Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition)

Chapter Four

James Leslie Jacobs was born on February 18, 1930, in St. Louis, Missouri. He had one sibling—a sister, Dorothy, who was five years older. Both of his parents descended from German—Jewish immigrants, the first of whom arrived in the United States in the mid-1800s. The families plodded along through the generations. Jacobs’s maternal grandfather owned a small wholesale grocery business. His paternal grandfather was a salesman. During the Depression, Jacobs’s father sold women’s ready-to-wear clothing at a retail outlet in St. Louis. He did well and rose to manager. In 1935, the family moved to Atlanta, where he managed a department store. Within a year, they were back in St. Louis starting over. In 1936, Jacobs’s father went alone to Los Angeles to work as a liquor salesman for the Al Hart distillery. The family joined him a year later.

They lived in a three-bedroom apartment in the then largely Jewish Fairfax district. The Jewish holidays were not observed. Dorothy went to Sunday school. “We were Jewish only because we were born Jewish,” said Dorothy, who still lives in the Fairfax area under the name of Zeil, the first of her three husbands. The family did not prosper. “My father rose no further than salesman and he spent every nickel he had on the family,” she added.

For four years, the children were close. In their fantasy games, Jacobs was the hero. “There was a radio show, Little Beaver and Red Rider. Jimmy always got to play Beaver; he solved all the problems. He also played Robin and I was Batman,” remembered Dorothy. “If he had a problem, of any kind, he’d fantasize it away by saying, “What would Robin do?”

When Jacobs was eleven, his parents divorced. The family dynamics shifted dramatically. The mother, also named Dorothy, aligned with her son and purged the daughter. “There was a photo of Jimmy and me taken in St. Louis. I was eight and Jimmy was three. After the divorce, she cut me out and put it back on the wall,” said Zeil, a small, thin woman of sixty-five whom years of chain-smoking had left with emphysema and a thin, raspy voice. She mustered just enough wind for one sentence at a time, then had to stop and breathe in deeply. “After the divorce it became his house and my mother’s house. She kept us apart. My mother hated me. She told me that. She got pregnant with me on her honeymoon and she said because of me she was unable to get a divorce. What you have to know is that she never got close to anyone, ever, except Jimmy. He was the only man she loved.”

And Jacobs loved mother, deeply. “He defended her always. I could never say how I felt about her,” said Zeil. “It was incredible, just incredible how cruel he was able to be if anyone even attempted to say anything critical about her. And it was always ‘my mother,’ never ‘our mother.’”

At about the same time Zeil moved out to join the Navy during World War II, Jacobs discovered a passion for sports. He was thirteen, physically strong, and highly coordinated. Jacobs could play virtually any type of game—basketball, football, baseball—and he did it with a relentless determination not just to win but to dominate. Handball was a favorite. Boxing too. His mother, though, refused to let him box. To fulfill that passion, Jacobs turned to fantasy.

Nick Beck was twelve and Jacobs fourteen when they met. Beck remembered seeing Jacobs around the Hollywood YMCA, strutting around in tank tops, wearing his various medals on a watch chain. “I had a very strange experience with him the first time we met,” said Beck. “I used to punch the heavy bag at the “Y”. Jimmy came up one day to work out and we started talking. He told me that his father was a famous fighter. I was a big fight fan so I asked who. He said that his father was Buddy Baer, the brother of Max Baer, a former heavyweight. I challenged him on that. He stuck with the story and eventually we just agreed not to talk about it anymore. Jimmy could do that. He told some outrageous lies.”

The friendship continued. Both boys started collecting old fight films, Jacobs in 16 mm and Beck in 8 mm. In the mid-1940s, before television, vintage fight films sat around in attics. People were glad to get any money for them at all. “We’d lend films to each other every now and then to show to other people. Whenever Jimmy didn’t want to do that he’d say that his film was in a secret vault in Santa Monica and there was only one key, which his father had. I didn’t believe him. He couldn’t afford a vault. Jimmy rarely had any money as a kid.”

Jacobs quit high school to pursue his other ambition: handball. By the late 1940s he could beat easily any member of the Hollywood YMCA. In 1950, he met Robert Kendler, a millionaire Chicago builder and patron of the sport. Kendler hired young handball champions to work for his company, live together, and teach each other. Jacobs stayed a year, learned from the masters of that time, and then got drafted into the Army. After the Army, he returned to Los Angeles, worked as a business machine salesman, and in his spare time rose slowly through the national handball ranks. In 1955, Jacobs won his first national singles championship. He reigned as the king of handball for the next ten years. Five other singles titles followed, plus six doubles titles. Jacobs never lost a championship tournament. The years he didn’t win were those in which, because of injuries, he didn’t compete. Jacobs became known as the “Babe Ruth of Handball.” A 1966 Sports Illustrated profile claimed that “there is no athlete in the world who dominates his sport with the supremacy [of] Jimmy Jacobs.”

In handball circles, Jacobs was dubbed “The Los Angeles Strongboy.” He brought more than strength to the game. His tactics and strategies, combined with an unshakable will, were so refined, so well planned and executed, that he rarely lost. As the Sports Illustrated story pointed out, “He leaves absolutely nothing to chance.”

Jacobs’s style of play set the pattern for how he pursued everything else in life, particularly the management of fighters. He sought the position on court that afforded the most control over his opponent. Jacobs also didn’t so much win a game as force the other man to lose. There were men who hated that aspect of Jim Jacobs. He played to emasculate.

“Everyone else played haphazardly compared to Jimmy,” said Steve Lott, who first met Jacobs in 1965 at the 92nd St. “Y” in New York. Lott was then eighteen. Jacobs would become his mentor in handball and later in almost every other aspect of his life as well. “He’d have an opportunity to take a shot which at that moment would score a point and look good. But he wouldn’t do it. He’d make three good defensive shots first to set up the one that put you away without any doubt about the outcome,” said Lott. “Jimmy knew his best shots and your greatest weaknesses. He had his game, and yours, figured out. That way, he’d give you shots that you had to take the greatest risk returning. It’s like making you lose before he had to win.”

Jacobs’s inner game stressed strict self-control. He referred to “Mr. Emotion” as predictable, someone that he wouldn’t let interfere with winning. He explained that concept in the 1966 Sports Illustrated story: “[Mr. Emotion] acts as a reminder to me that the application of the physical talent that I have is under the complete dominance of what I call my control system, my brain.” The brain ordered “Mr. Emotion” as one would “some small child.”

He went into a match confident that he was prepared for every contingency. “I plan how I’m going to win, meaning the type of play I’m going to employ in order to get the desired result,” said Jacobs.

All through the 1950s, Jacobs and Beck continued to build their separate fight film collections. They devised a radical thesis: the great fighters of the turn of the century, contrary to the conventional wisdom, were technical dullards. They grabbed, pushed, tripped, postured, and showed minimal boxing skills. In 1960, Jacobs and Beck put together a mini-documentary to prove their point with old footage from the fights of James J. Corbett, John L. Sullivan, Bob Fitzsimmons, James J. Jeffries, and Jack Johnson. “We showed it at the Hollywood ‘Y’ to the boxing press,” said Beck. “No one had seen these guys before. They groaned. Some of these fighters were just horrible.”

Word of the revolutionary footage spread. They got telegrams from all over the world to show the film. Jacobs and Beck decided to show it next in New York. They intended to use the opportunity as an entry into a fight film business. They’d combine their collections, move to New York, rent the library out, and produce fight films for television. While Beck was on vacation in Mexico, Jacobs went to New York to discuss a showing.

The film was to turn Jacobs, already a well-known sports figure, into a celebrity. He soon met two men who would change the course of his life. The first was Bill Cayton, and the other was Cus D’Amato.

Cayton produced a television series called “Greatest Fights of the Century” using footage from his own extensive fight film collection. Jacobs decided to work for Cayton instead of with Beck, and moved to New York. “I felt that he betrayed me, but you know, that was Jimmy,” said Beck. “No one could stand in his way.”

Beck had seen him do it to other people too. In 1959, while still in Los Angeles, Jacobs met John Patrick, a local fight film collector. Patrick was a close friend of Jess Willard, who in a 1915 Havana match defeated black champion Jack Johnson. Only ten film prints of the fight were known to exist. The negative had long ago disappeared. Patrick and Willard found one of the prints in Australia. They offered to pay Jacobs, then just twenty-nine years old, to go there and buy the film on their behalf. Instead, Jacobs borrowed the money and bought it for himself. Patrick and Willard sued, unsuccessfully.

Cayton was surprised that Jacobs managed to avoid more legal trouble. “Jimmy was never a very sophisticated businessman,” said Cayton. “He came to me and wanted prints of some of my fights. He showed me his but I found out he didn’t own any of the rights. He just showed them to friends. He was likable, very engaging. I hired him as a film editor.”

William D’Arcy Cayton was born in Brooklyn in 1918, the son of a prosperous stockbroker. He did well in school and eschewed sports. After graduating from university, Cayton wrote technical reports for Du Pont. He switched to advertising and in the mid-1940s started his own firm. Cayton Inc. remained a small operation with a few highly profitable national accounts. With the advent of television, he recognized the need for sports programming. Cayton started buying up fight films from retired promoters. “They were the wise guys, the Jewish and Irish mafia from the twenties and thirties,” said Cayton. “By then they’d become wealthy gentlemen. They had all these films of Dempsey and Tunney and Louis gathering dust. They were happy to get anything for them. I paid around twenty-five hundred dollars a fight.” Cayton also bought the film rights from current fights. He made his first of many such deals with none other than Jim Norris of the I.B.C.

Gillette sponsored a series of live fights on television every Friday night. Cayton’s program came on afterwards—and often got better ratings. By the time he met Jacobs, Cayton owned 450 films. Jacobs worked as an editor, then started filming some of the fights himself. He also went around the world buying, with Cayton’s money, more old footage. Eventually, he created and produced his own television programs. One of his first ran on CBS in 1962: the Willard-Johnson fight.

The business prospered. The two men produced a new television series called “Knockout.” Jacobs became an expert on boxing. Cayton invested in fight films. He bought the entire library collection of Madison Square Garden. They set up new companies, such as Big Fights Inc., to handle the growing demand for sports television programming. By the mid-1960s, Cayton cut Jacobs in for one-sixth of the profits from Big Fights. A few years later, that became one-third. Cayton, however, maintained full ownership control. The money rolled in. By the early 1970s, the ABC network was paying $2 million a year for the exclusive use of the Big Fights 17,000-fight film library. “Big Fights made Jim a wealthy man,” said Cayton.

Cus D’Amato also believed that the so-called great heavyweights of the turn of the century were anything but. He sought out Jacobs to see the evidence. They became instant friends. Jacobs moved into D’Amato’s small, cluttered, one-bedroom apartment on Fifty-seventh Street in New York and stayed there ten years until D’Amato, bankrupt and finished as an active manager, moved to Catskill.

It seemed like an “Odd Couple” relationship. D’Amato’s career as a manager had peaked, and fizzled, with the Patterson/Johansson scandal. Once a powerful iconoclast, he became a tolerated oddity, a fringe player in the world of boxing espousing arcane ideas of little seeming relevance. That a young, athletic, popular, and outgoing man like Jacobs would live for so long with the paranoiac D’Amato puzzled a lot of people.

Their differences, however, were more of style than substance. Unlike D’Amato, Jacobs’s thinking processes never wandered. He had a deep and resonant voice, and he spoke in a precise, direct fashion. Jacobs affected the formal, stilted manner of an English professor when he discoursed on boxing. He used such phrases as “Oh, yes, I daresay,” and “My dear friend, you must realize.” The effect, when combined with his dark eyes, strong jaw, and bull-like physique, was, to say the least, imposing.

Like D’Amato, Jacobs respected the views of very few people. He never allowed anyone else to be the expert. D’Amato’s cacophony of thoughts and aphorisms enveloped a person like a dense cloud. Jacobs bore down on, and into, his listener like a jackhammer. They were both impassioned about the rightness of their own ideas, both capable of obsessive tunnel vision. They were egoists focused only on their own ambitions.

D’Amato also found in Jacobs someone who fully understood, could practice and intellectually articulate, the psychology of fear. “Jimmy is one of the few people who have a good grasp of fear,” D’Amato was quoted as saying in the 1966 Sports Illustrated profile. “He is extraordinary. He not only has an excellent mind, but a tremendous physique and stamina. I have never met an athlete like him.”

There were rumors about the pair. It seemed like a simple mentor-protégé bond, but some people suspected a homosexual tie. That’s unlikely. It had more to do with the fact that Jacobs perceived his own father as a fallen man, a failure in business and in marriage, symbolically impotent and made all the more so by a domineering wife. D’Amato had also fallen, of course, but in a great battle, and he had emerged with the power of his ideas intact. His demise was unjust. Jacobs found in D’Amato both a wounded father to rehabilitate and a stronger one to be guided by.

Still, Jacobs’s sexual identity didn’t seem to mature past boyhood. He frequently dated women but had no long-standing relationship and no interest in either marriage or children. He lived for work and he strove to please his mother. Intimacy with her was about all that he seemed to want from the opposite sex. “They’d hold hands, he’d kiss her all the time, and call several times a week,” remembered sister Dorothy Zeil. “They used the same pet name for each other, ‘Doll,’ and signed letters the same way, ‘Hugs.’ Once, when Jimmy found out she’d been dating a younger man he went into a jealous rage and insisted that the relationship end.”

Mother and son became prisoners of their own idealized, inviolate bond. Neither could err in the eyes of the other. Each was perfect. To Zeil it was all an elaborate dance of denial. “My mother was a drug addict. Demerol, barbiturates, everything she could get her hands on,” said Zeil. “And Jimmy kept giving her the money to buy them. I told him to stop but he wouldn’t talk about it. Money solved his problems, but it was me who had to deal with her. When she started having accidents from the drugs, I had to take her to the hospital.”

Jacobs couldn’t even bury his own father, who died in 1965 at the age of sixty-five after a five-year bout with lung cancer. “Mother promised she and Jimmy would come to the funeral,” said Zeil. “I went to pick her up and she came to the door in her robe and said, ‘I’m not going and Jimmy isn’t coming home.’”

When D’Amato retired to Catskill in 1971, Jacobs stayed in the apartment for a few more years. He grew much closer to handball protégé Steve Lott and in 1972 hired him to work at Big Fights. In 1974, Jacobs and Lott moved into different apartments in a building on East Forty-fifth Street. They were inseparable. They walked back and forth to work together each day, and frequently traveled overseas with each other to buy fight films. “Jimmy always referred to Steve as his ‘clone,’” said Zeil.

In 1975, Jacobs became friendly with a neighbor, Loraine Atter. Slowly, she replaced Lott as Jacobs’s primary companion. Loraine was forty-five years old, of Italian descent, and originally from Florida. She worked as an executive at a paper manufacturing company. She was known as an emotionally reserved, fastidious woman, and, according to Zeil, she “worshiped Jimmy.” She was the sort of woman who “took care” of her man. Loraine bought his clothes, arranged his social life, decorated his apartment, indeed did everything but cook. They ate out in restaurants every night. And most important, perhaps, was that she met the approval of Jacobs’s mother. Said childhood friend Nick Beck: “His mother didn’t think any of Jim’s girlfriends were suitable, until Loraine.”

Still, no one who knew Jacobs well expected him to marry her. They did, secretly, in 1981. Beck was shocked. So was Zeil. She suspected that her brother was talked into it. But what neither Zeil nor Beck nor anyone else except Jacobs, his mother, and Loraine knew was that in 1980 Jacobs had been diagnosed with chronic lymphoid leukemia. Death, he was told, could come within seven to eight years. No doubt they married because they were in love. But Jacobs may have also wanted the experience of marriage for its own sake before he died.

Jacobs wasn’t content just collecting and producing fight films, no matter how much money he made. He wanted to manage a boxer, preferably a champion and ideally a heavyweight. One early flirtation came in the late 1970s when he worked as a booking agent for white South African heavyweight Kallie Knoetze. He had D’Amato assert in the boxing press that Knoetze would, without doubt, become champion. Despite D’Amato’s training tips, Knoetze did not advance beyond journeyman status.

Jacobs turned to the lower weight classes where there were far greater numbers of available prospects. In 1978, he used $75,000 of Big Fights Inc. money to buy the managerial contract of Wilfred Benitez, a promising young welterweight. Jacobs and Cayton guided Benitez to a championship title in 1979. Soon after, Jacobs and Benitez split up over a contract dispute, and Benitez’s career fizzled.

As a team, Jacobs and Cayton earned a reputation for being tenacious about getting their boxer the easiest matches for the most money—and being honest about purse cuts. They tried to maintain a unified front, as if there were no really significant division of labor and no personal tensions existed. Jacobs functioned as manager of record. He initiated negotiations for fights, dealt with other managers, selected opponents, and schmoozed with the sports media. Steve Lott worked as his assistant in charge of the day-to-day business of the training camp. That included getting sparring partners, making travel arrangements, and generally catering to the fighter’s daily needs. Cayton preferred to work in the background on the contract negotiations with television networks and promoters. Jacobs and Cayton split the manager’s purse fifty-fifty.

Jacobs strutted about as the boxing expert, fight film nabob, and historian. Whenever news stories were done on their fight film ventures, Jacobs the former handball champion took center stage. He claimed that according to a boxing encyclopedia, he was the world’s leading expert on the sport. Jacobs failed to mention the fact that he wrote the entry himself. Privately, to friends, he derided Cayton as a boxing dilettante. “Jim wouldn’t come out and say anything overtly critical of Bill,” said Nick Beck. “He was more insidious about it. He told me that Bill didn’t know much about boxing and didn’t care about it either. It was just a business to him.”

Jacobs also overstated his status in the team. He told people that he had come to Cayton with an enormous film library and plenty of his own money, and that they had pooled their resources and, as equal partners, made boxing film history. One of the first people in boxing to see through that fiction was Larry Merchant, a boxing analyst for HBO Sports. In 1980, Jacobs came to Merchant with an idea to do a comprehensive fight documentary series on videotape. It required transferring thousands of images from film and using advanced video technologies to create special effects such as slow motion and stop-action replays. Jacobs envisaged selling the series to television, then renting out videocassettes. Merchant would narrate, for which he’d get a fee plus a share in the gross rentals. “When I mentioned to Bill [Cayton] what the deal was, he was shocked. Jimmy never told him about it,” said Merchant. After that, Jacobs never brought it up again.

Jacobs also claimed to Merchant, among others, that his father owned a chain of department stores in St. Louis. In other variations, his father owned a construction business. When his father died, Jacobs claimed to have inherited millions of dollars. “Jimmy talked about all his money. He told me that his father gave him fifty thousand dollars in 1960 to stake him in the fight film business,” said Merchant.

Cayton was aware of Jacobs’s public posturing and outright lies but never confronted him with it. “I found the stories about his supposed wealth very amusing,” said Cayton. “First he told people he had ten million dollars, and when he got away with that the figure went to twenty million, then thirty million.” In Cayton’s value system, they were in business together and as long as they prospered, he didn’t care about Jacobs’s idiosyncrasies. “Essentially, Jim was my employee. I did all the business deals with the fight films and all the boxers. Jim was the front man, the public image. Every deal was made right here, at my desk.”

In fact, Jacobs did have a higher opinion of himself than did his associates in the boxing world. “I liked Jimmy. I was curious about his insights on boxing. So were a lot of other people. But he wasn’t liked as a businessperson. He had a code in a deal. He gave you his idea of what it was worth and that was it—no other opinion was valid. He didn’t negotiate. He said, this is it, take it or leave it,” Merchant added.

According to Cayton, on more than one occasion he had to temper Jacobs in a contract negotiation. “Early on, he was a bit too blunt,” said Cayton. “I taught him everything he knew.”

Perhaps he did. Jacobs was a quick study and a man, once he learned the basics, determined to do it his way to the end. By claiming such high ground, Cayton tried to disguise a measure of envy. Merchant was aware of that: “The ever-popular Jimmy, the astute manager and boxing expert liked by everybody: that’s how Bill perceived Jimmy, and he [Bill] resented him for it.”

Cayton had an almost mirror-opposite existence to that of Jacobs. Besides not ever being athletic, he suffered from recurring back problems and endocarditis, an inflammation of the heart valves. He was lean, and tall, but frail-looking. His personal manner was stiff, formal, unengaging, dispassionate, almost cold. He tried to offset that with frequent smiling, but to no avail. The smile looked forced and far too self-consciously affected. It had a Cheshire cat aspect, as if Cayton were pleased with himself in advance with whatever was about to transpire—probably at the listener’s expense. “Bill was a taker, not a giver,” said Camille Ewald. He avoided social outings, except when it concerned business. Not a single person in boxing claimed him as a friend. “Money and business. He’s all business,” added Ewald.