Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition). Monteith Illingworth

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