The Ring magazine, the leading boxing periodical, said he had the “toughest chin” in the sport’s history. “He fought with an anger that seemed as if it would spring forth from the top of his head like a volcanic eruption.”Įven when he lost, with his features bloodied and bruised, LaMotta retained a measure of pride by refusing to go down. “To LaMotta, fighting was a personal statement,” author and historian Bert Sugar wrote in his 2006 book Boxing’s Greatest Fighters. 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. 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 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. 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. LaMotta died at a Miami-area hospital from complications of pneumonia, according to his longtime fiancee, Denise Baker.Įven 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. A daughter, Christi LaMotta, announced his death in a Facebook post, but did not provide additional details. He was 95, according to his family, although some records indicate he may have been a year older. 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 on Tuesday at a hospital near Miami.
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