Purses were withheld, and LaMotta was suspended by the New York State Athletic Commission.įrom left, boxing legends Floyd Patterson, Jake LaMotta and Sugar Ray Leonard show off their champion fists in Washington in 1996. Fox won on a fourth-round knockout, but the fighters were so inept that everyone quickly realized the fix was in. The fight, staged in New York’s Madison Square Garden in November 1947, was a fiasco.

So, in an effort to curry favor with the underworld figures who controlled boxing at the time, LaMotta agreed to take a dive against Billy Fox, who was being groomed for bigger things. “I tried to do everything on the up and up, but time was running out and I was getting older.” “I wanted to make it on my own, but it took me a long time, and I had to throw a fight,” LaMotta told England’s Birmingham Post in 2006. Robinson then set his sights on the welterweight title and won it, but LaMotta, despite impressive performances against some of the best fighters in the business, from welterweights to light-heavyweights, couldn’t get a middleweight title shot. With Robinson heading for World War II service in the Army, LaMotta turned to other opponents - he fought Fritzie Zivic four times in less than a year - but they got together again twice in 1945, with Robinson winning 10- and 12-round decisions. Full obituary (Tina Fineberg / Associated Press) His informed yet accessible prose led many laymen to read his books as their introduction to religions of the East and West. It was reissued as “The World’s Religions” in 1991 and has sold about 2 million copies. A scholar of world religions, Smith is best known for his work “The Religions of Man,” first published in 1958.

Lamotta boxing