'Raging Bull' boxer Jake LaMotta dead at 95

Jake LaMotta, an iron-jawed boxer who brawled his way to the world middleweight championship in 1949 and whose tempestuous life was compellingly portrayed in an Oscar-winning performance by Robert De Niro in the film "Raging Bull," died Sept. 19 at a hospital near Miami.

He was 95, according to his family, although some records indicate he may have been a year older. A daughter, Christi LaMotta, announced his death in a Facebook post but did not provide additional details.

Even by the standards of boxing, LaMotta was a rough-hewn specimen, a product of the New York slums who learned his brutal trade on street corners and in reform school. Brash and glib, ruggedly handsome and charismatic in a dark, dangerous way, he was one of the leading fighters of the 1940s and early '50s, when boxing was among the nation's most popular sports.

He wore a hooded leopard-print robe into the ring and fought with a stubborn, inelegant fury that led him to be called the Bronx Bull. He stalked forward in the ring, with "blows bouncing off him like ball bearings off a battleship," as Associated Press sportswriter Whitney Martin put it, absorbing punches and pain like few fighters before or since.

He was a burly, compact 5-foot-8 and fought in a low crouch, attacking his opponent's body in a swarming, relentless style, launching blunt-force punches that seemed to rise from the canvas.

"To LaMotta, fighting was a personal statement," author and historian Bert Sugar wrote in his 2006 book "Boxing's Greatest Fighters." "He fought with an anger that seemed as if it would spring forth from the top of his head like a volcanic eruption."

Even when he lost, with his features bloodied and bruised, LaMotta retained a measure of pride by refusing to go down. The Ring magazine, the leading boxing periodical, said he had the "toughest chin" in the sport's history.

"The truth of the matter?" LaMotta told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1996. "The punches never hurt me. My nose was broken six times, my hands six times, a few fractured ribs. Fifty stitches over my eyes. But the only place I got hurt was out of the ring."

For years, LaMotta refused to cooperate with the mobsters who controlled boxing when he was in his prime. Although he was a top-ranked contender, he was not granted a chance to fight for the championship until after he agreed to play along with the gangsters.

He deliberately lost a fight in 1947 - benefiting the gamblers who bet against him - and was suspended for several months because his lackluster effort was so blatantly obvious.

Two years later, he got his title shot, defeating Marcel Cerdan, an Algerian-born French boxer who was known, among other things, for having an affair with the singer Edith Piaf. Cerdan injured his shoulder in the first round and gave up at the beginning of the 10th round, giving LaMotta the championship.

Later in 1949, while flying back to the United States to face LaMotta in a rematch, Cerdan was killed in an airplane crash. LaMotta defended his middleweight crown against two other boxers - and had four other non-title fights - before entering the ring one last time against Sugar Ray Robinson, his longtime rival.

Between 1942 and 1945, the two boxers had met five times. (Years later, when he had a nightclub act, LaMotta joked, "I fought Sugar Ray Robinson so many times, it's a wonder I didn't get diabetes.")

LaMotta drove Robinson through the ropes of the ring in their second match, in 1943, giving Robinson his first loss in a professional fight. Robinson won the world welterweight (147-pound) championship in 1946, and many boxing historians rank him as the greatest boxer in the history of the sport. His battles with LaMotta were often close and always entertaining.

Source: AFP