The straight ahead boxer Jake LaMotta was lucky to live before they invented concussions.
With a boxing style he described as "charge out of the corner, punch, punch, punch, never give up, take all the punishment the other guy could hand out but stay in there, slug and slug and slug," the boy got his brains beat in in the 1940s and 1950s and, improbably, lived until this week, when he died at 95.
His violent life was the subject of the Martin Scorcese film Raging Bull, about which LaMotta said, “I kind of look bad in it. Then I realized it was true. That’s the way it was. I was a no-good bastard. It’s not the way I am now, but the way I was then.”
Boxers are the most honest people in the world.
And the toughest. Have you ever seen the beating LaMotta took in is sixth and last fight against Sugar Ray Robinson while somehow staying on his feet? "If the referee had held up another 30 more seconds," LaMotta later said, "Sugar Ray would have collapsed from hitting me."
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