Sugar Sugar

About five years ago I posted on TMV about how boxing was something I shared with my stepdad for years before he passed away unexpectedly in 2009.  He was a lifelong fan of the sport--which admittedly has its cons and in many ways has deteriorated over the years to what it is today--and watching fights was something fun to do together.

In a seemingly unrelated occurrence I was looking through cards at a Meijer store near me one day in 2008 (back before card aisles devolved into overpriced Topps blasters and nothing else) when I came across a couple hobby boxes of 2008 Topps Co-Signers.  The price was higher than I usually paid for cards at a retail store but probably about right considering they were hobby boxes promising several autographs.

Before realizing that they were included in this baseball product I pulled a couple signatures of boxers:  one solo and one dual.  While I prefer that products stick to their sport I did recognize that I likely wouldn't have acquired boxing hits myself otherwise.  And so I told my stepdad about those signatures and some of the subjects in the set, which he thought was cool.  What I liked is that it tied something we enjoyed together to my collecting a bit.

Later that year around Christmas I thought it would be fun to acquire a number of the other signed cards in the set to give him as a present.  I added a number of good ones, including boxers we'd watched over the years (such as the Juan Manuel Marquez seen in the linked TMV post), trainer/commentator Teddy Atlas, and other notables.  He thought they were great when he opened them on Christmas, and I had fun getting him into the hobby in a small way.

After he died I sold off a number of those cards but decided to keep a few for myself.  And as luck would have it, one of the ones I kept now holds a special place in my Michigan PC:

This is Bert (not "Burt", TOPPS) Sugar, one of the boxing's most famous writers who was also a great historian of multiple sports (including pro wrestling!).  Pictured here with the fedora and cigar he was always known for, Sugar wrote for and/or edited the magazines Boxing Illustrated (which he owned) and The Ring while authoring a ton of books and playing himself in a few boxing movies.  I can't say I knew anything about him before I grabbed this card, but since I did and decided to read about him I'm amazed at his life's work.

So how does he tie into my PC?  Well, as it so happens, the Washington, D.C. native who did his undergrad at Maryland attended my alma mater for both law and business school degrees.  Fortunately for the boxing world he stuck with his writing, which is something he did for the school paper, the Michigan Daily, while in Ann Arbor.

The man was quite a character--check out this interview where he mentions his own days in the ring at Maryland while referring to himself as "the great white hopeless"--and a key figure in pugilistic history, and I'm honored to add his signature to my tiny "other sports, etc." Michigan collection (which currently otherwise comprises a pair of pro wrestlers).  And that's all thanks to sharing a sport and a bit of collecting with my stepdad, something I still miss to this day but am thankful for as I get older.