Sugar Ray Robinson – Jake Lamotta St Valentines Day Massacre: When a Championship Title Meant Something!
By Tareq “Philosopher” Almashini
A swift punch to the midsection of an exhausted Jake Lamotta, unseemingly at first, hurts him, as he withers back to the ropes, grabbing a hold of Sugar Ray Robinson, whose unquenching perpetual energy propels him to throw a couple more punches in the clinch.
The referee breaks them apart…
Sugar Ray unleashes a stiff jab, followed by a macabre right hand to the jaw of Lamotta, who’s out on his feet, only held up by his indomitable spirit that saw him hand the pound for pound greatest fighter of all time his first defeat in his forty second fight, followed by several more ruthlessly close encounters ending in decisions.
A quick succession of uppercuts followed and the ref jumps in and waves his hand in the air to end the history making savage affair, in what had come to be known as, the “St Valentine’s Day Massacre”.
February fourteenth, nineteen fifty one….
Both past their primes, Sugar Ray Robinson handed Jake Lamotta his first knockout loss in ninety five prize fights.
“You never got me down, Ray! You hear me, you never got me down”
Remarked Jake, played by all time great actor Robert Deniro in director Martin Scorsese’s boxing masterpiece “Raging Bull” depicting how, though Robinson beat the hell out of Lamotta, he was indeed never able to knock him off of his feet in any of their six matches. Jake took great pride in that, and great pride in the caliber of his opponent, stating every chance he got,
“I fought Sugar Ray so many times, it’s a wonder I didn’t get Diabetes”
Oh the good ole days…
The golden age of boxing, when intellect ruled, skills are what sold tickets, and compelling fights happened not only because they put asses in seats, but because anything less by the champion was unacceptable.
Yea, I am one of those guys!
The old school jokers that believes a fighter from the old days can whip any “modern day” athlete no matter what advances in sports science may have taken place.
That’s not my intended topic though…
To make comparisons between then and now, in which folks pit two fighters of different eras against each other and then debate and ridicule who can do what to whom is a truly fruitless endeavor. There is an immeasurable quality that can never be conveyed in any of those types of discussion, and that is the human spirit.
You can compare skills, physical abilities, the size of a man, the speed of another, the punching power of today and yesteryear, but you can’t measure a champion’s heart and what they would be capable of if they were confronted with challenge and had to rise to the occasion.
It is this very quality that has sewn together the mosaic, the colorful tapestry of boxing for the last 200 years. A sport littered by those striving for greatness and defined by the few who attained it against all odds and sound reason.
Things change…
They always change, and they are suppose to change.
Some can be articulated as positive evolution, such as mankind theoretically crawling out of the primordial ooze, to eventually become what it is and launch rockets into space, and boxing has come a long way as well, for the greatest analogy of life and all that it encompasses, from tragedy to triumph, is boxing itself.
It grew from an illegal bare knuckle sport of brutes, to a gloved and sanctioned sport and with the changing of the rules, so did the style of fighting and the way those involved conducted their business.
Change…
Not all changes are good though, because in life, and in this universe, you’ve always got two ends of the spectrum and the gradients in between and even those two extremes have degrees onto themselves.
Some changes are great, and some are not. Like the belts.
The very great number of them…
I don’t mean the advent of several sanctioning bodies, the greatest woe to the pure fan of the sport that appreciated the few divisions and sole distinction of “The Man” in each one, but the multitude of belts in each sanctioning body that produces the belts and decides who should fight for them.
See, back in the old days, at one point, you had just the one man that the public recognized and then a consensus on who was his biggest challenge and that dictated who he fought next. Then this concept evolved just a little. Folks still paid attention to lineal “title” and that had little to with a belt or a private sanctioning organization, but more so with the lineage of such a recognition drawing back from the first man to be recognized, such as John l Sullivan for example. In the heavyweight division and so on and so forth, but the advent of the private sanctioning body allowed for others to collect belts and create a dispute, such as when Muhammad Ali was the lineal champion and then lifted the “World Boxing Association” title from Ernie Terrell. Hell! When Ali came back from a nearly four year forced retirement because of a license suspension for refusing to be drafted to go to war in Vietnam, Joe Frazier was the Lineal champion and the only “belt” he held was that of the New York State Athletic Commission, but it made no difference, the public knew who the real champion was.
Well, fighting has drawing power, it generates a lot of money, it can make people very rich, especially those who don’t have to take any punishment and capitalists such as these, innovate unscrupulous ways to make their fortunes.
Make a long story short…
What the hell is a “regular champion”?
What the hell is a “super champion”?
I don’t want to get into calling out names, and besmirching good guys who fight and get swept up in their promoters press clippings. Some aware of the delusion and others well immersed in them. I would just like to make a simple point, as a matter of opinion of course.
No one can dictate the historical narrative of boxing to the audience. No one!
The public has always decided who the man was, and who is great, not a boxing promoter or a sanctioning body. As we crawl deeper into a new era, where every trinket title won is marketed as the legit championship, and every fighter crowned, all in the same division, with a paper belt call themselves the man. We the public, still have to exercise our intellects, and recognize who truly deserves the “title”.
A title, and a belt are two completely different things, and they shouldn’t be mistaken.
A belt is a material thing that one wears around their waist, but a title? That’s a distinction, an understanding. It’s earned and rightfully so and no one can just hand it to you and boast of its relevance.
Sometimes it’s obvious, other times it’s ambiguous, but nevertheless, it is on us, to work our minds, see things unbiasedly and recognize who deserves the distinction, or at least, what are the set of characters that have to slug it out to clarify this.
Once upon a time, there was a bruiser named Mike Tyson, who inhumanly, wrecked his way through the heavyweight division, lifting various belts from various victims, and everyone then believed he was “the man”!
I give credit to the fans though…
A recent poll on one of the boxing news websites asked to place into order who the champ was among various belt holders in the heavyweight division, and the percentages all went in the right direction, so hope is still alive! Fight fans are indeed educated, but my warning is to the young cats, the ones who have no clue who a Ray Robinson is, or a Jake Lamotta, whose first experience is introduced by some money grubbing promoter. Educate yourselves young ones. Boxing history is well documented, there is even film of guys like Jack Johnson, the first African American heavyweight champion, from 1900!
The way we can make informed decisions, especially in a medium of theater like prize fighting, is by having an open mind, and plenty of context. The more information you have, the better your understanding and the more eloquent your decision making process can be.
February fourteenth, nineteen fifty one…
“Sugar” Ray Robinson vs Jake “The Bronx Bull” Lamotta is on YouTube, really, you should check it out, it’s one hell of a fight…
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