LaMotta held on to the top rope for balance and anchor. Nardico, younger, fresher, and bigger, poured on the pressure.
Experience and defiance kept the former veteran upright. His tort, muscular frame appearing to grow as LaMotta aged and wilted before him. Doing what he always did, swinging hard and frequently.
LaMotta, as he stubbornly remained for every other moment of his professional career, and for a second life attempting to parabolise the first from behind a microphone, was vertical.
Gore and Nardico turned back to Regan, the drape of his up-turned slacks swaying with the motion of an exaggerated count “N-I-I-I-NE!“. Gore’s experience with Willie Pep and Joe Brown, and a hundred other pugs, helping him resist the contagion of excitement that had begun to course through the 3,318 who had bought a ticket. The laconic, dark lids of trainer Bill Gore blinked slowly, no expression was offered. Nardico glanced to his corner for reassurance, his own senses under assault too. Regan whispered something unknown in LaMotta’s left ear between the metronome of his public voice “SEVEN, EIGHT“. LaMotta’s right glove, short-cuffed and glistening like a ball of hot tar, found the rope. Regan’s fingers splayed wide in front of the bruised fudge of his face, “FIVE, SIX!“. His eyes, and those in the half-light beyond the ropes were focussed on LaMotta, the man who had once beaten Sugar Ray Robinson but was now desperate and fumbling for the second rope, his spatial awareness scrambled by fatigue and the weight of the shots that put him there. If he mouthed through his gum-shield “stay-down“, it was never reported. The enormity of what he’d just done with a thunderous cross-cum-hook, the last of a flurry of clubbing shots, writ large before him. Opponent Danny Nardico rushed to a corner, the adrenaline racing through his body. LaMotta, 31 and fighting at a career high of 173 pounds, pawed for the bottom rope with his right hand. Referee Bill Regan, once a Welterweight now broadened by twenty years of retirement, took up the count. Initially, the crowd seemed neither stunned nor charged by the sight of former Middleweight champion and boxing superstar Jake LaMotta slumped to the canvas for the first time in his then 103-fight career.
No hush fell beneath the domed ceiling of the Miami Coliseum. (This nostalgic item on Jake LaMotta originally appeared on David’s site .uk and you can also follow David for much more on boxing history and the latest on fights, specifically in the U.K.)
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