-By Warner Todd Huston
Jake La Motta, the middleweight boxer profiled in the 1980 Robert Di Niro movie, “Raging Bull,” died at 95 Wednesday.
The boxer became a household name in the 1940s over his battles in the ring with Sugar Ray Robinson, fighting Robinson six times but winning only once, according to The San Diego Tribune.
In their final bout, La Motta lost in the 13th round by a decision, but never went down to Robinson’s flurry of punches, a fact of which La Motta was proud.
“Ya didn’t put me down, Ray; ya didn’t put me down!” La Motta crowed after the 1951 match.
The scrappy fighter almost beat Robinson in that last bout, but Robinson turned the tables and outlasted his opponent. “I just ran out of gas,” La Motta later told the media. “It was my last barrage, I couldn’t raise my arms.”
La Motta later joked that he fought Sugar Ray Robinson so many times that he was surprised the experience didn’t turn him diabetic.
As La Motta’s boxing career began to wane he made a deal with organized crime figures to throw a fight to opponent Billy Fox in 1947.But the fight was badly staged and boxing authorities knew the fix was in. La Motta was suspended and fined for throwing the fight.
La Motta later admitted that the whole event was a fiasco.
In his biography, La Motta said:
The first round, a couple of belts to his head, and I see a glassy look coming over his eyes. … A couple of jabs and he’s going to fall down? I began to panic a little. I was supposed to be throwing a fight to this guy and it looked like I was going to end up holding him on his feet. … By [the fourth round], if there was anybody in the Garden who didn’t know what was happening, he must have been dead drunk.
La Motta later became even more famous after being portrayed by Di Niro as a driven, manic, and even abusive man in the 1980 hit movie. The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won Best Actor and Best Film Editing in 1980.
La Motta reportedly hated the Di Niro film. “That wasn’t me,” LaMotta is reported as saying to his wife. “I wasn’t like that
The film was such a brutal portrayal of La Motta’s family life that he asked his real-life wife, Vicki LaMotta, if the film was right about its portrayal. Vikki reportedly told him, “No, you were worse.”
Vicki has reported that her life with Jake was even worse than the movie portrayed.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, YoungConservatives.com, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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