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NEW YORK, Dec. 21 (AP) - At
long last they've crowned the un-
crowned champion of the welter-
weights - Sugar Ray Robinson - and
it happened just about in time, too,
because the sugar man isn't nearly
so sweet in the swat department
now as he was once.
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It took five years for the Harlem
stringbean to get his shot at the
147-pound bauble - five years while
the welterweight champions gave
him plenty of that blank stare and
he had to go roaming around knock-
ing over assorted ear-scramblers of
various shapes and sizes, and wait
for the big one. And when he final-
ly got the ticket to the title taffy-
pull last night, he arrived on sched-
ule in Madison Square Garden with
a 15-round decision over Tommy
Bell to take the championship Mar-
ty Servo abdicated when he retired
with an aching nose in September.
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But those five years of waiting -
durig which the uptown beanpole
had 75 fights, won 73, lost one (to a
middleweight) and tied another -
apparently took something out of the
sugar man that he isn't going to get
back, like losing the last pot of the
night in a seven-card stud game.
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He showed against Tommy that
some of the fire has gone out. This
isn't taking a thing away from Tom-
my the Thumper, mind you, be-
cause the T-shouldered swatter out
of Youngstown, Ohio was a fancy
fighting man in there last night,
and a crowd of 15,670 customers who
chipped in to a pot of $82,948 liked
him. Some even booed the decision,
although it was unanimous and the
Associated Press score card made it
8 rounds for Ray, 5 for Tommy and
2 even.
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Bell laid an assortment of large
left hooks on Ray's whiskers
that did the Harlem Hammer no
good at all. And one of them even
dumped Robinson right on his pretty
silk panties for a long, long seven-
count in the second round which
took years off the lives of the chalk
players who liked Ray 1 to 5 on
the board. And after Tommy him-
self hit the deck in the 11th and had
lumps raised on him in the 12th as
Robinson tried to put the squeezer
over, the Ohio Hot-Shot came
charging right back to take the 13th
and 14th.
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