Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition). Monteith Illingworth

to go. Then he remembered the rule that if any team member was knocked out in sparring he’d have to rest for several weeks, with the alternate taking his place. “Cus told Mike to go out there to the camp and knock out anybody he could,” said Baranski. “Mike stayed in the camp exactly one day. The other trainers knew what he was up to and didn’t want him around.”

      After the Olympics (Tillman won the heavyweight gold medal), D’Amato and Jacobs altered their plan for Tyson’s pro career. They could never be sure which Tyson would step into the ring, the knockout machine or the passive little boy. It seemed that the flaw could strike with almost any opponent. Still, there was a type they had to avoid matching Tyson with. A fighter who combined basic boxing skills with good movement, confidence, and poise—someone who could easily frustrate Tyson—was the riskiest.

      Without the fanfare of an Olympic gold medal, promoting Tyson would also be difficult. The television, newspaper, and magazine exposure that came with a gold medal would have sent him into the national consciousness in a ready-made, prepackaged form. His greatness as a fighter would have been largely assumed. Now they had to build his reputation from the bottom up. That posed a whole different series of management and marketing challenges. Jim Jacobs would dive into the task with the same obsession that D’Amato had the training.

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