In the summer of 1950, after all the whispers, suspicion and disenchantment, the pendulum finally swung Jake LaMotta?s way. New York fell back in love with the Bronx Bull. After being a hero on the road and a villain in his own backyard, his hometown told him there was room at the inn after all and gave him a hug.
The going had been tough for the quintessential tough guy. He was the middleweight champion of the world but no Joe DiMaggio in the popularity stakes. The fight that turned LaMotta?s fortunes around was his emphatic points victory over tough Italian challenger Tiberio Mitri at Madison Square Garden on July 12, 1950. Suddenly Jake was the old Jake again, back to his honest best, surging to victory over a very brave and resilient challenger. Mitri was outclassed and the New York fans applauded Jake as a true world champion.
LaMotta pledged to keep them on his side as he reflected on the turbulent phase in his career that had made him an outcast. ?I had three years of being a villain in New York. I didn?t like being booed. Who does? But I got used to it. To this day, I don?t think it was my fault. But that?s bygones now. I think I have the fans of my city on my side and I?ll do everything to keep them there.
?I didn?t blame them for giving me the raspberry. I made three bad fights in my home city in the last three years, even though I was batting 1,000 out of town. But I knew I could make them like me again. All I needed was one good night. All I needed to do was put on one helluva good fight and the fans would be on my side. I know I did that with Mitri. The guys who came to see me get licked were cheering me at the finish.?
LaMotta was determined to go all out to retain his newly gained hero status. ?I?m going to do it for the fans. They are my main concern. They pay their good money to see me. They let me earn a living. I?m in good with them again and I don?t intend to get out.
?If they want me to be courteous in the ring, I?ll be courteous. If they want me to be mean, I?ll be mean. If they want me to stick my chin out, I?ll stick my chin out, although I?m not saying I?ll let anybody hit me. I?m going to stay popular in New York.?
But what about those three crucial fights that had tarnished Jake?s image? The first was his fourth round loss to Billy Fox in 1947, when the Bronx Bull suddenly went soft and surrendered with uncharacteristic tameness. The result left a very bad taste in the mouths of most. Looking back on it, LaMotta said: ?I don?t want to talk about the Fox fight. I hurt myself in training and I shouldn?t have gone through with it, but I didn?t want to disappoint.?
He left it there, a wound too sore to revisit and not surprisingly so. Some years later, Jake would come clean and reveal that he threw the Fox fight in return for a promised shot at the championship.
Forthcoming
LaMotta was more forthcoming about the damage done by his two fights with the talented Frenchman, Robert Villemain in 1949. In their first meeting in March, Jake won a hotly disputed decision which was roundly booed. In the return meeting in December, LaMotta performed poorly and lost a unanimous decision.
The timing of that loss couldn?t have been worse. It was Jake?s first start (a non-title bout), after winning the middleweight championship from Marcel Cerdan in unsatisfactory circumstances. Cerdan retired after nine rounds with a shoulder injury sustained after being thrown to the canvas in the opening session, and many fans and writers questioned the legitimacy of LaMotta?s victory. They said that Jake had beaten a one-armed man.
Red Smith wrote: ?In spite of his injury and in spite of a severe beating in the first round …Cerdan won the second round big and the third and fifth by lesser margins. A master at handling his opponent, turning him, tying him up, slipping or blocking his punches, and setting him up, Cerdan could do none of this one-handed. He couldn?t even stick his left out to ward off his foe?it is difficult to believe LaMotta would have a chance with a two-handed Cerdan.?
However, it was the Villemain fights that seemed to bother LaMotta the most. ?VIllemain? Well, the first time I just didn?t make as good a fight as I ought to have. I guess I didn?t have enough ambition to get into the right shape. I was discouraged because I had gotten so many run-arounds on a chance at the title.
?The second time with Villemain ? I?ve told people I went into the fight over confident. That really wasn?t the truth. I just said that to get talk of it over with. I figured people were down on me anyway and would feel an explanation was an alibi.?
Ah, but Jake did have an alibi and he explained it as only Jake could. ?Two days before, I felt a cold coming on. I read about the wonder drugs that are supposed to knock a cold out of your system and I gave myself a good dose of it. The cold disappeared but in the fight I was as weak as could be. I couldn?t do what I wanted, I couldn?t figure it out, but I said nothing to anybody.
?To tell the truth, I didn?t think to connect up the cold medicine and my lack of pep. Two days later the thought finally struck me and I called up a doctor to ask if there could be any connection. He bawled the hell out of me. ?You shouldn?t have been fighting, you should have been in bed after taking those things,? he said. Some day, if I ever fight Villemain again, I?ll prove it.?
The big turnaround
The disappointments behind him, Jake engineered the big turnaround with his stirring victory over Mitri. Despite LaMotta?s dominance through the fifteen rounds, the battle was always an engrossing one. Jake was coming off three straight non-title victories and really rolling again. He had stopped Dick Wagner in Detroit, halted Chuck Hunter in Cleveland and unanimously outpointed Joe Taylor in Syracuse.
Mitri hailed from the Italian city of Trieste, which would later produce middleweight and junior middleweight champion, Nino Benvenuti. The shot at LaMotta was the chance of a lifetime for Tiberio, who was substituting for the injured Rocky Graziano. Mitri gave up his European title to concentrate fully on the Bronx Bull, but the game challenger found himself out of his league.
Jake landed the decision by margins of 12-3 from referee Mark Conn and 9-6 from judge Joe Agnello. The general consensus was that Conn?s tally was probably the most accurate reflection of the powerful champion?s dominance.
Judge Bert Grant somehow saw a close 8-7 victory for LaMotta, prompting Ring editor Nat Fleischer to suggest that Bert had been listening too intently to Mitri?s vociferous rooters.
It was a fight that demonstrated the wide gulf in quality between the American and European competition of the time. Mitri was a good class professional, not a big puncher but skilled and full of heart and tenacity. The Tiger from Trieste, as he was known, had made his American debut two months before the LaMotta fight with an overwhelming points win over Dick Wagner at Madison Square Garden. But journeyman Dick was no Jake and had already taken a bad hiding from LaMotta.
Mitri?s fine 48-1-3 record flattered to deceive in the tough American school, then a super league apart. LaMotta set a stiff pace from the outset against his willing challenger and only eased up when the victory was assured. Yet the Italian connection worked a treat at the box office and drew a crowd of 16,369 to the Garden. They saw a different LaMotta that night, a more tactical LaMotta, but a LaMotta they liked.
Jake reminded the crowd that he could be crafty and fight more than one way. Mitri was as much baffled as he was battered by the world champion, who employed ramming straight lefts to inflict most of the damage. LaMotta rarely led off or launched a big attack and Tiberio was understandably confused. He surely hadn?t contemplated having his face messed up by a steady LaMotta jab. Those jolting straight lefts kept coming and Mitri couldn?t avoid them. Figuring out early that the Italian was no match for him, Jake fought within himself and did only as much as he needed to.
Not that LaMotta could resist some of the old crash-bang-wallop. He nearly bent Mitri in half with a big body blow in the tenth round, by which time the challenger already needed a knockout to win the fight.
Full of courage, Mitri tried to the end and launched a commendable late rally in the last three rounds, when Jake was forced to revert to type as the two boys rained blows at each other.
Although a LaMotta victory was never really in doubt, the fight was a highly watchable battle that kept the interest of the fans right to the end and got a rousing reception. Bronx Jake was back in people?s good books.
Fans
While Jake was glad to have the fans back on his side after the Mitri win, the warm and magnanimous glow that comes from victory didn?t extend to the New York boxing writers or the sports powers-that-be. ?Fuck you??that most effective of verbal put-downs?was not permissible in print in LaMotta?s time, but that was pretty much Jake?s attitude.
Of the writers he said: ?They?ve been stupid and miserable about a lot of things and I don?t know if they want to admit they?ve made mistakes. Oh, they were mostly picking Mitri over me just because they didn?t like seeing me have the title.
?What?s that got to do with fighting? A fighter ought to be judged on how he fights, but the difference is that you can?t fool all of the public all of the time. They can be steamed up against me a few times, but, when they watch me giving satisfaction for their money, they think for themselves and they stop believing what they read.?
The press reaction to his championship win over Cerdan was still a painful sore to Jake: ?When I won the title from Cerdan, all the papers had it that I beat a one-armed fighter. Right? That would make it seem the people didn?t accept me as a real champion. I came home from Detroit to find the biggest parade and reception in the Bronx you could imagine.
?The phone never stopped ringing. Presents, letters ? I was snowed under. I think 50 per cent of the people always were for me in New York.?
La Motta felt he had been studiously avoided by the boxing authorities as a fighter worthy of a world championship challenge. He had fought his way to the number one contender?s spot, but might just as well have been the invisible man. He was bitter and with some justification.
It is certainly true that familiarity breeds contempt. In the years since his fighting days?and the defiant old fellow is still very much alive and ticking at the age of 91?Jake?s celebrity status has tended to obscure a sprawling ring record of top quality. He is forever linked with Ray Robinson and both men fought the very best boxers of their generation.
By the time of his victory over Mitri, LaMotta remained the only man to have beaten the fabulous Sugar Baby, even though Ray held a 3-1 advantage in their exciting series. Typically, Jake disputed the score. ?I think I beat him another time too. I had the better of him in Chicago when we fought twelve rounds.?
La Motta longed to fight Robbie over the championship distance of fifteen rounds. ?I can give him pace he doesn?t get from any other guy and I hurt him in the body, which nobody else does. And he doesn?t know as much about scientific condition as I do. When he starts to slip physically, he?ll go faster than I will.?
Robinson apart, look at some of those other mighty names on the LaMotta log up to his coronation as champion. Making his professional debut in March, 1941, with a points win over Charley Mackley at the Old St. Nick?s Arena in New York, Jake won fourteen and drew one of his first fifteen fights before dropping a hotly disputed decision to Jimmy Reeves in Cleveland. The crowd booed that decision for around twenty minutes, while the ring hosted some unofficial bonus fights between the various aggrieved.
Reeves won a fair decision over LaMotta in their return match a month later, but it wasn?t long before Jake was bulldozing his way up the ladder. He was quickly mixing with the tough guys of his generation, including Nate Bolden, Jose Basora, and California Jackie Wilson.
When Jake met Jimmy Reeves for the third time, at the Olympic Stadium in Detroit in 1943, a closely fought battle was abruptly terminated by a left to the chin from LaMotta in the sixth round. The 21-year-old kid from the Bronx was learning.
Jake had a series of winning fights with Fritzie Zivic and Ossie Harris, and was thought by many to have been unlucky in losing a decision to that ace of a pro, Lloyd Marshall. The top quality opposition kept coming. LaMotta knocked out George Costner in six rounds and pounded out points victories over Bert Lytell and Tommy Bell.
Holman Williams, Bob Satterfield, Anton Raadik and Tony Janiro were also beaten by the Bronx Bull. The amazing Williams, a brilliant ring mechanic, sported a 141-22-10 record when he met LaMotta. Raadik was a very dangerous operator who would later come close to knocking out Marcel Cerdan in the final round of their 1947 match at the Chicago Stadium. Bob Satterfield was another constant danger man of the era, a notorious in-and-outer with a ferocious clout who would go on to blitz heavyweight star Bob Baker inside a round.
Evidence
This was the body of evidence that LaMotta pointed to when people doubted his credentials. ?Why shouldn?t I have the people for me?? he asked. ?I mean people who have their eyes open?
?I got the dirtiest deal on record when I was number one middleweight contender back around 1946. You probably remember how I was licking the toughest middleweights and light heavyweights. So what happened when Tony Zale got back into action with the title? Did I get consideration? Did the press, the promoters and the New York Commission fight for me?
?Promoter Mike Jacobs saw a money shot for Rocky Graziano against Zale and bang! I was out in the cold. And I stayed frozen out for two years while they took the match to Chicago and back to Newark.
?Then what happened? They had Zale as champ again and they brought in Cerdan. Did he deserve the shot as much as I did? Okay, let all that pass. Finally I get a match with Cerdan. What does the commission in New York do? It drives the match out of town, laughs at the match, says it?s too one-sided. But when I licked Cerdan, New York jumped on the bandwagon, didn?t it?
?Talking about these things, I get heated up. If all this happened to somebody other than LaMotta, they?d have the crying towels out.?
It was apparent that Jake LaMotta was eager to be liked and indeed many people liked him. He had several close and trusted friends, despite Rocky Graziano joking that nobody ever bothered to look for Jake when they played hide-and-seek as kids. What LaMotta couldn?t be was a phony. Genuine friends were special to him and he expected to earn their respect. He wasn?t looking for plastic pals.
Said Jake: ?In Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago ? every town I?ve gone to ? I made friends right away and with the best people. In New York, I always stayed within my own circle, with my family and a few friends. Maybe if I stepped around more, I?d have more handshaking friends. But I can?t go for that. I want to make friends out of the public by what I do in the ring.?
LaMotta certainly achieved that objective. His way as always.
