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  It was on February 5, 1943, that the Sugar Ray Robinson–Jake LaMotta rivalry genuinely took hold. Their first bout, four months earlier in New York, had been won by Robinson. It showcased dueling portraits and starkly different styles, hinting at an allure, teasing the public’s appetite. But it was in Detroit that those portraits exploded, that tough automotive and steel city that truly told of things to come—of the blood and the fury.

  In New York circles, Jake LaMotta was known as “the Bronx Bull.” “A fight,” the Bull expressed, “is all of a piece, you get moving in a certain rhythm, you can’t stop, it’s all got to go along. It’s true that you have to stop at the end of every round, but once you’ve started you have to keep going, you don’t stop till you get to the end.” He thought every fight might be the end. If not for him, then, he hoped, for his opponent.

  He was the child of immigrants. They came on big hulking liners across the Atlantic, getting seasick, dreaming, becoming hungry, praying. Between 1900 and 1910, 2,045,000 Italian immigrants entered the United States. That was triple the number of the previous decade. Even before they shuffled down the gangplanks of those ships—staring wide-eyed amidst the clatter and chatter of Ellis Island—there already existed the foundation of the social and political turmoil that would test their resolve. It took little time for the accusations to emerge, and they came from many corners. Never mind the intelligentsia, the scholars and tradesmen and seamstresses among them. It was another social element that took hold. An 1884 letter to the editor in The New York Times read, in part: “The Italians who come to this country with a hereditary respect for brigandage, and find that the men who are most talked of here are the Jesse Jameses of the West and the Jay Goulds of the East, naturally think that there is a fine field in America for genuine Italian brigandage. The wonder is that they have ever thought of engaging in any other industry.” There were countless other letters printed of similar opinion.

  In 1890, a lynching took place in New Orleans that cut crushingly deep into the Italian immigrant sense of insecurity in a foreign land. David C. Hennessy, the New Orleans police chief, was murdered right in front of his home. Hennessy had been conducting an investigation of crime wars in the city that pointed to members of the Mafia. As he lay dying, Hennessy is reported to have uttered the identity of his killers: “the dagoes.” Arrests were swift. One arrested man was shot as he peered through the jailhouse doors. The others—all men of Italian lineage—were pulled outside by a screeching and cursing lynch mob. Their bodies swung in the open and charged air. There was outrage among Italians across America. A group holding a rally in Troy, New York, to protest the lynchings was pelted with rocks; gunshots were fired at the gathering, but miraculously no one was hit.

  Italy’s fascism kept the immigrant tide flowing toward America’s shores. Not surprisingly, in 1901 the Society for the Protection of Italian Immigrants was formed.

  Then came the convulsive drama that would echo for years to come.

  In 1920, Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, a fish peddler and shoemaker—in addition to being anarchists who had drawn the attention of federal agents—had been arrested and accused of being involved in the holdup and murder of a payroll guard and paymaster in South Braintree, Massachusetts. The men were, without a doubt, of a criminal mind; the FBI had accumulated files on them and some of their acquaintances. But what sent spasms of outrage through the immigrant community as the murder trial got under way was that the evidence was so circumstantial. The judge, Webster Thayer, appeared blatantly biased in favor of the prosecution, verbally taunting both defendants within earshot of court observers. Both men proclaimed their innocence. There were rallies on their behalf. Each received the death sentence.

  It was the law then—and it continued to raise ire—that the same judge who sentenced the men could also hear their appeals. Judge Thayer seemed to relish the opportunity, and his second ruling only rubber-stamped his first. There were letters written to high-placed politicians as the drama of their innocence or guilt spilled across newspaper pages for years. The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote an impassioned letter to Gov. Alvan T. Fuller on the eve of their scheduled date to die: “I cry to you with a million voices: answer our doubt. Exert the clemency which your high office affords. There is need in Massachusetts of a great man tonight. It is not yet too late for you to be that man.” The governor felt otherwise.

  Sacco and Vanzetti were each led into the death chamber just before midnight on August 23, 1927. Their deaths ignited protests throughout Italy, but also in London, Paris, Geneva, and Johannesburg. Millay wrote a poem about them called “Justice Denied in Massachusetts.” Woody Guthrie sang a ballad.

  It was hardly as weighty as the discrimination meted out against blacks, but the Italian immigrant was caught in a prism of political and social upheaval that unfairly multiplied their sins and belittled their contributions.

  In New York City, a great many of the Italian immigrants settled on the Lower East Side, as Joe LaMotta did when he arrived. He hailed from Messina, a region in southern Italy. Northern Italians looked upon their part of the country as cultured and were condescending toward their brothers to the south. LaMotta and his wife and children, struggling in Manhattan, moved to Philadelphia not long after World War I. He sold fruits and vegetables from a horse-drawn cart. He became bitter and took his anger out on his wife by hitting her across the face. One of his children, Jake, was constantly bullied at school. He cried to his father, upon which he received two things: a vicious slap—and an ice pick to defend himself. He wielded it with abandon: “It was the first time I can remember really having someone afraid of me,” he would recall. “I can still remember that feeling of power flood through me. An icepick in my hand—and I was boss!” His enemies, in time, would scatter.

  Back in Manhattan, Jake’s father entered him in back-room fist-fights when he was eight years old: two kids going at it in an open space for the amusement of gathered men. Money was thrown at the feet of the winner. Joe LaMotta pocketed most of his son’s earnings, and the son hated him for it. In time, Jake began stealing—small things, candy, radios. He quit school. He raised the stakes of his stealing when he assaulted men in alleys—sometimes with a lead pipe to the skull—and fled with the money he’d found on them. He ran unrepentant through the naked city like a little demon. He saw his father hit his mother, time and time again, rattling the furniture, frightening the children. Young Jake LaMotta’s whole childhood seemed stitched together by violence.

  When the authorities caught up to the teenager he was sent to the State Reform School at Coxsackie. The sentence was one to three years. His father uttered unkind things about him, while his mother fretted with worry.

  At Coxsackie, his rough Bronx-boy demeanor only hardened. Jake sassed guards. He kept to himself, a moody and distant figure, as stony as the brick around him. He ran into Rocky Graziano, an old neighborhood acquaintance also doing time. Graziano told LaMotta to walk a straight line so his time would pass quicker; LaMotta said he had no intention of doing that, and Graziano dismissed him as “nuts.” Jake walked up to colored inmates—the races banded together for security—and told them flat out they should steer clear of him. They did. His escape plot was stolen from a Grade-B movie: He was caught trying to flee in the back of a truck. The truck never made it beyond the reformatory walls. The warden—who thought him a “goddam [sic] moron”—sent him straight to the hole, which was below ground, a blanket of darkness. On sleepless nights he balled his thick fists and hurled foul words at the walls.

  The prison chaplain interceded and got him out of the hole in two weeks, then suggested he get into the prison boxing program, which he did.

  For the most part, he trained himself, a grueling exercise of sparring and jumping rope, lasting until he nearly collapsed. His ring style was aggressive and relentless, crouched low and stepping forward.

  No one understood why LaMotta wanted to take on the prison champ, a huge and feared fighter within
those walls, but he insisted on the chance. He trained for months, while guards snickered that he’d take a merciless beating. On fight night the gym was crowded: the warden and the guards with their sallow complexions, and even the prison chaplain. LaMotta refused the glove-touching ritual, his enmity against the champ—who had laughed watching him in the ring months earlier—heightening by the second. They gasped when the champ took a barrage of blows to the head and guts, finally crumpling at LaMotta’s feet. The air grew hot and heady; those in their seats began to stir like penguins as they tried to replay and chatter about the vicious knockout they had just seen. LaMotta stalked around the ring, looking out over those gathered. He had no friends, save for the chaplain, and he didn’t care.

  He gathered up his meager belongings on the day of his release. He had little to say to anyone. He saw the chaplain, and of course the warden, who gave him a quick lecture about going straight.

  Then Jake LaMotta—sprung from the stone walls where the Bull had been born—walked out the front door to his freedom.

  Back home in the Bronx, LaMotta, determined to become a professional boxer, got himself entered in some unsanctioned bouts that were held in warehouses—down-and-dirty affairs with beer and loudmouthed men. (Some of the warehouses fronted as porn movie theatres when they weren’t hosting these ad hoc boxing events.) The scene of desperately poor people and their sporting fetish—“home relief and boxing,” as LaMotta put it—depressed him. He finally got himself over to the Teasdale Athletic Club. There he was surrounded by trainers and other fighters hoping to enter the pro ranks—an environment that offered a hint of organization and success.

  His straight-ahead style attracted some attention and encouragement. He entered the Diamond Belt fights, local charity events that featured up-and-coming fighters, and got some press attention because people got dressed up—women in diamonds!—in evening attire to attend. The headlines—LA MOTTA WINS FOURTH STRAIGHT; LA MOTTA WINS IN SIZZLING FIGHT WITH ZEKE BROWN; LA MOTTA WINS DIAMOND BELT LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE IN FINALS—left LaMotta reeling with joy.

  His Bronx pals told him he was ready to turn pro—and then pointed in the direction of the Mob, which held a powerful sway over boxing and could speed the prospects of a promising fighter. LaMotta didn’t want anything to do with the Mob; he didn’t trust them. So he went his own way.

  On March 3, 1941, Jake LaMotta fought his first professional bout, a four-round victory held in New York. (It took place five months after Sugar Ray Robinson had fought his first pro bout in the city, so they were breathing the same air, carrying the same dreams.) LaMotta had grinned on his way to the dressing room following that initial victory—though in the ring there had been something akin to an animal’s fury in his eyes. He fought often in Detroit and Cleveland in those early years, the better to escape the clutches of the New York Mob. He eyed Negro fighters with great and fevered curiosity: “Many of those colored six-round fighters would have chased some high-priced top notchers right out of the ring. A lot of them would have to fight with handcuffs on just to get a pay night here and there.” He held no pity, however, regarding the uneven social and political dynamic faced by any colored pugilist: “You would just about have to kill them before they’d give up. Well, I had something going for me, too, on that score—I was just as hungry as they were. In those days there wasn’t anybody I wouldn’t get in the ring with. Not only did I fight the colored bombers, but I took on guys in any weight class.”

  In time, fight followers became convinced LaMotta was another version of Harry Greb, the native Pittsburgher who fought from 1913 to 1926. Greb—known as “the Pittsburgh Windmill”—had a fearless and cocky straight-ahead style. Greatness was predicted for him early in his career. It was amazing how often he fought: In a thirteen-year career Greb battled 299 times. It was quite a feat—and quite maddening. He appeared to be a man only at peace between the ropes. Greb’s battles against Gene Tunney—one loss, one win, two no-decisions—were legendary and blood-spattering affairs that left both fighters looking like reddened zombies. Between those Tunney battles, Greb had dropped down to middleweight, and he took that crown in 1923. The most remarkable evidence of Greb’s toughness, however, is that he fought for years half-blind: His retina became detached in a 1921 bout against Kid Norfolk. Like a man on a wartime battlefield, all he needed to keep going was consciousness. Four weeks after the eye accident he was fighting again. In 1926 Greb was in an automobile accident. Surgeons aimed to repair some of his facial injuries from the years of boxing while attending to his injuries from the accident. But Greb never came out of surgery. Even if he was past his prime, his death stunned many. He was thirty-two years old.

  In 1942 Sugar Ray Robinson was becoming agitated regarding future championship possibilities. He was like the welcoming welterweight host, only no one of stature wished to come to his party. The belt’s titleholder was avoiding him. The delicacies he offered—sudden headlines if he should be defeated, a bigger purse in an expected rematch—were not enough for potential challengers and their camps. Back in the summer of 1941, in Philadelphia, he had fought the lightweight champion, Sammy Angott and beaten him. But that was a non-title fight. So in 1942, he stood across from weak foes in the ring. Who was Maxie Berger? Or Harvey Dubs? Who were Dick Banner and Reuben Shank? Mere victims of his in merciless engagements he took while pining for better foes.

  He began trolling for challengers out of his weight division.

  Sugar Ray Robinson, who had spent part of his youth around the Bronx and knew the environs well, had heard of the hard-puncher from up there and—always with an eye toward the marquee matchup—he began pondering a LaMotta match. The upside thrilled him: It would mean being ushered into the middleweight ranks against one of that division’s most talked-about fighters. The downside—a loss that might darken his unblemished record—was something he simply chalked up as the inevitable danger of any fighter without a loss. When he instructed George Gainford to approach the LaMotta camp, Gainford’s nerves went haywire. La-Motta outweighed Robinson by nearly fifteen pounds. The number of those pounds could fluctuate now and then, but that hardly lessened Gainford’s concerns. LaMotta could flat-out hit and hit hard. Gainford lived on Robinson’s fists, and he knew well that many a fighter had been prematurely pushed into another weight division, a march that sometimes led them right to their breaking point. Robinson—whose self-confidence was a thing of unbending resolve, even beauty—also declared that he had no intention of bulking up. Gainford heaved a sigh, then began making inquiries on behalf of his impatient fighter.

  Aside from Gainford, there were more than a few who looked upon a potential Robinson-LaMotta matchup with worry. According to Dan Burley of the Amsterdam News, there had been “a lot of shaking of the head going on” regarding the potential clash. Burley wondered if the lighter Robinson would be able to avoid the muscle of LaMotta, and noted, “Robinson has an alarming tendency to get in close with rough, tough, bear-like individuals when there is no need to do so, mainly because Sugar likes to prove to himself and to the fans that it makes no difference to him whether he’s punching at a distance or mauling in the close-ups.” Burley sensed trouble for Robinson if he allowed himself “to be sucked in” by LaMotta, which would leave him at the mercy of LaMotta’s “blind swings.”

  Both Sugar Ray Robinson and Jake LaMotta were fighters who directed the course of their careers over and beyond the will of their managers. “Sugar Ray was the boss,” LaMotta would say decades later. “Whatever Sugar Ray said, went. Just like me. We fought anybody. No one could tell us who to fight and who not to fight. It was really like Sugar Ray didn’t have a manager. He was his own manager.”

  “Sugar Ray took on LaMotta because there was no one else in the welterweight division,” the trainer Angelo Dundee said.

  The fight was announced for October 2 in Manhattan.

  And immediately, from barstool to tenement stoop, from sandwich shop to radio station, from political-club back rooms to fi
ght gyms everywhere, the clack of chatter began. About LaMotta’s strength, and Robinson’s guile. Prognosticators rehearsed and debated memories of each fighter’s previous fights: old Italian men on the city’s East Side and down in Greenwich Village, conjuring a LaMotta victory into their passionate minds; smooth uptown figures in long coats—fall had arrived, the air was crisp enough for tweed or wool—believing in Sugar the same way they had believed in Louis. The fighter’s styles, obvious to many, were a fire-and-rain contrast. “A fighter who performs in the windmill style of Harry Greb or Jackie Kid Berg, LaMotta keeps charging forward at all times and throws punches incessantly,” one New York publication noted, with an obvious tinge of worry. “It is a style that Robinson doesn’t relish, and that has always given Sugar Ray his most uncomfortable evenings in the ring.” The Chicago Defender made mention of Robinson’s thirty-five-bout winning streak: “A surprisingly large number of boxing experts expect it to end at that figure.”