And so there was that that was kind of motivating his rage and his ability to just take punch after punch after punch. And that guilt kind of transferred into this feeling of, I'm not worthy of living.

But Jake LaMotta always thought that he had killed him, and he apparently was guilt ridden for that. He said he had a conversation with LaMotta, and LaMotta said when he was a teenager, he attacked a person with a lead pipe wrapped in newspaper and definitely hurt the guy. There was also a really interesting part of his personality that Nigel Collins told me - Nigel Collins being a Hall of Fame boxing writer. There were reports that his father, an immigrant, would beat Jake LaMotta's mother and siblings, so he grew up around physical violence. It would take a psychologist to kind of identify exactly what the root cause was for his rage, but you know, there were stories of him growing up - a very tough childhood. He held the middleweight title from 1949 to 1951. But you know, he had to be a good boxer as well to do what he did. GOLDMAN: He wore that as a badge of honor - his toughness. ROBERT DE NIRO: (As Jake LaMotta) Hey, Ray, I never went down, Ray. Matter of fact, in his last fight against Sugar Ray Robinson that was stopped because it was just so bloody and he was just being pummeled, he said to Ray, you know, I didn't go down. In fact out of his 100-plus fights, he was only knocked down once. GOLDMAN: He was known for being able to take a punch. But LaMotta, rallying from the brink of defeat, knocks Dauthuille down and almost through the ropes. TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: You know, the 1980 movie was aptly titled, because this guy was, you know, by all accounts raging in and out of the ring.ĭON DUNPHY: Both men blaze away at the (unintelligible). NPR's Tom Goldman remembers the former middleweight champion and his complicated life. Jake LaMotta died yesterday in a Florida hospital. The boxer whose life was immortalized in the film 'Raging Bull' has died.

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