Sweet Thunder Page 29

  Absent Cerdan, Jake LaMotta fought five fights in 1950; two were title fights. He defeated both Tiberio Mitri and, in their rematch, Laurent Dauthille. The Bull now strutted like a peacock around Manhattan, a champion who wanted everyone who didn’t already know to hear about the accomplishments of Jake LaMotta. He laughed too loudly and ignored social graces. Walking along one evening, he and Vikki ran into the comic Fat Jack Leonard on a Manhattan street corner. Fat Jack blurted out a joke to everyone he met. Jake listened, then, bizarrely, belted Fat Jack in the stomach. The comic cringed in pain. “What did you expect?” LaMotta said, his voice edgy. “You make your living telling jokes. I’m the champ. That’s how I make mine.”

  After mid-September of 1950, LaMotta didn’t fight for the rest of the year. In 1951, the public began clamoring for him to get back in the ring. It was time for him to defend his crown. And, if not a champion, they at least wanted him to fight a contender.

  On August 9, 1950, Sugar Ray Robinson fought Charley Fusari in Jersey City. The fight went the full fifteen rounds, with Robinson retaining his welterweight crown. But it had become mighty difficult for him to keep making the welterweight limit, and he decided after the Fusari fight to move up to the middleweight division. As soon as he started calling himself a middleweight, the public saw what was coming.

  It all began as conjecture, then shifted to heady and fast-moving gossip. Finally, promoters realized the marquee attraction of such a matchup. In time, emissaries for the Robinson and LaMotta camps huddled and began negotiations.

  What LaMotta had—the middleweight belt—Robinson now wanted; what Robinson had—a smooth and elegant image outside the ring—LaMotta craved.

  The fight was scheduled for Valentine’s Day in Chicago. The public swooned.

  A tenseness gripped the country at the time; President Truman had committed forces to the Korean conflict. Old generals from World War II and battle-tested American soldiers—along with U.N. forces—were pushing through the mud of Chipyong in Korea in an effort to defeat Communism. Gen. Douglas MacArthur remained wary of integrating military units. President Truman, however, got rid of him in favor of the more amenable Gen. Matthew Ridgway. And pride swelled in Negro establishments—Sugar Ray’s nightclub, Joe Louis’s restaurant—that, at long last, military units were now integrated.

  Early in 1951, Sugar Ray Robinson was being honored at a Boxing Writers Dinner at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan. They were annual black-tie affairs. The heavyweights always looked as if they were about to burst from their tuxedos. Not Sugar Ray: Robinson was wonderfully proportioned—as if he had been put together by a men’s fashion designer conscious of perfect measurements—and seemed born into his attire, formal or otherwise. Dignitaries were sprinkled about the evening audience, along with women in gleaming jewels, catching the wattage of Sugar Ray’s smile. Not everyone who had been invited could make it, and an assortment of telegrams were read from the podium, addressed to honoree Robinson. SEE YOU FEBRUARY 14 IN CHICAGO, one said. MAKE SURE YOU’RE THERE. JAKE. Beneath the glittering chandeliered light—elbows at rest upon white linen tablecloths—everyone, including Robinson, chuckled.

  It was as if the rivalry had been in stop-time since 1945, and now it was suddenly being resumed. There would be one marked difference, however, this time: It would be televised across the nation. The whole country would be able to see for themselves what the Robinson-LaMotta wars had been about—and why they still had such powerful currency.

  In 1948 there was a significant rise in the number of broadcast television stations across the country. The medium was still precious enough to be considered a novelty. In the 1948 television season, coaxial cables began linking the East and Midwest. Suddenly, television was a national phenomenon; shows could be circuited right to the West Coast. The first huge TV stars—Arthur Godfrey, Ed Sullivan, and Milton Berle—had also come onto the TV scene between 1948 and 1949.

  Retail stores often experienced a bump in the sales of TV sets prior to the broadcasting of big nationally televised events and fights. Ad salesmen realized this, and the newspapers were full of endorsements of which sets to purchase. There were, as well, trade-in opportunities—smaller sets for larger ones! DuMont was a huge manufacturer of TVs, and a mainstay of its product was the DuMont Lifetone Picture guarantee: “This exclusive DuMont picture circuit gives the finest range of ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’ in the most lifelike telepicture possible today.” One New York outlet, Davega, crowed about trade-in opportunities: “Davega Will Take Any Size TV Set—Any Make—and Offer a TRADE-IN ALLOWANCE Towards a New 17″ or 19″ EMERSON!”

  Fight promoters often had to work hard to secure their fight venues, fitting their bouts in around other events already scheduled inside big city arenas and stadiums. February 14 was the date that promoters found available for what would be the sixth and final act of the Robinson-LaMotta drama, a date that struck many as ironic inasmuch as their fights had always been full of bone-jarring and wounding fisticuffs. Now its next installment would take place on a day reserved for roses and sonnets.

  At a Chicago fight luncheon days before the bout, Robinson—with LaMotta sitting nearby—instructed a waiter to bring him a cup of red juice from a raw steak. When the beef blood arrived, Robinson offered a sip to LaMotta. “Keep it,” a puzzled LaMotta snapped. Robinson then proceeded to drink the blood. The Bull, aghast, shook his head: Robinson—supposedly the smooth and silky persona—was fucking with him and he knew it.

  On fight night, the national TV cameras panned across the audience inside the Chicago Stadium, and the edgy and excited murmurings of thousands could be overheard. But beyond the stadium—in all those homes—an estimated thirty million would tune in. That was one-fifth of the American population. The fighters’ wives were in attendance; both Edna Mae and Vikki looked gorgeous. They sat on opposite sides of the ring.

  Robinson’s hands were being taped tight; Gainford and trainer Harry Wiley feared the bruising his knuckles might take as they rammed into LaMotta’s skull. Robinson’s demeanor worried Wiley. “You look too cool,” Wiley told him.

  LaMotta, in his dressing room, made a strange request to his brother: He wanted a shot of brandy—and got it.

  The familiar voice of Ted Husing, even and sonorous, would be announcing for Pabst Blue Ribbon. “This broadcast tonight is making history,” he proclaimed. “Never before has any event been heard and seen by so many people. Not only here in America but right around the globe. It is being shortwaved to Australia and New Zealand, ten thousand miles away …” The Voice of America would pipe the fight to military camps in Korea; Pan Am flights would begin carrying it at the sound of the bell on their aircraft flying around the world. Press representatives were in attendance from Canada and France. Italian dignitaries were in the audience, representatives of LaMotta’s native land. “The bout the world’s been waiting for,” Husing said.

  For the first time, Sugar Ray Robinson and Jake LaMotta—a crown merely a dream for both when they originally met back in 1942—were meeting as individual champions. Also, a championship belt was at stake. Not since the days of Henry Armstrong had a champion from one division stepped into a ring to face a champion from a separate division. A nation, its DuMont and Emerson TV sets at the ready, was primed.

  LaMotta entered the ring in an eye-catching leopard-spotted robe. Robinson’s robe was rather simple: black silk.

  Soon as the bell sounded, LaMotta rushed in at Robinson, unfolding a strategy similar to the other confrontations—charge and charge and charge—the two becoming entangled until the referee stepped in to separate them. Robinson was still backpedaling from LaMotta in round two, but LaMotta kept charging, going after “Ray’s lean ribs,” as the Chicago Tribune noted. Robinson’s counterpunches began to connect in the third, and a streak of blood could be seen dropping from LaMotta’s nose. “A right obviously hurt LaMotta,” announcer Husing explained. But just as quickly La Motta landed a right to Robinson’s face and his nose was also ble
eding. LaMotta’s aggressiveness had clearly put him ahead going into the fourth.

  Just into the fourth, Robinson unleashed a bolo punch—drawing ahhs from many of the estimated 14,800 on hand—and it stilled LaMotta for a moment. Seconds later, however, LaMotta landed a solid right as the light from the Speed Graphic flashbulbs at ringside erupted. Robinson’s trainers, Gainford and Wiley, were quite pleased at the taping of Robinson’s hands: he stood taller than La Motta, and his fists—the taping held off swelling—continually fell upon LaMotta’s head. In the sixth round, the fighters fought evenly; LaMotta’s right eye was puffed, as were Robinson’s lips. “I just couldn’t level away with him with my right hand,” Robinson would say of the sixth. LaMotta’s endurance surprised him: “… the more I kept punching the more determined he seemed to stay on his feet.”

  And then in the ninth, it happened: Sugar Ray began unloading unanswered punches with a vengeance. He would later admit this had been his and Gainford’s strategy all along. LaMotta, as he imagined, would be exhausted by now. The punches seemed to come like big scattering stones; his energy bedeviled LaMotta. It was as if LaMotta’s head was a nail and Robinson’s fist a hammer, and he was hammering the nail. The punches rained down and down. LaMotta began wincing from the blows. Robinson hardly let up in the tenth, managing to brush off a wicked LaMotta right hook and then quickly opening a gash over LaMotta’s right eye with a stinging blow. LaMotta showed distress as he made his way to his corner to end the round. He came out in the eleventh and offered a quick fusillade, but, as The Washington Post would put it, it was just “a dying swan gesture.” Robinson stood in a corner and took those blows: “Then he pulled the switch,” the Post noted. He fired punch after punch into LaMotta, staggering him to within inches, it seemed, of going to the canvas. “No man can endure this pummeling,” announcer Husing cried. It was sheer personal pride that kept LaMotta on his feet in the twelfth, taking the blows like a puppet in a ferocious wind. His wife Vikki had already buried her drained face in her hands, where it would remain for the final two rounds. At the beginning of the thirteenth, Jake LaMotta looked truly spent, and a final Robinson volley brought referee Frank Sikora in between the two; he had seen enough and ended it all, two minutes and four seconds into the round that had seen LaMotta take an astonishing fifty-six blows.

  The sounds rose slowly, then began cascading in operatic fashion. The world had a new middleweight champion. Gainford and Wiley saluted their champion. Leila Smith, mother of the new champ, pressed against her two daughters with unalloyed joy.

  LaMotta, descending from the ring, pushed aside the hands that reached toward him to help him through the ropes. The organist piped up “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” as a salute—strange as it might seem—to LaMotta’s having withstood such punishment. Reporters scampered toward the respective dressing rooms. LaMotta fell onto a table and was immediately given oxygen. His wife Vikki, her high heels clacking swiftly into the room, was shocked at the sight of her husband connected to the tank, his face horribly swollen. She had grave thoughts her husband might expire then and there, but a physician managed to calm her. “I’m here with you as always,” she said soothingly to the Bull. It was hours before he was in a condition to leave the stadium.

  The worldwide sporting event played out on the front pages of newspapers, right alongside news of the Korean war conflict. A six-column headline—CHINESE REDS LOSE 10,225 IN DAY—was spread across the top of the next morning’s edition of The Washington Post, and the front-page photo beneath it showed Robinson lashing a right into LaMotta’s jaw: ROBINSON TKO’S LAMOTTA IN 13TH TO WIN TITLE. Gainford was telling anyone with a pencil or pen that his fighter now would be aiming for the light heavyweight crown.

  The televising of the fight—and Robinson’s “spectacular” showing, as The New York Times put it—introduced Sugar Ray Robinson to more fans than ever before. He was a lethal, fist-flying presence, suddenly as near as the television set. But not everyone was enamored of such living-room intimacy. In a front-page editorial, the Indianapolis News attacked the proceedings: “At least a million Hoosiers last night saw a world championship prizefight over television. For most of them it was their first. They saw two athletes swing at each other’s jaws and stomachs like savages in a jungle; they saw blood drip from battered noses; they heard 15,000 fellow Americans roar a sickening tribute to brutality.” It went on: “When Jake LaMotta was permitted to go into the thirteenth round unsound of mind, unsound of body, wobbling and with a mentality that didn’t know whether it was 10 o’clock or the Fourth of July, the ‘sport’ showed its true colors. It is a throwback to the Cromagnon man …”

  Sportswriters—and the fight-watching public as well—quickly found a summing-up title for the final Robinson-LaMotta encounter: “The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.”

  Neither Sugar Ray Robinson nor Jake LaMotta, of course, had invented the sport. They simply played by its rules, unfair as they often were. It was war, up close and in the trenches. It was as dark and grave as a cemetery at midnight. LaMotta knew that innocence had nothing to do with the fight game. Darkness, in fact—and a need to escape a life of criminality—had led him into the ring in the first place. Robinson, a Negro, had found glorious movement across the landscape as a fighter. The lyrics of “Sweet Georgia Brown” played in his heart as his hands showed a killer instinct. His fists gave him freedom, allowing him to believe he owed the sport everything he could give it.

  Three days after the bout, Robinson and his wife Edna Mae boarded a train for New York City. Well-wishers and Chicago acquaintances crowded the platform to see them off. They waved and smiled as the train pulled away, receding into the distance, finally vanishing.

  The saga of Jake LaMotta wasn’t over. A year and a half after the last Robinson bout, he moved his family to Miami Beach.

  Vikki thought it might save the marriage. Things only grew worse. The money began floating away. There were bad investments, a hilarious attempt at playing the trumpet in hopes of joining a band. He tried affecting the manners of a man of leisure. He was seen rushing in and out of bars, his gut heaving, loud Hawaiian shirts on his back. He whispered into the ears of game young ladies. There were run-ins with Miami police: LaMotta punched a shoeshine man who had asked him to leave his stand. The assault charge was dropped, but he had to make a financial settlement to the poor soul. His last bout—he would fight only ten more times after the final Robinson meeting—was against Billy Kilgore, a nobody, in Miami Beach on April 14, 1954. He lost.

  In 1955 he opened Jake LaMotta’s, a bar on Collins Avenue. He held court, brought in celebrities to entertain (Buddy Hackett, Milton Berle), told horrible jokes, and ordered up drinks for young Lolitas: underage girls in lipstick sitting in the smoky shadows. But, in time, bar attendance dropped, the clientele went from upper-crust to low-life. There had been complaints about Jake’s boorish behavior. Vikki hated the riffraff he brought home from the bar. The following year she left him, eventually filing for divorce.

  In January 1957 Jake LaMotta was arrested on several charges, among them promoting prostitution, conspiracy, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. A fourteen-year-old girl who had been arrested on a prostitution charge told police she plied her trade at LaMotta’s bar. LaMotta professed ignorance of the girl’s age. The scandalous news went national. He was eventually convicted on two counts of promoting prostitution. He served six months, sitting, at night, in the darkness, just like at Coxsackie all those years ago. Some days, chained, he trudged to the back of a big pickup along with other cons, and was deposited on the side of a highway to do roadwork. A shotgun-wielding prison guard watched over everyone. Inside jail the rednecks hated him and he hated them, daring any of them to lay a hand on him. They kept clear.

  Upon his release, he was finished as a businessman and seen as a joke. There was additional shame, in time, when he went public in 1960 about having taken that dive in the Billy Fox bout.

  Sometimes reporters and sports
junkies would come around and want to talk to Vikki LaMotta about her onetime husband. He was the father of her children; she preferred talking, for the most part, about when things were good; when the Bull was smiling and happy and fighting and loving her and looking beautiful in the ring against Marcel Cerdan. She did believe, though, that the fighter who had chased and captured her Jake time and time again over a nine-year period had come to forever haunt the Bull: “Physically and psychologically, Sugar Ray Robinson destroyed him,” she felt. “Jake was never the same in or out of the ring again.”

  Sugar Ray, on the other hand, only continued to soar. On that cold 1951 Valentine’s Day evening in Chicago, millions upon millions could suddenly witness the mastery of Sugar Ray Robinson. He became a figure removed from the radio box and all those grapevine soliloquies. What had been mentioned in various corners of the nation about him—his prowess, his frightening speed, his power—proved utterly true. He was photogenic, coldly unemotional in the ring—and a star.

  Sugar Ray now stood a decade into his professional fight career. By now the emotional wars that had shaped him had also given him his independence. Walker Smith Jr. had escaped childhood only to be born again as a fighter. The military, he had felt, had been against him and his dream to become a champion, so he outfoxed them too. He was the rare Negro who had rebuked the mob and won. Victory in the LaMotta wars served as a crowning achievement. It was little surprise that admirers seemed to be everywhere. Yes, bad things sometimes happened in and around the environs of entertainment venues in Harlem. But the parishioners at his church, Salem Meth odist, forgave him his nightclub ownership. They were convinced he was doing good in his own way. They, too, had been seduced by the champion: If told that Sugar Ray and Edna Mae were coming to church on a certain Sunday morning, the minister in the pulpit was careful not to begin until the couple arrived. Many strained to see the cut of their attire. (Robinson had a habit of stopping cold just inside the church doorway before beginning his stride to his seat.) His church tithing was always generous. He took comfort while away on the road knowing that church members were praying for him. Growing up in the North—unlike Armstrong, Joe Louis, and Jack Johnson—he had also escaped personal racial trauma. His mother had protected him in the beginning, then the church came to the rescue—deacons and ministers shielding the Salem flock from the lash of racial hurt as much as possible. But a Parisian chanteuse, herself the survivor of a desperate childhood, was about to shake the conscience of Sugar Ray.