Jake LaMotta, ‘Raging Bull’ in and Out of the Ring, Dies at 95<br />He would, as he wrote in his memoir, “charge out of the corner, punch, punch, punch, never give up,<br />take all the punishment the other guy could hand out but stay in there, slug and slug and slug.”<br />Ray Arcel, one of boxing’s most renowned trainers, said of LaMotta, “When he was in the ring, it was like he was in a cage fighting for his life.”<br />Best remembered for his six bouts with Sugar Ray Robinson, LaMotta won 83 fights (30 by knockouts) and lost 19 (including a “fix” to which he belatedly confessed, telling a congressional panel<br />that he had been promised that if he lost that fight he would get a title shot).<br />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 —<br />that became the subject of an acclaimed film, died on Tuesday in Aventura, Fla., near Miami.<br />As Silvani recalled in “Corner Men,” by Ronald K. Fried (1993), LaMotta would “lay against the ropes playing possum<br />and all at once — and this no exaggeration — he’d throw seven, eight, nine, ten left hooks at you.”<br />LaMotta had been favored to defeat Billy Fox of Philadelphia in a light-heavyweight bout in November 1947,<br />but the odds swung 3-1 in Fox’s favor shortly before the fight, evidently because of an infusion of organized crime money from Philadelphia.<br />Mr. Scorsese made his film long after LaMotta had squandered his money — he said he made $1 million in the ring —<br />and had gone through a series of stormy marriages, been sent to prison once more and ballooned into obesity.
