Sports Nicknames

Appears in
Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets

By Darra Goldstein

Published 2015

  • About

sports nicknames with sweet references may seem surprising, given the brutal image of sports like boxing and football. But in fact boxing was termed “the Sweet Science of Bruising” as early as 1813, in English journalist Pierce Egan’s volumes of Boxiana.

The most famous athlete with a sweet name is Sugar Ray Robinson (1921–1989), a boxer whose actual name was Walker Smith Jr. As a fledgling fighter in the late 1930s, Smith borrowed the Amateur Athletic Union card of an older friend named Ray Robinson. Watching the agile fourteen-year-old, George Sainford, later Robinson’s manager, called him “Sugar Ray” for his ease and élan, a style as “sweet as sugar.” Smith never used his real name again. Although boxing is a violent sport, Sugar Ray’s fans never associated him with the sport’s brutality, perhaps because of his nickname.