Jake LaMotta, ‘Raging Bull’ in and Out of the Ring, Dies at 95
He would, as he wrote in his memoir, “charge out of the corner, punch, punch, punch, never give up,
take all the punishment the other guy could hand out but stay in there, slug and slug and slug.”
Ray Arcel, one of boxing’s most renowned trainers, said of LaMotta, “When he was in the ring, it was like he was in a cage fighting for his life.”
Best remembered for his six bouts with Sugar Ray Robinson, LaMotta won 83 fights (30 by knockouts) and lost 19 (including a “fix” to which he belatedly confessed, telling a congressional panel
that he had been promised that if he lost that fight he would get a title shot).
Jake LaMotta, boxing’s “Raging Bull,” who brawled his way to the middleweight boxing championship in a life of unbridled fury — within the ring and outside it —
that became the subject of an acclaimed film, died on Tuesday in Aventura, Fla., near Miami.
As Silvani recalled in “Corner Men,” by Ronald K. Fried (1993), LaMotta would “lay against the ropes playing possum
and all at once — and this no exaggeration — he’d throw seven, eight, nine, ten left hooks at you.”
LaMotta had been favored to defeat Billy Fox of Philadelphia in a light-heavyweight bout in November 1947,
but the odds swung 3-1 in Fox’s favor shortly before the fight, evidently because of an infusion of organized crime money from Philadelphia.
Mr. Scorsese made his film long after LaMotta had squandered his money — he said he made $1 million in the ring —
and had gone through a series of stormy marriages, been sent to prison once more and ballooned into obesity.