Monteith Illingworth - Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition)

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.