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Jake LaMotta Up There With The Greats Now! Rest In Peace…

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

“Jake LaMotta, 95 years old, is survived by his fiancé” © The Guardian!

As single line obituaries go, there can be few better, but the fact is that LaMotta was far more than the sum of that sentence. All the way over in the UK, his influence was acknowledged and recognized, such was his reach and the shadow over the sport and its depiction in the cinema.

I was a drama student in Glasgow managing, badly, to fit in a course of film studies when we were asked to watch a black and white effort that apparently had a lot of swearing in it. I was probably at a time when I was out of love with the sport of boxing and getting to see Raging Bull was not, ever, going to make me feel positively about people involved in fighting but then again it was not meant to make us root for the boxer.

As a film, we dissected it but it was the boxing sequences that made me wince and then remember why it was that I watched boxing in the first place. The depiction of LaMotta made me want to go back and watch it all over again.

That was over 30 years ago and he would have been sprightly 65 at the time. His legacy, through that film, his heart rendering and honest biography upon which it is based and a legendary period of time in the cenet of those rings are what make LaMotta, the Bronx Bull, a real life phenomenon; his reach being truly global. He was huge in life and in death there is a shadow now cast that is longer than a 10 bell shadow and has a bigger reach than most in the sport today.

Perhaps one of his biggest achievements, in a month and period when we are questioning the way that boxing is behaving was a 6 fight sequence against Sugar Ray Robinson which he lost 5-1 and makes us still think of him as a great boxer.
That legacy survives Raging Bull.

Shot in black and white, the movie of his early life included him as a pesky consultant. It is widely believed that he gave them the idea of shooting in black and white as he felt his past was like a black and white movie of the olden times.

That was how he remembered it and it was how we became able to see it.

When he saw it originally, he hated the movie until he realized it was a depiction of how he had been and not how he was now. It was a film that threatened to obscure that 12 year career in the ring; what it actually did was catapult him into the stratosphere and show the world how a fighter, a scrapper, a ducker and a diver survived some of the most brutal of times. With his enlightenment, also came ours and we looked back and saw both the harsh reality of the time and what was needed to survive it.
It was a life that gave birth to clichés with surprises tucked round almost every corner.

In his earlier career as a hoodlum he had once followed local bookie, Harry Gordon home and beat him to take his days takings. Leaving him for dead, the image and the incident haunted LaMotta until that “ghost” turned up in his dressing room after he won the world championship to congratulate him. LaMotta had believed he had killed the man, his presence and the scars he bore from that beating underlined the strange savagery of the man.

Life imitating boxing meant that he was embroiled in many controversies in retirement including when he was arrested for introducing men to underage girls in his club in Miami. Despite such sleaziness he was seen as some kind of hero with his image immortalized with the movie and people eulogizing his boxing prowess in ways that were distasteful for some and contextualized what he did, for others.

His retirement included some acting work and some time as a stand up comedian. His ability to come out with some funny lines were epitomized when he was asked who were the toughest he faced in the ring. His common response was, ““The three toughest fighters I fought were Sugar Ray Robinson, Sugar Ray Robinson and Sugar Ray Robinson. I fought Sugar so many times, I’m surprised I’m not diabetic.”

Clearly LaMotta has left a legacy in celluloid but in a ring?

We were able to recognize his greatest boxing achievement was winning, in 1949, the world middleweight title against Marcel Cerdan. Two years later in one of the 5 losses to Sugar Ray Robinson he had it ripped from him.

He was one tough guy who did not hit the canvas until 1952, having made his debut in 1941. The 6 fight series with Robinson began in 1942 when Robinson beat him on points at Madison Square Garden, in 1943, in Detroit they met again and LaMotta took Robinson’s unbeaten record, by points.

Three weeks later – that’s 3 weeks – Robinson got his revenge, once more on points before another couple of encounters happened in 1945 with Robinson winning the one in New York by unanimous decision and then a split decision – widely disputed – in Chicago, in the second.
Their final battle was 6 years later.

In between LaMotta won his title after throwing a fight on the orders of the Mob, against Billy Fox, so that he could fight for the world title; he had his purse withheld and he was suspended from fighting.

Of course, he was able to get back on track and that promised world title shot came. By 1951, he was a genuine world champion and had defended his title twice before the “St Valentine’s Day Massacre” when he was stopped in the 13th round, having been ahead and absorbed a massive amount of punishment.

His bravery was stuff of legend but his future less assured.

He continued to fight for 3 more years but he was done. Drink was now his problem and with 106 fights, 83 wins, 30 by way of knockout with 19 losses and 4 draws his contribution to the sport was massive.

As a boxer, and as a person, he was a brute. He bullied in the ring and he continued outside of it. The punishment that he took in his fights did not render him a blubbering mess as his granite ability to take and absorb punishment meant he was seen as a man who was tough to beat; unless of course you had the money.

LaMotta was guilty of being the poster boy for the seedier side of boxing as the rumors that he took money to throw fights became increasingly hard to deny; so he didn’t.

His standing amongst the media and the general public may be defined by a film that is a classic, and though his career never got to the same heights it was equally as distinguished.

RIP Jake LaMotta…


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