Were all of American history written with the style and passion Wil Haygood pumps into his dazzling biography of boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, college history departments would be stormed by eager students.

"Dude," students have been known to say, "all that stuff happened, like, before I was born," as if nothing that unfolded prior to one's own odyssey down the birth canal could possibly maintain any relevance, let alone impact.

Wrong as that is, it's probably too late to have Haygood prove it by rewriting everything at this point, prolific as he is.

The early stages of Haygood's career included a turn at the Post-Gazette in the early 1980s, and apparently no one's held that against him inasmuch as he's more than a revered feature writer at the Washington Post but also the decorated biographer of both Sammy Davis Jr. and Adam Clayton Powell Jr.

Biography is not history, nor vice versa, but nowhere is history more alive than in the people whose complex psychologies and unique energies actually make it. In Haygood's hands, the legendary prizefighter emerges with rich clarity as a historical figure, with Haygood's own literary muscle pulling all the biographical and historical freight.

"Sugar Ray Robinson was a man of music -- you could see it in the way he fought," Haygood begins one chapter. "And it was jazz in particular that moved him, curled his mind into delicate introspection and observation. Those stuttering jazz stanzas were like big canyon-wide flashes of light ... The men he admired -- Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Billy Eckstine, Miles Davis, Cootie Williams among them-- had seemed to bring the same discipline to their craft that he brought to his: It was the discipline of science, coupled with the fleetness and derring-do of improvisation."

In such insightfully literate hands is "Sweet Thunder" molded, and in all of its 400-plus pages is Sugar Ray's story a very comfortable and elegant place.

On multiple levels, whether as the story of 20th-century racial convulsion running a parallel track to global conflict, or as wartime sentimentality back-dropping neo-Jim Crow politics, "Sweet Thunder" fully informs on a singular lifetime, that of Walker Smith Jr., who became Ray Robinson through a last-minute registration switch at a tournament where Smith wasn't expected to fight.

A cadre of Pittsburgh notables flash in and out, including its legendary fighter Fritzie Zivic, as well as some legendary members of the African-American press.

For perspective on Robinson's emergence as a cultural talisman so close in the historical narrative to the great Joe Louis, Haygood credits none other than Bill Nunn, later to become a pivotal figure in the grand history of the Steelers scouting department, but then the sports editor of the Pittsburgh Courier.

"Joe had made sure [in Nunn's words] that, 'all the fondest dreams of the 12,000,000 racial brethren of the new champion have come true.' He has been a credit to them and now he rides the Glory Road. He has taken them up with him. He is theirs."

Even in the vast portions of "Sweet Thunder" that can't avoid the sweet science, Haygood's prolonged section on the rivalry between Robinson and Jake LaMotta (made into an enduring cultural icon by Robert De Niro and director Martin Scorsese in the 1980 film "Raging Bull") are as compelling about LaMotta as the balance of the text is about Robinson.

"Jake LaMotta was that odd figure," Haygood writes, "in whom losses only fortified will and confidence. Hadn't he knocked Robinson from the ring? And had Robinson ever put him on his rear end? He had not. ... They were magnetically linked. Both had now possessed the American imagination. They were connected not only by klieg lights but by the blood they were willing to spill to outlast each other."

In fights and in lives that very nearly defined each other, Robinson and LaMotta fought six times over nine years through 1951. Robinson won five of them.

I don't know if Haygood has changed much about Sugar Ray in these pages, and Robinson's legacy, particularly through the prism of his successful youth foundation in Los Angeles, has been long since unassailable. Robinson was, as they so often say of the dead, full of life, but his life never looked so fully like literature and likely never will again as it does in "Sweet Thunder."

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