Monteith Illingworth - Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition)

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.”