![]() ![]() Actually, LaMotta was a highly skilled boxer, cagy and clever as well as savage when he had to be. But if it has a flaw, it’s with the depiction of Jake (played so memorably by Robert DeNiro) as a human punching bag who took far more punishment than he handed out and who absorbed the pain in some weird act of expiation. “Raging Bull,” Martin Scorsese’s epic account of Jake’s grim life and times, is an almost perfect movie. If he were still with us, the matchless Sugar Ray Robinson – with whom Jake brawled six times, losing “only” five – would gladly attest to that assertion. And when he wasn’t in the tank, he was as honest a warrior as ever stepped in a bloody ring. Does that have something to do with the forward march of civilization? Given all that’s awful that abounds in contemporary life, the mere suggestion seems silly.Īnyway, if LaMotta was hardly an exemplar of the manly arts at their best, please believe this was one tough cookie. Is there any longer an excuse for boxing? Not really! Yet I confess, if somewhat inexplicably, to missing it as once it was and will certainly never be again. ![]() Jake was the last of the great champions reared in the 1940s who gave boxing, then at its height of esteem and fascination in the culture, a grip on our imagination that survives even as the game now sadly withers away. His passing closes the door on an era of sports history that, while unquestionably sordid, was also compelling, even heroic. This, ladies and gentlemen, was one helluva character, may I assure you. There was much that was immensely ugly about him, but he seemed to revel in all of it which, perversely or otherwise, gave him a certain baffling yet extraordinary charm. ![]() If ever a man lived a harder life, it’s doubtful he did so with more relish or enthusiasm than Jake. Others, no doubt, said to themselves, “I thought that bum died 50 years ago.”īoth sentiments are viable. When the legendary pug Jake LaMotta – better known as the “Raging Bull” – died the other day at the tender age of 95, my first reaction was to wonder how such an incomparable rascal and incorrigible roughneck could have possibly survived 95 years. ![]()
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