The furious boxer who inspired

Jake LaMotta could take a beating as well as he could give one. The boxer, whose relentless fighting style won him the middleweight championship belt in 1949, was knocked down only once in 106 fights, earning him a reputation as one of the “toughest chins” in the sport’s history. His ferocity, both inside the ring and out, was immortalized in director Martin Scorsese’s 1980 movie Raging Bull. LaMotta personally trained Robert De Niro for the lead role, boxing more than 1,000 rounds with the actor. But the former champ was angered when he saw the final film and its portrayal of him as a brutal, wife-beating paranoiac. “Then I realized it was true,” said LaMotta. “I was a no-good bastard. I realize it now. It’s not the way I am now, but the way I was then.” Born on New York City’s Lower East Side and raised in the slums of the Bronx, “LaMotta learned to fight at an early age,” said ESPN.com. His father, a Sicilian immigrant, would force him into street brawls with other neighborhood children, paying part of the family’s rent with coins thrown into the ring by spectators. LaMotta “emerged as a leading middleweight in the early 1940s,” said The New York Times. He successfully defended his title belt twice before losing it to his longtime rival Sugar Ray Robinson on Feb. 14, 1951, in a fight that became known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. LaMotta endured a relentless battering from Robinson, considered by many to be the best pound-for-pound boxer of all time. When the fight was stopped in the 13th round, “LaMotta was a bloody mess but had never hit the canvas.” LaMotta retired from the sport for good in 1954 but “had trouble adjusting to life after the ring,” said The Washington Post. He went to jail in 1957 for enabling the prostitution of a minor when a 14-year-old girl was arrested in his Miami Beach nightclub. While in solitary confinement, he broke his hands punching a wall. But the release of Raging Bull rescued him from obscurity, and he enjoyed a long second career on the speaking circuit, “delivering one-liners, signing autographs, and making appearances before far more people than ever attended his fights.” Without the film, “I’d be in bad shape,” he said in 1997. “It made me champ all over again.”