Jake LaMotta

• Born: July 10, 1921
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: September 19, 2017
• Place of death: Aventura, Florida

Sport: Boxing

Early Life

Giacobe “Jake” LaMotta was the oldest of five children born to Giussepe and Elizabeth LaMotta. His father, a Sicilian immigrant, had settled on the lower East Side of Manhattan, where he met and married Elizabeth, a second-generation Italian American. LaMotta was born there, but the family eventually moved to the Bronx. He dropped out of high school early, and after several brushes with legal authorities, he was arrested for attempted burglary of a jewelry store. At the age of fifteen, he was sentenced to three years at the State Reform School in Coxsackie, New York. There, the prison chaplain helped him channel his aggression into boxing. He developed some boxing skills and a determination to seek a career as a pugilist. After his release, he started boxing competitively, and after winning all forty of his amateur matches, he turned professional at the age of nineteen.

The Road to Excellence

LaMotta began his professional career as a light heavyweight, winning his first fifteen fights. After two years, his professional record was 28–6, and he shifted to the middleweight class. The quality of his opponents improved, highlighted by an October 1942, bout with Sugar Ray Robinson. The undefeated Robinson won a unanimous 10-round decision. Four months later, however, LaMotta gave Robinson his first defeat and first knockdown. Robinson barely averted an eighth-round knockout when a punch sent him through the ropes and down for a count of nine before the bell rang.

Next, LaMotta defeated Jimmy Reeves in a rematch, and over a six-month period in 1943, he won three of four fights with former welterweight champion Fritzie Zivic. The boxing press took notice of LaMotta's impressive victories and came to regard him as the “uncrowned” middleweight champion. Despite his success, a championship fight eluded him because, in his judgment, he refused to cooperate with the mobsters in control of boxing.

LaMotta's brother Joseph arranged for him to fight Billy Fox on November 14, 1947, in Madison Square Garden. Fox won by a technical knockout in the fourth round, when referee Frank Fullam called the fight because of LaMotta's injuries. Since LaMotta had made little effort to defend himself from Fox’s punches, suspicions were raised that the fight had been fixed. The New York State Boxing Commission investigated the fight, and despite his denial of a fix, LaMotta was suspended for seven months. Later, during the June 1960 Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on professional boxing, he admitted that this fight had been fixed. He testified that a $100,000 bribe was received but insisted the reason he complied was the guarantee of a championship fight.

The Emerging Champion

LaMotta resumed boxing in mid-1948, winning all but one of his fights, a loss to Canadian Laurent Dauthuille. Finally, on June 16, 1949, in Detroit, Michigan, he got his opportunity for a world middleweight championship in a title match against Marcel Cerdan, the renowned French boxer from Casablanca, Morocco. Cerdan injured his shoulder early in the fight and surrendered after the ninth round, giving LaMotta the victory by technical knockout.

A scheduled rematch had to be canceled when Cerdan’s plane crashed in the Azores islands, killing all aboard. In 1950, LaMotta successfully defended the middleweight crown against Italian champion Tiberio Mitri in July and in a rematch with Dauthuille in September. The latter, a fifteen-round, bruising fight, was designated by Ring magazine as the 1950 fight of the year. On February 2, 1951, he met Robinson for the sixth time in a middleweight championship fight in Chicago. The fight, often called “the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,” was stopped in the thirteenth round because of damage Robinson had inflicted on LaMotta. That marked the end of his reign as world middleweight champion.

Continuing the Story

LaMotta continued his boxing career for several more years, moving to the light-heavyweight division. He defeated several leading light middleweights, and by the end of 1951, he was ranked as one of the top-ten light heavyweights by Ring magazine. His 1952 loss to Danny Nardico included a seventh-round knockdown, the first and only one in his career. After a layoff of fourteen months, he fought three more times. He won two but lost his last fight, to Billy Kilgore, on March 14, 1954. After this loss, he retired from boxing.

LaMotta, his wife Vicki, and their three children moved to Miami Beach, where he opened a nightclub. He had difficulty adjusting to life outside of the boxing ring, and his heavy drinking and frequent womanizing led to a marital breakup. Vicki, who married LaMotta ten years earlier while still a teenager, was the second of six wives; all of the marriages ended in divorce.

LaMotta's personal troubles continued. His self-described “lowest of lows” was his arrest and conviction of aiding and abetting prostitution of a fourteen-year-old girl. His already tarnished reputation sustained further damage from his testimony during the Senate subcommittee investigation of professional boxing that he accepted a bribe to lose the Fox fight. Personal, financial, and employment problems followed. He returned to New York and eventually got speaking engagements and acting jobs. His biggest break came when his 1970 autobiography Raging Bull was made into a film by the same name. The 1980 film, directed by Martin Scorsese, starred Robert De Niro as LaMotta, a role which earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor.

In addition to continuing to tour to sign autographs, LaMotta became involved in two more projects that revolved around his life story. In 2012, he performed, along with his fiancée, Denise Baker, in an Off-Broadway show titled The Lady and the Champ. Next, he helped work on another biopic about his life, this time focusing more on his troubled early years and how he became the boxer everyone came to know. Starring William Forsythe as LaMotta, the film, The Bronx Bull, premiered at the Newport Beach Film Festival in 2015 and was released to theaters in 2017.

LaMotta died at a rehabilitation center in Aventura, Florida, on September 19, 2017, at the age of ninety-five.

Summary

Jake LaMotta was proud of his career record of 83 wins—30 by knockouts—and 19 losses, but he especially savored the fact that he was never knocked out. Best remembered are his six bouts with Sugar Ray Robinson, whom he regarded as the greatest boxer. He was elected to the World Boxing Hall of Fame in 1986. Despite open acknowledgement of serious misconduct, his several rehabilitations and his resistance to mob influence during his boxing career drew him some favor. The New York Times movie critic Vincent Canby observed in his review of Raging Bull that, in the end, there is a deep mystery about LaMotta, about what propelled him through his tumultuous and remarkable life.

Bibliography

Anderson, Chris, et al. Raging Bull II. Lyle Stuart, 1986.

Goldstein, Richard. "Jake LaMotta, ‘Raging Bull’ in and Out of the Ring, Dies at 95." The New York Times, 20 Sept. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/09/20/sports/jake-lamotta-dead.html. Accessed 13 Apr. 2018.

Hauser, Thomas, and Stephen Brunt. The Italian Stallions: Heroes of Boxing’s Glory Days. Sport Media, 2003.

LaMotta, Jake, et al. Raging Bull. Prentice Hall, 1970.

Mitchell, Kevin. "Jake LaMotta Was Not a Great Champion but One of the Toughest, a Boxing Beast." The Guardian, 21 Sept. 2017, www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2017/sep/21/jake-lamotta-not-great-champion-but-one-of-toughest-boxing-beast. Accessed 13 Apr. 2018.