged, waiting for an opening. About a minute into the fight, he saw his chance. Bam! Bam! Pow! Pow! The shots to the head put Robinson down. He struggled to stand, but the referee counted to nine, then stopped the fight.

  It had lasted 94 seconds.

  Afterward, the New York Daily News wrote, “It was all a mistake.” The Miami News wrote, “If promoter Chris Dundee had canvassed the women in the audience, he couldn’t have found an easier opponent for Clay.”

  Three years later, Ali beat Sonny Liston in Miami to become champion, and the next night, a few miles up the road in a tiny auditorium, Robinson lost to a journeyman named Jack Gilbert. Robinson was already fading away. Boxing records show he kept fighting, losing much more often than he won, finally stopping in 1968.

  There’s been only one sighting since then. In 1979, a photographer shooting pictures for Sports Illustrated went to find Ali’s earliest opponents. Michael Brennan located Jim Robinson, whom people down in Miami called “Sweet Jimmy.” Most of what’s known about his life comes from the brief blurb that ran with the photos. He lived off veterans’ benefits. He claimed he was born around 1925. He claimed he was wrongfully convicted of armed robbery. Most days, he just hung out in the seedy Overtown neighborhood, at the pool hall owned by Miami concert promoter Clyde Killens.

  The photos show a haunted man. His jaw juts out, like he’s lost teeth. His eyebrows are bushy; once, they probably seemed delicate. A visor throws a shadow across his eyes. A deep scar runs along his left cheekbone. In one, he leans up against the wall of a Winn-Dixie. In another, he walks down railroad tracks, the skyline of Miami rising behind him. He never smiles.

  Brennan shot the photos on a Friday night and a Saturday morning. Sweet Jimmy smelled of booze and Camel cigarettes. Brennan remembers the last time he saw him. It was in the morning, on the railroad tracks, and he slipped the old fighter 20 bucks. Sweet Jimmy turned and walked off, negotiating the cross ties. He never looked back.

  “Tell Clay I ain’t doing too good,” he said.

  THE PAPERLESS TRAIL

  We all live parallel lives on paper.

  Long after we’re gone, the details of our existence will remain part of the public record; in time, they will be all that’s known about us, a skeleton of facts, the human whys long decayed. That’s what made Sweet Jimmy’s disappearance strange. It’s hard to disappear. Search engines record everything: our arrests, the amount we paid for our house, the times we’ve defaulted on a credit card or paid our taxes late. No piece of our past is truly private. The love of a wedding day is public record, as is the hatred of divorce. Public records allow me, in less than two minutes, to learn that Muhammad Ali has a home or office at 8105 Kephart Lane and that his wife has owned a Lexus, license plate LA1, with an AM/FM cassette player and a standard tilt steering wheel. The invasiveness can be scary but also strangely reassuring. Someday, through these strings of ones and zeroes, people will know we were here. It’s impossible not to leave a trail. Finding Jimmy, I was sure, would take a day. Two, tops.

  That was six years ago.

  I stuck with the search, first while with The Kansas City Star, then at ESPN. Everywhere I turned, I found pain and loss, a procession of wasted lives, people who never fought Ali and, thus, won’t ever have someone come looking for them. Did any of these men hang in the pool hall, too, never knowing someone a few feet away shared the same name? A James Robinson born in 1929 was shot a few blocks from the pool hall in 1984, his murderer yelling, “I told you I was gonna kill me a black son of a bitch.” A James Robinson died of a gunshot to the head in Overtown in 2007, likely a suicide, but he turned out to be just 54. A Jimmie Robinson was beaten to death under an overpass near the pool hall in 1991. He had an old arrest for being in a park after hours, and his only address was the Camillus House, a local homeless shelter. His date of birth made him too young to have fought Ali in 1961. The Miami medical examiner’s office said 227 people have died in Miami since 1980 and never been identified. Any of them could be Sweet Jimmy.

  I ran hundreds of searches, through every imaginable database, called every Miami boxing authority still alive. Dundee helped by going through his wealth of boxing sources. The VA struck out, as did the military records center and the Social Security office. Current and former law enforcement officers tried to help. The police union sent Sweet Jimmy’s picture to old beat cops. The county and city cold case detectives searched. They found no J. Robinsons who were African American and the right age. The Florida Department of Corrections said it had never had custody of a Jimmy, Jim, or James Robinson who fit the description.

  Finally, I began to realize that I was looking for Jimmy all wrong. I was looking for him the way I’d look for myself. He’d lived off the grid, managing to go through
life and, according to society just out of reach around him, never exist.

  It was pointless to look for Sweet Jimmy in my world.

  I had to go search in his.

  STARTING OVER

  The first stop is in Miami Beach at the Fontainebleau hotel. Elvis and Sinatra stayed here. Bond spied on Goldfinger’s card game here. The man I’ve come to see stands ready to grab my luggage—an old bellhop, name tag reads Levi. Yes, that’s my guy, Levi Forte, an old boxer who fought with Sweet Jimmy. He’s been here 44 years, and the tourists whose bags he carries have no idea that he once stood in the ring with champions, just like most folks didn’t know that Beau Jack, the old man who shined shoes downstairs, had headlined Madison Square Garden 21 times, more than any fighter before or since.

  I show Levi the photograph. He studies the drooping chin, the delicate eyelashes, the wild beard. “That’s him,” he says. “I haven’t seen that guy in I don’t know when.”

  The last time was about 30 years ago, and both men were passing by the famous 5th Street Gym. Levi thought Jimmy would turn and go up the stairs. When he didn’t, Levi stopped him.

  “You Jimmy Robinson?” he asked.

  Jimmy seemed surprised and pleased. The question made him real again, briefly.

  “You know me?”

  “You fought the Man,” Levi said.

  The tourists pile out of their cars as I step back into mine. Before I can put it in drive, I hear a knock on the glass. Levi fills my window. He’s got a story. One he needs to tell me before I’m gone forever.

  “Don’t forget,” he says. “I was the first guy to go 10 rounds with George Foreman. December 16, 1969.”

  A LINE IN THE WATER

  Next stop: Overtown.

  Though it’s just a few blocks from the downtown AmericanAirlines Arena, the home of the Miami Heat, you can feel the world changing as you turn off Biscayne Boulevard, each street bleaker than the one before, buildings giving way to boarded-up facades giving way to empty lots. People walk toward my car when I stop at traffic lights. Minor laws and small courtesies don’t apply; a cop had advised me to run the red lights. People huddle beneath the overpasses. Drug lookouts in white T-shirts eye me warily from corners and the rooftops. Nobody enters Overtown undetected.

  It didn’t always feel like this. In the ’60s, when Sweet Jimmy fought Ali, blacks-only hotels and nightclubs filled each block. The best musicians in the world—who could play, but not stay, on Miami Beach—saved their best and wildest sets for Overtown. Everybody came, booked by promoter Clyde Killens: Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, Count Basie, B. B. King, John Lee Hooker, everyone. That time and place is as lost as Sweet Jimmy. “You get off 2nd Avenue,” says Gaspar González, a documentary filmmaker who made a movie about Ali’s time in Miami, “and there’s a hopelessness there. It’s an island. There’s no sense the world is bigger than that. People are desperate in a way you can’t communicate. You’re behind God’s back.”

  Driving through the streets, I finger a stack of homemade posters I brought, each with Sweet Jimmy’s photo and a local 305 phone number I set up. I explain on them that ESPN is looking for this man but don’t include his name. I tape them up around the neighborhood, and I drop them off at all the restaurants, shops, and liquor stores. I email them to the secretaries at the local churches; nobody sees or gossips more. If Sweet Jimmy is alive, he’s probably in Overtown. Finding a focal point is both satisfying and heartbreaking. All this time, Singer and I didn’t know where to look for Jimmy, who never knew anyone was looking.

  It’s as if he was shipwrecked.

  A MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

  Three days after I return home from my first trip to Miami, my phone starts ringing.

  The first caller, Melvin Eaton, claims, “I’ve been knowing old Sweet Jimmy for years.”

  He says the last time he saw Jimmy was five or six years ago, and that Jimmy never stopped reminding people that he fought Muhammad Ali. He’d shadowbox and brag. “That’s all he talked about,” Melvin tells me. “That’s all he talked about. ‘I’m the one who fought Ali. I’m the one who should have been the greatest.’”

  A few days later, a woman calls. Her name is Brenda. “I see him every day,” she says. “He’s my friend. He be in Overtown around 12th Street and 2nd Avenue every day. He be on the street and asks for a dollar for a soda or a beer.”

  I ask her to go to that corner and put the phone in his hand. “They told me he just walked off,” she says later, and I’m not sure whether she really knows Jimmy or just wants to feel like somebody with a mission, with a purpose, even if just for a few thin moments.

  These calls point me to the door of Jimmy’s world. I go back to Miami. As I’m sitting in the medical examiner’s office, waiting to read the files of a few dead James Robinsons, a private investigator suggests checking Camillus House.

  It sits on the edge of Overtown, a gateway. Miami has 994 people living on the street, and almost all of them end up here at one time or another. Outside, a man and a woman push a stroller toward the shelter door. Another man steps inside holding a baby rattle. I walk up to the front desk, holding a flier. “I’m looking for someone,” I tell the lady manning the desk.

  Her name is Patricia. As she studies the photo, sadness darkens her face, as though a cloud is passing overhead. She slumps. Every day, unwanted people come through that door, and now, finally, someone has come for one of them—and it might be too late. “I never forget a face,” she says. “He is homeless.”

  “Is he alive?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. She doesn’t know.

  II. THE WORLD WHERE NO ONE EXISTS

  GHOSTS OF THE POOL HALL

  The pool hall is boarded up, its secrets buried inside. The past is gone. It never happened. No sign of the white father and son who ran a watch repair business here until the ’50s, when the son got polio. No sign of Killens, who took over the building; no sign that it once attracted the best sharks passing through Miami; and no sign of Jackie Gleason, who liked to stand atop the tables and sing.

  It’s the only building left on the block. Once, Ferdie Pacheco, Ali’s fight doctor, had an office next door, but it burned in the 1980 riots. Crime took over the avenue. Cops often found themselves at this address. One night, they found a police motorcycle in the back that someone had stolen. As the years passed, fire and the wrecking ball cleared out the rest of the block. The promoter Killens died in 2004, but not before heroin took his son. At the end, Killens sat in his home around the corner with the shades drawn. He stopped listening to music.

  The pool hall was condemned in April 2005. Killens’s daughter made some poor business decisions and lost the property. It’s been empty ever since. Rolling doors, like smaller versions of a garage’s, are locked shut. Cinder blocks fill the upstairs windows, where a few apartments used to be, and boards cover the glass painted with the address: 920.

  The current owner lets me inside. The tables are gone. The room’s painted orange and turquoise, the colors of the Dolphins and nearby Booker T. Washington High. There’s a toilet out in the open; the interior walls have been ripped out. The floor’s been ripped up. A homeless person lives in the back room, with a basket of clothes and cardboard boxes spread out to form a bed. There’s a pile of trash in the corner with a shoe sitting on top. There’s a welcome mat.

  There is no sign of Jimmy.

  OVERTOWN 101

  Overtown surrounds the empty pool hall, split north and south by I-95 and east and west by I-395. The concrete canopy is a daily reminder of what the neighborhood used to be, what it’s become and why.

  Building the interstates in the late ’60s forced thousands from their homes, destroyed a vibrant business district, and further cut them off from the rest of Miami. Population declined, from 40,000 to where it is today, just more than 10,000. A new kind of economy rules the neighborhood now. A beer or two for a bath
. Penicillin or tetracycline might buy you a place to sleep for a night. A crack rock buys just about anything.

  The zip code, one of the poorest in the country, has more sex offenders than any other in Florida. It’s a dumping ground for addicts, pedophiles, and the insane. In the shadow of a booming downtown, people live invisible lives. Near the corner of Northwest 3rd Avenue and 11th Street, I talk to a group gathered beneath I-95. They’re looking for cops.

  “Police tell us to go home,” one guy says, eyeing me suspiciously. “It’s martial law in Overtown.”

  There’s one woman in the group. Her arms are disfigured with scars, like she’s been in a car wreck. In a way, she has. I’m told later: infections from years of heroin use. She’s seen my fliers and asks if I could help her too. She wants to find out about her daddy. She gives his name. Any little bit of information will help her reconstruct the past, and a past is at the core of our humanity. A story is what makes us real.

  Under the overpass, they talk about Sweet Jimmy, whom they haven’t seen in a while, and about how people down here just vanish. “Give an emergency contact number,” the woman tells her friends. “Let somebody know your name in case you go missing.”

  They go back to sitting around, their words muffled by the whine and hum of the car tires overhead. They’re waiting, for the next hit, the next drink, the next meal, the next green mattress at the Camillus House, waiting for someone to come save them, for their body to end up at the morgue with a tag that reads “Remains, Unknown,” for the cops to tell them they can’t stay here any longer. They’re waiting for tomorrow, which will be just like today. The concrete shades them from the hot South Florida sun, and if you stand in just the right spot, sometimes a breeze blows nice and cool on your face.