Born into the cauldron of post-World War I Detroit, born Walker Smith, Jr., to a sharecropper dad who tried his luck in Fordized Michigan; to a sturdy mom, Leila, who provided the energy for a life lived at high speed, Sugar Ray Robinson was an American legend who spanned both sides of the civil rights transformation and who reinvented the African-American sports hero.  Wil Haygood's story is fluid and romantic.  The accidental rise of Sugar Ray Robinson is contained in a wonderful anecdote of how he went from Walker Smith to Ray Robinson.  It was amateur fight night in Watertown, New York, 1934, and a boxing club from the Salem Episcopal Methodist Church of Harlem was in for a series of matches.  The team lightweight, Ray Robinson, was out sick.  So Herbert Smith pushed himself to the coach and said, "Let me."  He won in a tidy style that at ringside they called "sweet," and he was written up the next day in the local paper as "Sweet Sugar Ray Robinson."  Legend born.  After he won the Golden Gloves in 1938, he turned professional and also made the decision to present himself stylishly, befriending Langston Hughes, Lena Horne.  Not a palooka, not a gambler, not a loser.  He was in the Army in 1944 with Joe Louis, touring the base in the South for the Department of the Army.  After an incident in which Robinson defended Joe Louis from discrimination, Robinson walked away from the Army and the decision was made to let him go.  In 1946, back to fighting, he started his own night club on Seventh Avenue in Harlem, and it became a hot night spot for the TV, Hollywood and newspaper crowd, like Jackie Gleason, Walter Winchell, Frank Sinatra.  The five fights with Jake LaMotta from 1941-1951 defined feud fighting for a big gate.  In May 1947 at Cleveland, Robinson punched a kid fighter and Doyle in the eighth round, and Doyle never recovered, dying the next day.  The incident haunted Robinson, but did not stop him fighting.  Sugar Ray Robinson transformed the boxing game so that when Muhammed Ali came along, there was a role for the champion celebrity iconoclast.  Robinson died young of complications from what was called Alzheimer's in 1984 in California, his last years a disappointment of missed opportunities.  Did all the punching contribute to the early death from brain damage?  And where is the Hollywood movie?  This is a role that makes careers.