LaMotta's Left Hand

Worked wonders against padded-up welterweights when Jake sauntered to the weigh-in at a beefy 164 and his opponent was 151 with his clothes on, his pockets filled with rocks and Army boots.

 

Lamotta was a great, tough middleweight but his left hand is far from being one of the greatest in the sport.

 

It’s truth. Go look how many times LaMotta fought at over the middleweight limit against a welter who was 155 or below.

Go count how many times held weight advantages of 7 or more pounds.

Now go count how many times he fought someone bigger by the same margin.

Jake was the original weight bully.

EDIT: Quick count per boxrec on weights I came up with 24 fights where he outweighed his opponent by 7 or more pounds (more than 30 if we make it 5 or more pounds) and 14 of those he had an advantage of 9 1/2 or more.

You won’t find similar number of him being the smaller guy by a significant margin.

His whole career is propped up by fighting welters while he was a middle or even light heavy by the rules of he day.

 

What's with the insults? He had a decent jab but not a great one. His left hook was good not great. The guy is an all time great middleweight but his strengths were not his left hand. It was his pressure, volume punching, iron chin and underated defense.

Quit acting like a dick on here.

 

If you want to produce something that says the weights on all of Jake’s fights are wrong, have at it.

I’m sure all those welterweights he fought were really 175 pounds when they fought him.

That you were so quick to resort to name-calling rather than discuss it says all anyone needs to know.

 

And body punching! He threw and awful lot to the body.

 

Cerdan wasn't a blown-up Welter was he?

 

I agree that LaMotts's left hand was very good. It was productive, his jab was overlooked and effective as we saw on film of a drunken LaMotta out jabbing Sugar Ray. He turned that left into a hook very smoothly and could double it up body head, head body very skillfully.

 

Yep, He was a tremendous body puncher. This is just a weird thread. So many positives to Lamotta's game, I just don't think he had one of the greatest left hands ever. One of the greatest chins? Absolutely! "One of the greatest left hands" not so much. I do remember him having some success with the jab against SRR in their last fight but that certainly was not the norm for him. He was a prototypical swarmer that typically just used the jab to get inside since he only had a 67 inch reach.