The New York State Athletic Commission looked into suspicions that LaMotta had deliberately lost the fight, but he claimed he had been impaired by a ruptured spleen that he incurred in training. 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.” As Silvani recalled in “Corner Men,” by Ronald K. Robinson won their other five fights, but LaMotta also defeated prominent fighters like Fritzie Zivic, Tony Janiro and Bob Satterfield.Īl Silvani, a trainer for LaMotta, felt he was most dangerous when seemingly beaten. In February 1943, he dealt Robinson the first loss of his career in Robinson’s 41st fight, winning a 10-round decision after knocking him through the ropes. He emerged as a leading middleweight in the early 1940s, having been rejected from World War II military service because a childhood mastoid operation had affected his hearing. LaMotta attacked bullying schoolmates with an ice pick, and he beat a neighborhood bookie into unconsciousness with a lead pipe while robbing him. The family moved to Philadelphia and then to the Bronx, where they lived in a rat-infested tenement. Robert De Niro won an Academy Award for his portrayal of LaMotta, and the film was nominated in six categories, including best picture.
He ultimately became a pop culture symbol of rage when the director Martin Scorsese told his story in his 1980 film “Raging Bull,” based on LaMotta’s 1970 memoir of the same title, written with Joseph Carter and Peter Savage.
Having gone undefeated as an amateur after his release, he turned pro in 1941 and unleashed his enmity on dozens of ring opponents. His longtime fiancée, Denise Baker, said he died of pneumonia at Palm Garden of Aventura, a nursing Home and rehabilitation facility, where he had been under hospice care.Ī “good-for-nothing bum kid” with a terrible temper, as he later described himself, LaMotta learned to box in an upstate New York reformatory, where he had been sent for attempted burglary. 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.
0 kommentar(er)
