Another person licking his chops for Sugar to return was Jake LaMotta. Now that the way was cleared for them to face each other for the sixth time, the Bull was practically pawing the turf, eager to charge across the ring and punish the man who had beaten him four out of five times.
Sugar was looking forward to the match as well, but there were a few things he had to do before the February 14 date. First of all, there was the BWA award ceremony to attend. The event took place at the Waldorf-Astoria, and Sugar was resplendent in his tuxedo. Of all the accolades and praise he received that evening, one thing stuck out in his memory. It was a telegram from LaMotta, reminding him of their bout. Sugar smiled when he heard the message read by the master of ceremonies. He was stunned that the Bull knew about the event and knew exactly where to send the telegram. Later, while training at Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, a change from his regular site, he realized that the telegram was less LaMotta’s doing than his manager’s or someone close to him, since the gesture was not characteristic of the Bull.
That person, he assumed, was Frankie Carbo, who was not only close to the Bull, but also very close to the mob and to the International Boxing Club, a major organizer of fights. The suspicion was verified a few days later when Carbo, using an alias, phoned Sugar at camp and requested a meeting. Because of his experience with Blinky Palermo, the mobster who had tried previously to entice him into a fix, Sugar knew what Carbo was up to. When they met near the camp’s entrance, Carbo made Sugar an offer: Sugar was to win the February 14 match with LaMotta, then lose the return bout; the third and final fight would be left for the best man to win. “You got the wrong guy,” Sugar told him, rejecting the fix. Unlike LaMotta, who had thrown a fight for the mob in order to get a title shot, Sugar was not about to capitulate, no matter how much money was involved, no matter how dangerous it was to refuse these notorious underworld figures. Sure, he’d carried a few fighters and pulled his punches on occasion, but he had never taken a dive or cut a deal by betting on his opponent. If the mob hadn’t gotten to him when he was younger, it was too late now, as he reached the apex of his career.
“Throughout the fifties, to read Dan Parker in the New York Daily Mirror or Jimmy Cannon in the Post was to scan a bill of particulars against a dirty fight game run entirely by mobsters—mainly Italian and Jewish mobsters,” David Remnick observed. “After the war there was not a single champion who was not, in some way, touched by the Mafia, if not wholly owned and operated by it. [Senator Estes] Kefauver (with substantial help from his chief counsel, John Gurnee Bonomi) intended to prove the case and instigate a reform of boxing.”1
Sugar was neither squeaky clean nor a Goody Two-shoes, but if there was any evidence of his being in bed with the mob, it escaped detection by a gaggle of nosy sleuths and inquiring reporters. Moreover, if the reporters of the day didn’t have the wherewithal to ferret out the dirt, the Senate investigating committee did, and it could sling the mud too.
With varying degrees of sympathy for Sugar, Dan Parker, Jimmy Cannon, Hype Igoe, Arthur Daley, James Dawson, Lester Bromberg, Bill Gallo, and Bert Sugar infused sports journalism with a dash of analysis and literary flair, though, in general, it was a far cry from the singing, zinging prose of the writers of the previous generation—Heywood Hale Broun, Damon Runyon, Grantland Rice, Paul Gallico, and Ring Lardner.
Bromberg was a particular favorite of the Robinsons, and he made sure they received all his clippings and photos from the New York World Telegram and Sun. Perhaps Bromberg was eternally bothered by his testimony in 1947 before the New York State Athletic Commission, in which he divulged that Sugar had in fact been approached by the mob and offered a deal not to fight Marty Servo. For not disclosing the information, Sugar was fined five hundred dollars and suspended for thirty days.2 Bromberg died in 1989, a few months before Sugar.
Reaching the top of his craft had not been easy, and Sugar had used all sorts of tactics and strategies to keep his opponents off balance. Sometimes he psyched them out—as he may have with LaMotta at a luncheon a few days before their fight. Sitting near the Bull, Sugar asked the waiter if he could have a large glass of beef blood. Both the waiter and LaMotta were puzzled by the request. Sugar stressed his order, clarifying that he did not want gravy, but actual beef blood, extracted “before the meat is cooked,” he said. The waiter obeyed and returned with a glassful of blood. Sugar downed it in one long gulp. Wiping his mouth, he explained to a bug-eyed LaMotta that he had been drinking it for years on the advice of Chappie Blackburn, Louis’s trainer. It was the equivalent of a stare-down at the weigh-in. He told the Bull that it was his secret weapon and gave him the strength to overcome bigger and stronger opponents. LaMotta told Sugar that he was out of his mind.
Sugar would have likewise questioned LaMotta’s sanity when he drank two or three shots of brandy before their fight. LaMotta said he did this to give him a sense of false courage to hide his real fear. He knew he wasn’t in good enough shape to fight Sugar. One fighter was half drunk on brandy and the other was juiced up on beef blood. If the bettors had known, there would be no guessing where their money would have gone.
At the sound of the bell, the din in Chicago Stadium increased, and the Bull, as was his style, leaped from his stool and rushed headlong across the ring, his gloves locked to his side like padded horns. Sugar was faster than ever in sidestepping the charges, delivering stinging jabs and swift counterpunches to the Bull’s awkward flails. And this would be the pattern for the first several rounds, with Sugar slicing and dicing LaMotta with such rapid, laserlike precision that the Bull became more frustrated with each blow.
There was very little toe-to-toe punching during the first seven rounds, though there was plenty of superb boxing by Sugar “the matador” and headfirst assaults by the Bull. However, over the next three rounds Sugar battered LaMotta unmercifully. But the Bull was as stubborn as ever, refusing to fall. When it was over, LaMotta lay sprawled across the top ropes, his face bloodier than a slab of beef. He had only the strength to mutter, “You couldn’t put me down, you black bastard. You can’t put me on the deck.” These were the words Sugar heard, but in his autobiography LaMotta remembered the slaughter this way: “Robinson had me but I wouldn’t give the son of a bitch the satisfaction of knocking me down, so I told the referee I’d murder him if he tried to stop the fight. I got my arm wedged around one of the ring ropes and stayed there, defying Robinson to knock me down. He couldn’t, but I got about as bad a beating as I’ve ever had.”3
The referee, Frankie Sikora, stepped in and halted the match in the thirteenth round. Under Illinois regulations, Sugar was awarded a technical knockout, and indeed, the Bull was virtually out on his feet. Because of the beating LaMotta took on this day, February 14, 1951, the fight was called “the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,” recalling the mob-related execution on the same day in 1929 in the Windy City. In LaMotta’s own words: “Well, Robinson didn’t have a machine gun and there was only one victim, but it was still a massacre…. If the fight had gone another twenty seconds, Sugar would have collapsed from hitting me so much.”
But it was the self-deprecating LaMotta who was on the verge of collapsing, causing the doctor to order an oxygen tank to relieve the gasping fighter. “LaMotta collapsed in my arms,” said Al Silvani, who worked in the Bull’s corner that night.4 For a half hour he was on the tank, and was not allowed to leave the stadium for two hours. All agreed: LaMotta had been the recipient of a thorough shellacking. “Sugar and I fought so much that I should have died from sugar diabetes,” LaMotta quipped during an interview after the fight. This was their last bout, and it was the worst one for the Bull, who had taken a severe beating and lost his title. But then, he should have known how much of a challenge it was going to be to whip somebody revved up on beef blood.
Boxing authority Dr. Ferdie Pacheco ranked the thirteenth round of this fight as one of the greatest rounds in fight history.