Monteith Illingworth - Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition)

In June, Tyson left for Las Vegas to compete in the Olympic trials. D’Amato and Jacobs considered the trials a mere formality. To everyone’s shock, Tyson lost twice to Henry Tillman, a six-foot-three, 195-pound former gang member from South Central Los Angeles. He would not compete in the Olympics. Tyson later accused Tillman of trying to stick thumbs in his eye. D’Amato blamed the amateur boxing establishment for taking out on Tyson their dislike for him. But a look at the fight proved that although it was close, Tillman won by scoring more points. He simply fought smarter.

That’s how Alex Wallau read the fight. “Mike didn’t fight a very smart fight. He let himself get frustrated and I sensed that he was in conflict about what style he was supposed to use, professional or amateur. He couldn’t make the adjustment to amateur style.”

Tillman’s trainer put it more bluntly. “Tyson boxed like a robot and when Henry started to pick him off with jabs, it was like pulling out a fuse.”

D’Amato and Jacobs were stunned by the loss. All of the promise that had built up around Tyson over the last four years seemed in question. He was capable of spectacular successes, and stunning, inexplicable defeats. Despite all the psychological reordering, the work in the gym, battles with teachers, social workers, and tutors, and all the abuse D’Amato took from Tyson, despite the strings pulled and lies told, the cover-ups and the loss of friends, with all that had been expended, Tyson remained an enigma. For that D’Amato disliked Tyson, deeply. He vented those feelings to a boxing promoter at the trials: “He said that Mike was a piece of shit and an animal and that if he had his way, he’d throw Mike out onto the street,” said the promoter.

But of course D’Amato didn’t have the choice. More than anything, he wanted that third champion. He was obsessed. Just before leaving Las Vegas, he hatched a backup plan to get Tyson the gold medal. Tyson had been selected as an alternate to the team. He’d be permitted to work out at the training camp with the other boys until the competition began. At first, D’Amato was so bitter about the loss that he didn’t want Tyson 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.”