He defended the title twice before running into Robinson for a sixth and final time. He had bowed to the arm-twisting of Fox’s influential gangster manager, Blinky Palermo, but never properly cashed in on being world champion. If asked, he could probably recount the night he threw his fight against Billy Fox in 1947 to get his title shot against the charismatic Frenchman Marcel Cerdan two years later – and how he lied about the fix for 13 years. LaMotta, the world middleweight champion from 1949 to 1951, was not ringside on either night but seeing out his final days in a nursing home in Florida. They hoped the past might gild the present. They spoke, too, about the later Sugar Ray – Leonard – and Marvin Hagler and Tommy Hearns and Roberto Durán.
He was lauded alongside Sugar Ray Robinson, his nemesis.
To rinse away the taste of that farce, LaMotta’s was a name the promoters raised in the week before GGG-Canelo.
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