Body Blow

Stephanie LaMotta, daughter of famed boxing champion Jake LaMotta, sat in her wheelchair, engrossed in a video of her father’s 1951 fight with Sugar Ray Robinson.

“What a man,” she muttered, watching her father take one tremendous punch after another, shake each one off and continue taking the fight to Robinson.

Fifty years have passed since LaMotta and Robinson fought at old Chicago Stadium. On Feb. 14, 1951, both in their prime, they met for LaMotta’s world middleweight championship before 14,802.

It was their sixth fight, Robinson having won four of the first five, all of which had been wars. Even so, no one was prepared for the ferocity with which they battled for 13 rounds. It was one of boxing’s greatest action fights, maybe the greatest.

And the 11th round might have been the single greatest round.

“This is exciting, I haven’t seen this fight since I was 12,” said Stephanie LaMotta, 41.

LaMotta-Robinson was a great fight for one simple reason: LaMotta took a punch as well as any fighter who ever fought. According to historian Bert Sugar, LaMotta was knocked down only once in his career, late in his 106-bout, 13-year career.

LaMotta’s daughter winced each time Robinson jolted her father.

“Oh, no! Couldn’t you have shown me a film where my dad wins?” she said, watching her father take a brutal combination from Robinson in the 11th.

LaMotta was all about indomitable will. Although he absorbed heavy punishment, he never stopped taking the fight to Robinson--even in the 13th, when the referee stopped the fight and awarded the championship to Robinson, the 2-1 favorite.

In the movie “Raging Bull,” actor Robert De Niro, who portrayed LaMotta, defiantly mumbles to Robinson as the fight is stopped: “Ya didin’ put me down, Ray. Ya didin’ put me down.”

“My dad told me he really did say that, but not at the instant the fight was stopped,” Stephanie LaMotta said.

She is engrossed in watching her father, in a fight eight years before she was born.

“You know, dad had his spleen ruptured in this fight. He looks so strong but he always told me he had to lose so much weight so fast for the fight, it left him weak. Hard to believe.”

Jake LaMotta is 78, hale and hearty, his daughter reports. But he didn’t respond to interview requests for this story.

“My dad is amazing; he’s never had a health problem,” Stephanie said.

Even more amazing, she said, LaMotta has no apparent neurological damage from a career made famous by his ability to shake off punches.

But the fact is, LaMotta never took punches as well as his daughter can.

No one ever told Jake LaMotta he had multiple sclerosis, a disease his daughter has battled for more than 20 years.

Jake LaMotta never had to be pushed around in a wheelchair, never had to have someone help him dress. He has never needed someone to carry him to the bathroom.

Stephanie LaMotta has been rocked by all of those punches and still is punching back.

“I have a heavy bag in my garage and I punch it as part of my therapy,” she said.

“It’s good therapy for anyone who’s in a wheelchair. Do you realize how much frustration and hostility is associated with having to stay in one of these things?” she said, pointing to her wheelchair.

She knows a lot about punching bags. In the late 1980s, when she was an aspiring actress, she developed a business plan for organizing boxing workouts for women at health clubs. It was bag work, rope jumping, shadow boxing and all the calisthenics boxers use.

Such workouts for women are common in fitness clubs today. She says she was about eight years too early.

“I was Thomas Edison with the light bulb at a time when no one wanted to see the light,” she grumbled.

“I can’t tell you how many gyms I went to and the answer was always the same: ‘What, are you crazy? Women doing boxing workouts? Women don’t even like boxing. No one would be interested. It’d never work.’

“So what happens? It’s everywhere. Every gym in the world has boxing workouts. Thousands of women have discovered that boxing workouts are a great way to stay in shape.”

LaMotta undergoes rehabilitation at a Cal State Northridge clinic, the Center of Achievement for the Physically Disabled. Its director is Dr. Sam Britten.

“She’s a dynamic lady,” he said. “If will, if spirit, if her drive have anything to do with it, she will get better.”

LaMotta’s MS was diagnosed in 1980, after a year of mystery symptoms.

“At first, the fingers on my left hand went stiff,” she said. “Then I started dropping things and falling. Then I started losing sight in my right eye. Then I was blind.

“For a long time doctors thought I had a tumor on my pituitary. Then they wanted to open up my skull and look at my brain.”

MS afflicts about 250,000 Americans. The disease begins when the protective coating around nerve fibers in the brain and spinal cord inexplicably begin to deteriorate. Scar tissue forms. The effect is akin to what happens when an electrical wire short-circuits.

Symptoms range from minor to major paralysis and vision impairment. Symptoms may be permanent, or can come and go.

LaMotta said her case was not especially troublesome until three years ago, when she was in an auto accident.

“The air bag in my car deployed so violently it collapsed one of my lungs,” she said. “The trauma of it all exacerbated my MS. Two days later, my legs went numb. Two days later, they were stiff. A month later, I was in a walker, then a wheelchair.

“There’s a new Exercycle-type device out called a NuStep, which enables people who can’t move their legs to do so by turning a wheel with their hands. I use one at Cal State Northridge--I don’t know where I’d be without it.

“I’m fighting this, with all my heart. I’m like my dad, in that way--we’re both fighters. We talk about once a month and he inspires me.”