9/27/2023 0 Comments Lamotta boxing![]() ![]() On occasion, there are still sparks of intense interest, as there was last month when the welterweight Floyd Mayweather Jr. Try asking a friend or co-worker to do that now, let alone to care which among the alphabet soup of sanctioning organizations conferred the title. 1.) Time was when almost all Americans, even ones who hated the fight game, could instantly name the heavyweight champ. When the Gallup poll asked Americans in 2013 for their favorite sport to watch, a mere 1 percent cited boxing, the same share as those who preferred fishing or figure skating. The death of a well-known fighter of yore is also a time to be reminded of boxing’s steep decline in the United States, to the point of near-irrelevance. And though the screenplay was hardly a flattering portrait of him, LaMotta said, “That’s the way it was.” 4 on its list of the 100 greatest of all time, behind “Citizen Kane,” “The Godfather” and “Casablanca.” Heady company indeed. The American Film Institute ranked it No. The movie is considered among the best by many cinephiles. LaMotta would probably have faded into the blurred recesses of a dimming sport had it not been for “Raging Bull,” a 1980 Martin Scorsese film about this battler’s life, loves and fury. Other boxers bust their hands on him, but in his 106 fights he was knocked down only once, and that was late in his career. There was a fair amount of Ad Francis in Jake LaMotta, the onetime middleweight champion who died on Tuesday at 95. He was the title character in “The Battler,” a 1925 Hemingway short story about a broken-down scrapper encountered by the author’s recurring protagonist, Nick Adams. ![]() “They couldn’t hurt me.”Īd Francis wasn’t real. “They all bust their hands on me,” he said. Ad Francis’ face was misshapen from having absorbed too many blows in the boxing ring but, he proudly said, “I could take it.” ![]()
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