Boxing Legend Dies at 95

In the end, Jake LaMotta was more famous for being famous than for being the furious fighter who won boxing’s middleweight title and handed Sugar Ray Robinson the first defeat of his career.

Once Robert DeNiro portrayed LaMotta in the 1980 film “Raging Bull,” LaMotta’s legend was remade. DeNiro won an Academy Award for his performance (Martin Scorcese directed) in the story of this boxer who fought 106 times and was a champion for nearly three years.

LaMotta, 95, died Wednesday at a hospital near Miami of pneumonia.

Boxing was one of America’s most popular sports in LaMotta’s era and he reveled in his ring wars. He won the title in 1949 and kept it until Robinson stopped him in 1951. There will always be arguments about the best fighter pound-for-pound and Robinson should always be in the top two. LaMotta fought him six times, winning once.

“I fought Sugar Ray Robinson so many times it’s a wonder I don’t have diabetes,” LaMotta often said.

He fought before the money in boxing got so big, before pay-per-view telecasts. He fought in smoky arenas, sometimes more than once a month. He was 89-14-4 in a time when fights went 15 rounds, not the current 12.

Tough? He was knocked down once … once in 106 fights in a career that stretched from 1941-54. His title loss to Robinson in Chicago, when he was stopped in the 13th round on Feb. 14, 1951, was so bloody and vicious it was nicknamed “The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,” a flip reference to that city’s violent day of mob murders in 1929.

The fight game – still morally shaky today – was even more corrupt then. LaMotta admitted in a Congressional hearing in 1960 he once threw a fight because it brought the promise of an eventual title bout.

Married six times and not exactly the perfect husband, LaMotta always acknowledged he was no angel.

And now, in some boxing afterlife, he certainly is.

 
 
Post By: Larry Weisman, a longtime sportswriter for USA TODAY, blogs for Twistity.com. Follow him on Twitter @MrLarryWeisman