She’s a Real Fighter--and She’s Battlin’ : Boxing: Stephanie LaMotta is in a lot tougher fight than her father ever was. The opponent is multiple sclerosis.

The punching bag in the drafty gym rattled loudly at first but then Stephanie LaMotta increased the tempo of her punches and the bag produced a steady, throbbing hum.

For 15 minutes she pounded the bag, alternating between her left and right fists. Sweat began to stream down her face.

In a sense, LaMotta, a Los Angeles actress, wasn’t punching the speed bag. Instead, her punches lashed out at a silent, unseen enemy more terrifying, more dangerous than any human opponent.

The opponent: Multiple sclerosis.

It was possibly the best mugger story of the 1980s. Stephanie LaMotta, daughter of former world middleweight champion Jake LaMotta, not only warded off a knife-wielding mugger, she knocked him out.

“Dat’s my goil!” cooed her happy father. “Idn’t dat cute?”

It happened late one night in 1982, on a London street. LaMotta, alone, walked out of a nightclub toward her car when a man approached and asked for money.

“The funny part is, I was going to give him some money,” she recalled recently, after a boxing workout.

“I said: ‘Come over to my car and I’ll write you a small check.’ Then he wanted my jewelry, and he pulled out a knife.

“Then I said: ‘Do you know who I am? I’m going to hurt you if you use that.’

“He tried to stab me, but I blocked the knife with my left hand. When I saw blood from the cut, I went into a rage.

“I hit him in the stomach with my left hand and as he started to double up, I hit him on the jaw with my right. He went down on his back, out cold. At first, I thought I’d killed him.

“When the police came, I was holding his head off the sidewalk, wondering if he was alive.”

The mugger was alive . . . and lucky. He got only seven years, for attempted murder. His intended victim, Stephanie LaMotta was serving a life term with MS.

The first symptom appeared in 1979. She was in a London recording studio, cutting a record with her band, called “Stephanie LaMotta’s Band.”

“I was the guitarist, and I was playing the lead riff, a piece I’d played hundreds of times,” she said.

“All of a sudden, I couldn’t press the strings with my left fingers. All I could do with my left hand was slide it down the guitar.

“I didn’t think much about it at the time. I attributed it to stress and fatigue. Then I started dropping things and falling down.

“Shortly after that, I was on vacation in Vienna when I started losing sight in my right eye.

“It was like a shade descending slowly over my sight. Then the left eye started going. By the time I got to New York to start seeing doctors, I was blind.

“The first two doctors I saw were ophthalmologists, and they had no idea what was wrong. Then I started seeing neurologists. The third one I saw, Dr. John Schaefer, was the one who diagnosed me for MS. At this point, I was wearing a Braille watch. I was really depressed.”

LaMotta regained her sight. Sort of. Some days she has 20-20 vision. On others, she says, she can’t see her hand in front of her face. Some days she has slurred speech. She once played both guitar and piano, but hasn’t played either since that day in 1979 when the weakness in her left hand appeared, and stayed. For nine months in 1980, her entire left side was paralyzed. The paralysis left, but she still has no feeling on her left side. But to see her today doing her vigorous boxing workout, you’d never know this was a woman with a gun to her head.

The special terror of MS is its uncertainty--the daily, chilling fear sufferers carry for a lifetime. The disease wages a psychological warfare upon those afflicted that is nearly as debilitating as its attack upon the central nervous system.

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

Symptoms ranging from minor to major paralysis, to vision impairment--which can be complete blindness--can become permanent. Or the symptoms can come and go during a lifetime. Or they can come once, disappear, and never appear again.

That is Stephanie LaMotta’s torment--not knowing if tomorrow is the day she becomes a prisoner in her own body . . . or if she will be free of MS symptoms for the rest of her life. LaMotta, 31, the national spokeswoman for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, looks you straight in the eye when she tells you she’s fighting MS just as her father fought the likes of Sugar Ray Robinson and Marcel Cerdan, decades ago.

Her father, known as “The Bronx Bull” because of his free-swinging style, was the middleweight champion in 1949 and ’50. He was the fighter portrayed in the 1980 film, “Raging Bull.”

So when the story came out that Jake’s little girl--actually, at 5-feet-8, she’s as tall as her father--had flattened the mugger in London, no one who knew her was surprised. To kids who grew up in her Sutton Place neighborhood in New York, the byword was: “Don’t mess with Stephanie.”

“I hung out in gyms with my dad all the time when I was little,” she said. “My dad was through boxing then, but he worked out, and he taught me how to fight.

“One time when I was 12, a girl beat me up at school. I mean really beat me up. So when my dad saw my face, we went to the gym and he taught me some stuff. So I beat her up pretty good, the next time I saw her.

“We both got kicked out of school for fighting, but the best part of that was I got to go to the gym every day with my dad.”

Jake LaMotta’s marital history is a bit complex. He has been married six times and has seven children. Stephanie is the middle child, and her mother is Dimitria LaMotta, Jake’s fourth wife.

“My mother is Greek and beautiful,” Stephanie said.

She hopes to make the LaMotta name prominent again in boxing. She teaches the LaMotta boxing workout to people who want to become fit by training as a boxer, but who don’t want to box.

She has 42 pupils.

“When I start with someone, I tell them what equipment to buy--the gloves, bags, jump ropes and all that,” she said. “Then I go to their home on a regular schedule and teach and supervise the workout. I teach a real mix of people--actors, secretaries, construction workers, waiters, Century City executives . . . even one chairman of a board.

“Sometime down the road, I’d like to open a gym.”

She has produced a boxing video, “Stephanie LaMotta’s Boxersize Workout,” due out in March.

Her boxing trainer is Tony Rivera of Montebello, who is also former champion Roberto Duran’s assistant trainer. He supervises all her workouts.

This day, he helped her pull on and lace up her boxing gloves.

“These were once worn by Hilario Zapata, isn’t that great?” she said.

Zapata was world flyweight champion in the mid-1980s.

During a recent LaMotta workout at the Los Angeles Youth Athletic Center gym--it’s on the fifth floor of what once was the Lincoln Heights Jail--Rivera talked about LaMotta’s athleticism as she tattooed the speed bag.

“Look at the rhythm she has,” he said. “She’s a very good athlete. Even though she doesn’t hit anyone, she looks better doing her workout than half the pros you see in here.”

Rivera has taught her a wrinkle from Duran’s workouts, “the money walk.”

Striding about with long steps, LaMotta bent down at every other step and touched the floor with first the left hand, then the right.

“Roberto Duran does this all the time--it’s a stretching exercise,” she said. “He told me to pretend like I’m walking around picking up money. You stretch the back of your legs, your arms, lower back and shoulders.”

Although she is proud of her father’s boxing career and occasionally accompanies him to major Las Vegas fights, she is not a fan.

“Actually, I really don’t like boxing,” she said. “I really don’t enjoy seeing men hit each other. But Dad gets ringside seats, so I like to go with him and meet important people.

“Did I say that? That sounds terrible.”

She is not totally free of MS symptoms.

“My legs are weak, I can’t run at all,” she said.

“A year ago, I entered a 12-mile charity walkathon and practically finished on all fours. I was in bed a week after that.”

There is no evidence that boxing workouts, or any other kind of physical activity, wards off or lessens the degree of MS symptoms.

“All I can tell you is that I feel good after these workouts, that my doctor tells me if it feels good, keep doing it,” she said.

Fact is, doctors know very little about MS. It’s known that women are afflicted slightly more often than men, and that environmental factors are somehow related. The disease strikes people in temperate climates more often than in other regions.

MS has been linked by some researchers to where a patient’s first 15 years of life were spent.

The disease is extremely difficult to diagnose, a process that can take up to five years. Most often, diagnosis comes only after a long list of other possibilities--ranging from syphilis to cerebral infarctions to spinal arthritis--are eliminated.

There is no cure. Moreover, spontaneous remissions and the sudden onset of symptoms make any treatment difficult to evaluate. Research continues. More than $10 million was spent on MS research in 1990, according to the National MS Society.

Researchers are hopeful that AIDS research may provide clues to the causes of MS.

“It’s believed there may be some parallels in the immunology of AIDS and MS,” said Thomas Fauble, an Arcadia neurologist who keeps close tabs on MS research.

“Very generally, the same thing happens in both diseases--the immune system is disrupted and ceases to act in a normal protective fashion. Everyone hopes AIDS research will spill over, and help people with MS.”

LaMotta toweled off after her workout and talked about her outlook for her life. On May 25, she will marry Jacques Dreyfus, a Los Angeles musician.

“I’m in remission,” she said. “But some people go into remission for 10 minutes, others for 50 years.

“I’m totally annoyed by MS,” she said. “That’s about it--I’m annoyed. Am I bitter? No. You’re dealt cards in your life, OK? This is my card. I can deal with it.”