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

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A lot of people were responsible for what happened in and around Madison Square Garden in those ten years: gangsters, promoters, managers, TV moguls—and some of the fighters.

Jake LaMotta, for instance. Jake was the less-than-beautiful bull born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a crude, tough kid who raged through his era with manic energy, hounded by the Mob and, very occasionally, his conscience. He was a wife-beater, a thief, a mugger and liar who went on to become a raconteur skilled in reheating his past. He was an extraordinary man, a fighter who struggled to ever say sorry, who expected no apologies in return, and, crucially for the making of his legend, clung to the notion that he wouldn't go down. The words he was famously supposed to have uttered through purpled lips in Chicago on St. Valentine's Day, 1951, while enduring a barely legal beating at the expert hands of Sugar Ray Robinson, were, according to Martin Scorsese's evocative take on his life, Raging Bull, “You never got me down, Ray.” Those words stand as a boxer's battle cry of futile pride, even though, as his biographer Chris Anderson revealed years later, Jake never said them.