How Sugar Ray Robinson made Jake La Motta his bloody Valentine in 1951
The numbers and statistics that can be pulled from the great Sugar Ray Robinson’s record are truly extraordinary. A rapid and exemplary 85 and 0 amateur career preceded exactly 200 professional bouts, spread thick and heavy across a full quarter of a century. In that time he took on all-comers, from 129lb featherweights to 173lb light heavyweights, with the calibre of Hall of Fame fighters such as Kid Gavilian, Carmen Basilio and Gene Fullmer sandwiched in between.
He was victorious on 173 occasions, scored 108 knockouts, and no man was able to knock him out. Only the immeasurable power of the sun in a sweltering Yankee Stadium achieved that feat. Robinson spent 13 rounds schooling the bemused 175lb champion, Joey Maxim, before collapsing with heat exhaustion and failing to answer the bell for the next round. Even then, Robinson was reluctant to concede that a celestial body as meagre as the centre of our solar system could have overwhelmed him.
In the dressing room after that fight in 1952, a barely coherent Robinson looked to Mayor Impellitteri of New York, a trio of medical doctors, and his manager, George Gainford, for some clarity on what had just happened. “He didn’t knock me out, did he?” Robinson mumbled as Gainford and Impellitteri supported his semi-listless body while it lolled towards the sanctuary of a cold shower. The two suited men assured Ray that it was the eviscerating heat, not Maxim, that had prevailed but Robinson, now 16 pounds lighter than at the opening bell, was not convinced.
As the cooling water began to take effect, he spoke more clearly. “The heat didn’t beat me,” he began, shaking his head. “God willed it that way. It was God. He wanted me to lose.” Even the magisterial Robinson could not expect to compete against such an opponent.
His other great foe was a slightly less saintly figure with whom he shared six fights. The name Jake La Motta is the most populous on Robinson’s hit-list, yet it is conspicuous by its absence from Ray’s knockout tally. The two men were destined to be inextricably linked from the moment they first toed the line opposite one another in Madison Square Garden in 1942.
The 35 and 0 Robinson was already on the road to welterweight immortality when he accepted the challenge of facing a 160 pounder who, while not yet a marquee fighter, was regarded as one of the toughest men to ever lace a glove.
A later autobiography, for which the term brutally honest could have been coined, appended the prefix Raging to his nickname, but at the outset he was simply the Bull, or the Bronx Bull, on account of a fighting style that resembled a hungry front row hooker on the rugby pitch, ferociously boring into a busy ruck in search of the ball.
He was a one-man riot, a crouching, bobbing, hooking menace who appeared to thrive on the punishment he absorbed in every round he fought. Some brawlers are happy to take one to land one. La Motta gladly accepted 10 in return. This was a guy who, when asked to describe his childhood, said that growing up is having bad things happen to you for no reason. He was bred not to give a feck. A confession later in his life says it all: “I took unnecessary punishment when I was fighting. Subconsciously – I didn’t know it then – I fought like I didn’t deserve to live.”
He was as blunt and crude as Robinson was cute and slick. The two men shared a profession but their philosophies on how best to do their jobs were at polar opposites of the pugilism spectrum. Robinson believed boxing was about finding out who was the smartest in the ring, while La Motta was convinced it was a contest to see who was the toughest. It was an ideological clash that blessed us with an enduring rivalry and guaranteed an everlasting legacy.
Robinson comfortably won their first encounter in a unanimous 10-round decision in front of almost 13,000 in the Garden. The Associated Press report described a “willing and rugged workman” being “completely outclassed” by a “skinny negro swatter.” The United Press, meanwhile, was less flattering in claiming that the “slender, dancing 21-year-old negro” deserved little credit for beating the “human truck” La Motta while “back-pedalling.”
Whichever way you choose to analyse the two contrasting styles, the template for the rivalry was set in stone. La Motta was the bull and Robinson was the matador. The squat, rugged La Motta was going to brawl with furious energy and the lithe, elegant, Robinson would swerve and shimmy and toy with his opponent, torturing him until his spirit was broken and his body open to a decisive
estocada.
For some boxing fans – the United Press reporter included – the absence of that final, bloody stage of the contest renders the impressive beauty of the performance almost irrelevant.
Boxing, like bull-fighting, is a blood sport and people who never enter the ring are often quick to call for a violent end to proceedings: an easy demand to make from the behind the safety of the ropes.
In early 1943, most of Europe and South East Asia was on fire as the battles of the second world war grew deadlier and ever more entrenched. A childhood mastoid operation for La Motta – the result of a violent father yanking on his left ear as an over-zealous dog trainer might on a misbehaving pit bull’s leash – made La Motta exempt from military service. But Robinson was practically perfect as a physical specimen and his induction into the US Army was set for 27 February.
With the standard private’s $50-a-month wage unlikely to sustain Robinson’s taste for the good life, he was happy for Mike Jacobs, the most powerful figure in boxing at the time, to hastily secure a few paydays before his war duties took precedence. Jacobs delivered and in February 1943 Robinson fought an astonishing 30 rounds across three fights in just three weeks. First up was a rematch with La Motta in front of 19,000 fans in Detroit’s Olympia Stadium.
Since their first meeting, in 1942, they had both fought and won five times. La Motta was hardly a choirboy between fights, but Robinson, whose roving eye for women was as quick and instinctive as his fists in the ring, was particularly distracted over that particular holiday period. Though he knew he’d never be close to the front line, perhaps the spectre of his looming army induction subconsciously sent his psyche into last hurrah mode.
Whatever the reason, he was not ready for La Motta that night and, in Robinson’s own words, the Bull stomped him for the full 10 rounds. In the death throes of the eighth, a right hand to Robinson’s mid-section and a left to his jaw knocked him through the ropes and out of the ring. He scrambled back to listen to a count that reached nine before the bell provided some respite. Robinson survived until the end but there was no surprise when La Motta was awarded the unanimous decision and the honour of being the first man to defeat Robinson. That achievement alone was enough for the Bull to be named Ring Magazine Fighter of the Year.
Robinson was distraught but the emotional pain was eased somewhat by the knowledge he could right the wrong in three short weeks. Incredibly, he fought again before that against California Jackie Wilson, a US Army sergeant on leave and a 47-4-2 boxer. One of Wilson’s four defeats was at the hands of the Bronx Bull just a month before when he entered the ring as a 4-1 favourite and left it 10 rounds later, in La Motta’s words, “a sadder but wiser man”. Robinson beat him too but it was a tough outing and one judge scored the fight a draw.
A week later he was back in the Garden for a third fight with La Motta. Announced as Sugar Ray Robinson, he knew that the following morning in the Manhattan Island induction centre, he’d be called forward as Private Walker Smith Junior.
To this day, La Motta maintains he won Part III and believes the judges were blinded by the shine that emanates from a public figure answering his country’s military call. He backs up his claim by pointing to the seventh-round knockdown and subsequent eight count that Robinson had to endure. But in truth, few saw it as the Bull did.
After the folly of engaging with La Motta on his rugged terms 21 days before, Robinson played to his own strengths this time around, keeping the Bull at bay on the end of a long, spiteful jab. Whenever La Motta did manage to get past that left hand, Robinson adroitly conjured up enough space to welcome his opponent inside with fierce uppercuts. The referee gave La Motta three rounds but neither ringside scorer could find more than two that ended in his favour. The decision was unanimous.
Their fourth meeting, back in the Garden two years later, was almost identical as Robinson controlled the fight behind his quicksilver jab, only allowing La Motta isolated success in the sixth round when he temporarily took his foot off the gas.
The Bull had more success in their fifth bout, six months later in Chicago’s Comiskey Park, and the first to be scheduled for 12 rounds. La Motta figured the extension benefitted him most as Robinson tended to start fast and then coast to victory towards the end. He may have been right, and one judge saw La Motta as a clear winner this time, but ultimately he was on the wrong side of a split decision. It would be a long six-year wait before he had another shot at Robinson.
The prospect of GGG vs Brook and Canelo vs Khan in a month is amazing, it's a great time for British boxing. Although apparently Fury is thinking of giving it in to spend more time with his family, which would be a disappointment. Just when the Heavyweight division was beginning to get interesting 
