UNIDENTIFIED CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It was the last big crowd for a champ. More than 2,000 mourners, including heavyweight champion Mike Tyson and other athletes and celebrities, came to a church in Los Angeles, paying last respects to Sugar Ray Robinson, regarded as the best pound-for-pound boxer ever to enter the ring. Sugar Ray Robinson was born Walker Smith Jr. in May of 1920 in Detroit. He went on to fight over 200 times professionally from New York to L.A., and just about every fight town in between. But in his boxing prime, Ray Robinson was technically remarkable: fluid, graceful, smart, a picture of elegance and class.</s>GENE FULLMER: Including me, he fought five world champions, lost to them and won the title back five times. You know, this is unheard of. That will probably never be repeated again, but I mean, he done it.</s>CNN CORRESPONDENT: Ray Robinson fought 25 years and stayed far too long in the game, battling until he was 44 years old and getting hit by fighters who never would have touched him. His wife said: "He took each day as it came now, and was never bitter about the millions, lesser fighters of today, were making."</s>REV. JESSE JACKSON: Sugar has done the good work and he's still sweet and he's still pretty and he's still tough. And he was born on the bottom and left on the top.
CNN 20: Sugar Ray Robinson Dies, April 12, 1989