Bert Sugar, 1936–2012

Never without his broad-brimmed hat—a fedora in winter, a panama in summer—and his unlit stogie, sportswriter Bert Sugar was a deliberate throwback to the era of Damon Runyon and Ring Lardner. But behind the caricature of the hard-drinking, wisecracking raconteur was a serious student of boxing with a magisterial command of the sport’s history.

Born Herbert Randolph Sugar in Washington, D.C., Sugar graduated from the University of Maryland and earned law and business degrees from the University of Michigan, said The New York Times. He passed the bar in Washington, but the only purpose it served his career was to set up his oft-repeated line that it was “the only bar I ever passed.” After moving to New York and working in advertising for almost a decade, in the early 1970s he bought Boxing Illustrated, “which he edited well but ran as a business badly.” He briefly edited the men’s magazine Argosy, along with a string of short-lived sports publications, eventually becoming the co-owner and editor of The Ring.

Sugar “possessed one priceless and seemingly vanishing skill: the ability to tell a story at a bar,” said ESPN.com. Many of his stories were based on his encyclopedic knowledge of boxing, the subject of most of the 80-odd books he published in his lifetime, including co-writing efforts with legendary cornerman Angelo Dundee and heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson. But Sugar could also hold forth with authority on baseball, horse racing, vaudeville, and much else. “He could sing all the words to ‘Lydia the Tattooed Lady,’ trace the lineage of every heavyweight champion back to John L. Sullivan, and explain how Houdini did his famous Water Torture Escape.”

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Storytelling, he believed, was vital to the writing craft, said USA Today. “Sportswriting is almost an extinct species, or soon to be,” Sugar once said, a state of affairs he blamed partly on blogs that impose “no space restraint” and are written so quickly that “there’s no time for cerebral thinking on an article.” But he said young writers, even teetotalers, could learn the trade by hanging out in bars and listening to their elders. “Don’t go up to your room to figure out on your laptop how many free flier miles you have,” he said. “Sit and hear what it is you’re doing.”