Jake LaMotta Was More Than Just a ‘Raging Bull’

When a champion dies, a wave of nostalgia for his era rolls over the culture. It’s like “rocket summer,” the wash of snow-melting heat that passes over a wintry Ohio town when spaceships lift off in Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles.” The more famous the champion, the more potent the wave.

The passing at the age of 95 of Jake LaMotta, who held the world middleweight title from 1949 to 1951, has set off a wave of nostalgia for ... 1980. That’s the year of Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull,” starring Robert De Niro as LaMotta, a celebrated performance that set a new standard for a male actor’s immersion in a character. The character has so eclipsed the man that by now it’s hard to see around De Niro’s LaMotta to the guy who died on September 19.

The glutton for punishment depicted in the movie and almost every obituary is a highly stylized take on Jake LaMotta the boxer, who was not only strong and resilient but also a skilled craftsman. Rather than a rage-blind punch eater, he was a cagey pressure fighter who expertly rolled with most of the blows that the movie depicts him as masochistically taking flush on the chin. A swarming attacker who wore down and outpointed opponents with volume of punches, he also gulled them with tactical retreats that tempted them into overextending themselves.

There’s no point in complaining that “Raging Bull” alters its subject in the name of spectacle and storytelling. That’s what movies do. But the movie character’s supplanting of the historical LaMotta — a process in which he cooperated — doesn’t just make it harder to give him his due as a boxer.

It also makes it harder for us to get at the historical dirt attached to the roots of that character: the world that shaped LaMotta, and the knowledge that flowed through it. He fought when boxing was still a central feature not just of the sporting scene but of industrial-era American culture, intertwined with the routines of manufacturing work and deeply embedded in the textures of neighborhood life via the gym, saloon and union hall.

The gradual decline of boxing to the status of niche sport has pushed that era almost beyond our ability to recover it. As a result, we have lost contact with much of the knowledge about bodies, force and work that went along with being good with your hands in the golden age of boxing.

Floyd Mayweather Jr., our own era’s biggest name in boxing, has counted on such a forgetting to save him from being laughed off the face of the earth when he claims that he’s the greatest fighter of all time because he’s undefeated. He’s a defensive virtuoso, blessed with mentors who passed along to him precious remnants of golden-age know-how, but his claim is empty puffery. Two magic words that refute it are “Jake LaMotta.”

LaMotta fought an epochal six-bout series with Sugar Ray Robinson, who is generally regarded by those even slightly informed about boxing as the greatest of all time. The classic matchup between the bigger, stronger LaMotta and the impossibly elegant Robinson produced closely contested bouts packed with skill, heart and suspense. Robinson won five of them, but LaMotta handed him his first career loss in the other.

Robinson’s record was 175-19, with 6 draws; Mayweather’s, amassed against well-chosen opponents in an era when stars fight much less often and for a lot more money, is 50-0. For the purposes of comparison, you can set aside Robinson’s other 194 fights and simply recognize that going 5-1 against LaMotta was a herculean labor far more impressive than all of Mayweather’s victories put together.

I mentioned this to Mayweather once — backstage at a WrestleMania show, where he was dabbling in play fighting while he waited for Manny Pacquiao to get ring-worn enough that it would make business sense to fight him. Mayweather’s counter was, as always, “But was Robinson undefeated?” Fight a prime LaMotta six times and let’s see if you’re still undefeated.

Not long after I talked to Mayweather, I called LaMotta, who gave him credit for being smart enough to make more money while absorbing less damage. LaMotta said: “I fought 13 years, 106 fights, and I made $750,000, total. Fighting all the time keeps you strong, makes you able to take a shot better, but I would have fought less if I made more money.” He said he would have fake-wrestled or done anything else anybody had asked him to, as long as the work involved getting paid and not getting punched.

Mayweather is the greatest money fighter of all time, without peer in exploiting the conditions of the boxing business in his moment to maximize the ratio of reward to risk. But he can’t enjoy that distinction and also come even remotely close to being the greatest fighter of all time. To reach that simple truth, find your way past the movie back to what the midcentury fight world knew, back to what Robinson knew in his sinews and bones, ingrained there by 200 professional fights, including six monumentally tough shifts on the shop floor of the ring with the flesh-and-blood Jake LaMotta.