Читать книгу Jacobs Beach. The Mob, the Garden and the Golden Age of Boxing онлайн

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LaMotta epitomizes boxing's gift for crushing truth to a pulp. Although Jake was a hell of a fighter, one of the best middleweights of all time, he had no problem in sustaining his legend by denying for more than a decade that he had thrown his fight against the mobbed-up Billy Fox at the Garden in 1947. If he had confessed when he was first accused of the fix, he would have been banished and forgotten. His silence earned him his shot at the world title ten fights later, in 1949, against the exquisite Frenchman Marcel Cerdan. It also lent LaMotta a twisted immortality. It wasn't until a Senate hearing in 1960, however, six years after he'd quit boxing, that LaMotta came clean. By then, he was on his way to becoming a parody of himself, albeit a famous and rich one, to be remembered eventually as the Raging Bull.

LaMotta is a small part of this tale, and his experiences are not unique. But Jake (and his literary collaborators) had a better handle on it than most. As he was once quoted as saying, “I also noticed that around the gym all the time there were the Mob guys, for the very simple reason that there's always betting on fights, and betting means money, and wherever there's money there's the Mob. If you paste that inside your hat it will explain a lot of things to you and maybe even save you some trouble.”