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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 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.
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.”
Jacobs also overstated his status in the team. He told people that he had come to Cayton with an enormous film library and plenty of his own money, and that they had pooled their resources and, as equal partners, made boxing film history. One of the first people in boxing to see through that fiction was Larry Merchant, a boxing analyst for HBO Sports. In 1980, Jacobs came to Merchant with an idea to do a comprehensive fight documentary series on videotape. It required transferring thousands of images from film and using advanced video technologies to create special effects such as slow motion and stop-action replays. Jacobs envisaged selling the series to television, then renting out videocassettes. Merchant would narrate, for which he’d get a fee plus a share in the gross rentals. “When I mentioned to Bill [Cayton] what the deal was, he was shocked. Jimmy never told him about it,” said Merchant. After that, Jacobs never brought it up again.
Jacobs also claimed to Merchant, among others, that his father owned a chain of department stores in St. Louis. In other variations, his father owned a construction business. When his father died, Jacobs claimed to have inherited millions of dollars. “Jimmy talked about all his money. He told me that his father gave him fifty thousand dollars in 1960 to stake him in the fight film business,” said Merchant.
Cayton was aware of Jacobs’s public posturing and outright lies but never confronted him with it. “I found the stories about his supposed wealth very amusing,” said Cayton. “First he told people he had ten million dollars, and when he got away with that the figure went to twenty million, then thirty million.” In Cayton’s value system, they were in business together and as long as they prospered, he didn’t care about Jacobs’s idiosyncrasies. “Essentially, Jim was my employee. I did all the business deals with the fight films and all the boxers. Jim was the front man, the public image. Every deal was made right here, at my desk.”
In fact, Jacobs did have a higher opinion of himself than did his associates in the boxing world. “I liked Jimmy. I was curious about his insights on boxing. So were a lot of other people. But he wasn’t liked as a businessperson. He had a code in a deal. He gave you his idea of what it was worth and that was it—no other opinion was valid. He didn’t negotiate. He said, this is it, take it or leave it,” Merchant added.
According to Cayton, on more than one occasion he had to temper Jacobs in a contract negotiation. “Early on, he was a bit too blunt,” said Cayton. “I taught him everything he knew.”
Perhaps he did. Jacobs was a quick study and a man, once he learned the basics, determined to do it his way to the end. By claiming such high ground, Cayton tried to disguise a measure of envy. Merchant was aware of that: “The ever-popular Jimmy, the astute manager and boxing expert liked by everybody: that’s how Bill perceived Jimmy, and he [Bill] resented him for it.”
Cayton had an almost mirror-opposite existence to that of Jacobs. Besides not ever being athletic, he suffered from recurring back problems and endocarditis, an inflammation of the heart valves. He was lean, and tall, but frail-looking. His personal manner was stiff, formal, unengaging, dispassionate, almost cold. He tried to offset that with frequent smiling, but to no avail. The smile looked forced and far too self-consciously affected. It had a Cheshire cat aspect, as if Cayton were pleased with himself in advance with whatever was about to transpire—probably at the listener’s expense. “Bill was a taker, not a giver,” said Camille Ewald. He avoided social outings, except when it concerned business. Not a single person in boxing claimed him as a friend. “Money and business. He’s all business,” added Ewald.
Not entirely. Cayton had one other abiding interest that may explain part of the reason for his emotional reserve. Every night Cayton would take the 6:40 commuter train to his house in Larchmont, just north of the city. Every weekend is spent at home. One of his three children, a daughter, was born premature in 1947, and then mistakenly given too much oxygen in the incubator, causing blindness and severe retardation. Cayton and his wife, Doris, raised her by themselves at home. “Nothing, no one, could help. Doris devoted herself to her,” said Cayton. Apparently, the younger woman will not eat dinner, or go to bed, until he returns home each night. Whatever Cayton is in business, there must be another, far different man at home. Cayton diligently protected that aspect of his life. He rarely gave out his home telephone number, and he never invited business associates to his house.
Chapter Five (#ulink_437f66bb-054d-569c-8f50-4db38f2cb8ed)
Mike Tyson’s professional career began on March 6, 1985. One year, eight months, and sixteen days later, he would capture the heavyweight championship of the world. The list of firsts which led up to that event in sports history is, by all appearances, mind-boggling.
He would win the title at the age of twenty, younger than any other heavyweight. At that age, Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano were still in the amateurs. No other heavyweight ever captured the title in so short a span of time. No other heavyweight ever achieved as high a percentage of first-round knockouts as Tyson—40.5 percent, or fifteen in twenty-seven fights—in his career leading up to the crown.
It wasn’t victory just by brute force. Tyson acquired the subtler though far less recognized distinction of defensive excellence. Due to his training in the D’Amato “system,” he would be hit far fewer times moving forward than had any other notable heavyweight moving in any direction in the ring.
What won’t go into the statistical record books, or the sports lore, is the degree to which those achievements were the product of design. No boxer becomes champion by serendipity. But the careers of some boxers are more intently, and successfully, manipulated than others. In the hands of D’Amato, Jacobs, and Cayton, that manipulation almost reached the level of conspiracy. Recognizing this fact doesn’t severely diminish Tyson’s achievement. But it does put it in proper perspective.
Informing the whole effort was a single, unspoken motive. None of the men could waste any time getting Tyson a shot at the title. Each of them was on borrowed time.
D’Amato was seventy-seven years old. He had little energy to travel long distances, let alone keep up with the punishing regimen of watching over a rising contender. Tyson was his last hurrah.
In 1985, Jacobs entered the fifth year of his leukemia. According to Dr. Gene Brody, the New York specialist who diagnosed and treated Jacobs, in the early years he managed fairly well. Starting in 1982, Jacobs received occasional doses of two drugs—Leukeran and Prednisone—that kept the disease under control. By 1985, the distorting effect of the cancer on his blood cell count made Jacobs increasingly prone to simple infections. He also suffered enlargement of the lymph nodes in his neck. As Jacobs well knew, chronic lymphoid leukemia, or CLL, is incurable. It’s also capricious. He could die with only a few months’ warning.
Cayton, of course, also knew that. Jacobs told him of the disease, and his prognosis, in 1981. Since then Tyson’s success as an amateur, and the prospect of making him champion, had given Cayton a new interest in his business career. He delayed plans for retirement despite recurring attacks of endocarditis, which had been treated successfully with massive doses of antibiotics. Still, Cayton was a sixty-nine-year-old man. He’d probably outlive D’Amato, but it was a toss-up with Jacobs. No doubt, somewhere in the back of his mind, Cayton wondered if he’d be left having to finish (and profit from) the job himself.
With their collectively fragile mortalities as the background, they devised three basic guidelines for developing Tyson’s career.
First and foremost, they could not risk another defeat in the ring. For an amateur losing was excusable. For a professional it would severely diminish the aura they wanted to build around Tyson as an indestructible force in the ring and an inevitable champion of the heavyweight division. Opponents had to be selected carefully, with all factors—such as fight duration, ring size, and glove weight—stacked in Tyson’s favor.
Second, they hoped to schedule a fight at least once a month. That served several purposes. It fit in with the mortality factor. It was also a way of maintaining control over Tyson and sustaining his burning intensity. And as long as he could be kept at that upper level of performance, Tyson’s tendency to fall into a passive state in the ring might just be avoided.
Third, just as D’Amato had with Floyd Patterson, they had to find promoters willing to let them make most of the decisions. That was the best way to retain absolute control over Tyson’s career.
In this first stage of Tyson’s career, they needed a completely malleable promoter. Matt Baranski suggested a husband-and-wife team based in Troy, New York, an hour north of Catskill. The Millers ran a true mom-and-pop promoting business. They rarely made much money and certainly couldn’t afford to lose any. Jacobs and Cayton would finance the whole promotion. The Millers would be paid out of profits from ticket sales, if any. Jacobs and Cayton also promised to cover all losses.
Tyson’s professional debut came against a club fighter named Hector Mercedes on March 6, 1985, in Albany, New York. Tyson’s hair was cropped short at the sides in a homage to the Spartan macho aesthetic of Jack Dempsey. Tyson swarmed over the taller, slower Mercedes, who must have felt as if he were fighting two opponents: one who only punched and another who eluded. Tyson then settled down into a more fluid expression of his unique style. He’d revised the “peek-a-boo” by holding his gloves on either side of the chin instead of the temple. That way his punches got off more quickly. He knocked out Mercedes in the first round.
As expected, the fight did not turn a profit. Jacobs and Cayton paid Tyson a purse of five hundred dollars. D’Amato paid Rooney 10 percent of that, gave Tyson one hundred dollars, and put the remainder away.
Tyson’s second fight came on April 10 against Trent Singleton. This time he looked more studied. He charged straight in, feinted with his head, slipped and weaved, all the while not getting hit. Then, suddenly, Tyson popped up in close range and let go a series of left and right hooks to the body and head. Singleton went down twice within seconds. When he got up, Tyson reverted to a more conventional offense. He pinned Singleton against the ropes and threw a series of punches, displaying textbook “finishing” abilities. Singelton crumbled. Tyson lunged down to hit his prone opponent again—a serious infraction of the rules—but was stopped by the referee. He turned to his cornermen, Kevin Rooney and Matt Baranski, and smirked.
In his third fight, five weeks later, Tyson regressed. His first two opponents had been tall and black. This one, Don Halpin, was the same height as Tyson and white. From the moment the bell rang, Tyson looked sluggish. There was little head and upper body movement. At times, he let his gloves drop.
Halpin made things worse by standing up to Tyson’s punches. He also tended to crouch, which may have confused Tyson. From early in the amateurs, Tyson was always more effective with a taller opponent. It gave him the chance to use his smaller size to advantage. By the second round, he had started to get lazy on the inside, which enabled Halpin to connect with a few straight rights.
By the fourth round, Tyson began to look like any other conventionally trained fighter. Fortunately, because of his superior hand speed and power, he was better at being average than Halpin. Tyson won by a knockout in the fourth, and tried to hit Halpin as he fell. This time the referee openly rebuked him.
It wasn’t Tyson’s foul play—and there would be much more of it to come—that worried D’Amato and Jacobs afterwards. The passivity had struck their prospect once again, and this time with a handpicked, mediocre opponent. They had no idea what to do about it. “They didn’t know Mike,” Baranski said. “He was out of control most of the time.”
For the next fight Jacobs arranged to get Tyson on ESPN, the sports cable station that stages a weekly fightnight to showcase up-and-coming contenders. These events were organized by top Rank Boxing, owned by Bob Arum. Arum was one of the country’s two top promoters, the other being Don King. Jacobs ran a risk letting Tyson come within Arum’s grasp. Like King, he was notorious for spiriting away other people’s fighters with promises of big money. Jacobs had had one such battle with Arum over Wilfred Benitez.
But Arum had something that Jacobs desperately wanted. Due to his losses at the Olympic trials, Tyson had no chance yet of getting on one of the big three broadcast networks. He had to start with cable. Jacobs made an appeal to Arum’s appetite for power. For several years Arum had been battling with King over turf. Arum ended up doing most of the major middleweight fights, and King the heavyweights. Jacobs knew that Arum had always wanted to get his hands on a major heavyweight contender and challenge King for control of that division.
Tyson’s first fight under Arum was against Ricardo Spain on June 20 in Atlantic City at the Resorts International hotel-casino. D’Amato and Jacobs didn’t want to take any chances with Spain. His height, six-foot-two, didn’t worry them, and neither did his record of seven wins, five by knockout. It was his weight, a mere 184¼ pounds, or around thirty pounds under the average for a heavyweight. “They were really afraid that because he was so much lighter than Mike, Spain would run,” said Nick Beck, who was at the fight. “Chasing him around the ring would have made Mike look bad.”
The fight was scheduled for four rounds. They decided the night before to try increasing it to six, which would give Tyson plenty of time to score a knockout. Jacobs called Spain’s manager. He didn’t want to do it. Jacobs demanded to talk to Spain. “He offered Spain a few hundred dollars on top of his purse for two more rounds,” said Beck. Spain took the money.
Tyson knocked him out in thirty-nine seconds of the first round. Spain, whose nom de pug was “The Ram,” had unwisely decided to stand and fight, a mistake with Tyson, as many other fighters would soon discover. Ironically, Jacobs’s offer may have also made Spain overconfident. If they were that worried about their man’s chances, Spain may have reasoned, maybe he wasn’t such a threat. No doubt that was the conclusion they hoped Spain would reach.
A few weeks later, Tyson went on ESPN again, this time to fight six-foot-four, 226½ pound John Alderson, a twenty-one-year-old former West Virginia coal miner. Alderson was four victories into his return from a three-year layoff from the ring. He made the perfect victim for Tyson. He had the tall heavyweight’s habit of leaning away from a punch. That might have worked against Tyson if Alderson also had good hand speed and leg work, plus punch accuracy, but he didn’t. Tyson easily eluded the punches. He then chopped away with combinations at the body and head as if trying to fell an old red oak, bloodying Alderson’s nose and eye, and dropping him twice until the referee called the fight over in the second round.
The ESPN commentator noted that Tyson switched to being a southpaw, or a left-hander, midway through the first round. He had indeed been taught—perhaps after a suggestion by Jacobs, who was lethal with both hands on the handball court—to fight as a right- and left-hander. That confused opponents. They couldn’t figure out which side of Tyson was the bigger threat. The answer, of course, was both.
Jacobs felt that Tyson had proven himself enough to deserve a regular schedule on ESPN. Arum, in one of the biggest blunders of his promoting career, disagreed. Incredibly, he told Jacobs that his matchmakers considered Tyson an average talent. Arum refused to give Jacobs the dates. Jacobs made contact with a promoter in Houston, Jeff Levine, who would go on to handle eight Tyson fights. Jacobs and Cayton, with their long, bitter memories, never forgave Arum his lack of insight. They did one more fight with Arum, then never again let him within a foot of Tyson’s career.
In Tyson’s next fight, against Larry Sims in Poughkeepsie, New York, he faltered. That is, after an unsuccessful initial barrage, he seemed to get frustrated and lose the seamless union of defensive and offensive movement. It took three rounds to knock Sims out. As with all his fights, this one was taped on video. But Jacobs and Cayton would later deny that a tape had been made. The Sims tape was destroyed. They wanted a record of first-round knockouts and nothing less.
Tyson’s next five fights were on average three weeks apart. Every opponent was tall, slow, and used little head or lateral movement—in other words, tailor-made for Tyson. Some of them didn’t deserve to be in the ring against a fighter of Tyson’s caliber. Not surprisingly, he set off on binge of first-round knockouts.
In pro fight number seven, the slow hands of six-foot-two Lorenzo Canady proved his downfall. Tyson simply ducked underneath, dipped to his left, and let go a concussive left hook to the head. Next was Mike (“Jack”) Johnson, fighting his first bout in more than two years. He sank to the canvas after Tyson slipped, then ripped into him with a left hook to the ribs. Johnson got up and Tyson delivered a straight right through the gloves that dislodged two front teeth, which remained stuck in the hard, rubber mouth guard. Tyson turned to Rooney and pointed at Johnson with a gleeful look that said, “Look at that! Did you see what I just did!”
Donnie Long was dubbed “The Master of Disaster.” He, too, had recently come back after a two-year layoff. Long had a tendency to hold his gloves out as if displaying a sign. That left a big space, through which Tyson drove a straight right. A few more punches and Long was out. Back in his corner, Tyson blew a kiss at the camera.
“Big Bob” Colay, another tall opponent, came on a platter. He held his hands low and tried to dance, but he lacked the leg speed to move out of Tyson’s way. He pawed with left jabs that Tyson easily slipped—to both the right and left, to Colay’s amazement. His trademark left hook to the head put Colay out in thirty-seven seconds of the first round.
After knocking out Sterling Benjamin with another left hook, Tyson didn’t bother to wait for the count to make sure he stayed down. He walked over to Rooney and Baranski and thrust his hands through the ropes, saying nothing, just demanding with the gesture that the gloves be removed. He’d finished. Job done. As they were about to cut the tape away and undo the strings, Tyson glanced over his shoulder to make sure Benjamin remained prone. After all, the unexpected could happen.
It did. Three days later—November 4, 1985—D’Amato died of pneumonia. Through most of October, D’Amato had battled the illness at home. Always distrustful of doctors, he wouldn’t go to the hospital. Finally, he had no choice. By then it was too late. D’Amato spent a week in a nearby local hospital but didn’t respond to the drugs. He moved down to Mount Sinai in New York, and died a few days later.
The only person with him during those last days was not Jacobs or Tyson or Torres, but Tom Patti, who still lived in the house even though he’d given up boxing. “I don’t know why Mike didn’t come,” said Patti. “Maybe he didn’t want to see Cus like that. Cus looked bad, all bloated up.” Patti paused a moment. “Jimmy Jacobs should have been there. I learnt something about Jimmy after that.”
D’Amato was buried in a Catholic cemetery on the outskirts of Catskill. The gravestone is a simple pink granite slab, a few feet high, a few feet wide. Chiseled on it are D’Amato’s own words:
“A boy comes to me with a spark of interest. I feed the spark and it becomes a flame. I feed the flame and it becomes a fire. I feed the fire and it becomes a roaring blaze.” And then beneath, “Cus.” The day after the funeral, Tyson returned by himself and poured a bottle of champagne over the grave.
It was Jacobs’s idea to put those words on the gravestone. They focused on a small part of what D’Amato’s life represented. But they were more apt in describing Jacobs’s primary commercial ambition: promoting heavyweight contender Mike Tyson. Patterson was at most a flickering flame, Torres a mere glow. Only Tyson blazed.
Jacobs didn’t overtly exploit the event of D’Amato’s death to advance his interest with Tyson. He did, however, subtly leverage from it as Patti noticed at the November 19 memorial service that Jacobs organized at D’Amato’s former gym, the Gramercy, on Fourteenth Street. Dozens of people came; old fighters long forgotten, boys whom D’Amato had helped, and friends from his childhood. Jacobs asked only authors Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, and Budd Schulberg, among others, to give eulogies—which he then videotaped.
“He wanted to have segments just in case they came in handy promoting Mike,” said Tom Patti. “Jimmy was using Mike’s relationship with Cus. He wrote a program for the memorial service and quoted Cus about fighting and what makes a great fighter. Beneath the quote he wrote in things like ‘and Mike Tyson is what Cus meant.’ That was true, but what Jimmy did wasn’t right. He was thinking about himself, not Cus or Mike.”
With D’Amato gone, Jacobs could think about the opportunity of Mike Tyson in different terms. He no longer had the benefit of D’Amato’s wisdom on managing a fighter. But he’d listened to D’Amato for years on the principles of the job, and had practiced them with other lesser fighters. “Cus had gone over the plan for Mike endlessly with Jimmy: how often he should fight, who the best opponents would be, when he’d probably be ready for the title, how to handle promoters—everything you could think of,” said Baranski. “Then he told Jimmy what Mike was probably going to be like after he won the title. How he’d change, what to look for to head off problems, guys muscling in on him. Cus had the plan, and all Jimmy had to do was follow it.”
Without D’Amato around, Jacobs knew that the management of Tyson had become greatly simplified. “It would have eventually come to a head between Jimmy and Cus,” continued Baranski. “The bigger Mike got, the more say Cus would have wanted. That would have drove Jimmy nuts. Bill, too. With Cus gone they breathed a lot easier.”
Maybe so. But it’s almost a moot point, because if conflicts had arisen over management issues, D’Amato wouldn’t have had much legal recourse. Once Tyson turned eighteen, D’Amato’s guardianship approval wasn’t needed anymore on documents. Jacobs and Cayton had tied Tyson into a series of agreements that gave them control over every aspect of his career.
They stuck to the plan of Jacobs as manager and Cayton working behind the scenes on contract negotiations. That suited their temperaments and abilities. They also didn’t have any choice. According to the rules and regulations of the New York State Athletic Commission, a body that oversees boxing and wrestling, a boxer is permitted to have only one manager of record.
Still, Cayton had solidified his background role. On September 28, 1984, he obtained Tyson’s signature on a contract that made him “exclusive personal manager” for the extraordinary long term of seven years. He would represent Tyson for commercial appearances, product endorsements, and all entertainment activities under the corporate name of Reel Sports, Inc.
Cayton was sole owner of Reel Sports. He also had a private agreement with Jacobs to share evenly the personal manager’s commission. That was the other unusual aspect of the contract besides the lengthy term. Personal service agents for athletes usually claim a commission of from 10 to 15 percent. Cayton took 33⅓ percent.
D’Amato, who for so long had prided himself on working in the fighter’s interests, did not object to either the term of the Reel Sports agreement or the commission. Nor did he advise Tyson to get a lawyer to review the contract.. Perhaps D’Amato felt that his review was sufficient. He signed the agreement. Under his name it read “Cus D’Amato, Adviser to Michael Tyson, who shall have final approval of all decisions involving Michael Tyson.” D’Amato’s legal position was shaky. He didn’t have a separate contract with Tyson making him exclusive adviser.
A few weeks after the Reel Sports agreement was signed, Jacobs officially contracted with Tyson to become manager. That agreement used the standard Athletic Commission boxer-manager form. Nothing in the specified term (four years) or purse split (two-thirds for Tyson, one-third for Jacobs) was unusual. That same day, Jacobs and Cayton used another Athletic Commission form to put their division of Tyson’s purses in writing. The “assignment of manager’s contract” enabled Jacobs to legally give Cayton 50 percent of his earnings from Tyson.
* * *
Ever since doing the Alex Wallau interview with ABC, Jacobs and Cayton had looked for new media opportunities to push the narrative of the relationship between D’Amato and Tyson. They knew that every great fighter, if he was going to cross over into the mainstream audience, needed a story. The more empathetic the tale, the better. In other words, the more Tyson could be defined through a device America understood, the more likely he’d achieve general acceptance and popularity. Given Tyson’s continued bent for the wild side—all through 1985 he continued to disappear for days at a time in Albany and New York, and on one occasion mugged a man in an elevator for his wallet—that story had to move center stage. It would popularize, sanitize, and create the ever-ready, all-purpose rationalization.
Soon after Tyson turned professional, Jacobs pitched a documentary profile of D’Amato and Tyson to the producers of CBS “Sunday Morning,” hosted by the avuncular Charles Kuralt. On June 2, 1985, the piece aired. Narrative had been refined into the fable of Cus and the Kid.
The initial image showed Kuralt and D’Amato strolling across the lawn of the house. Kuralt’s voice-over cut in: “Cus D’Amato lived a full, rich, embattled life in the big cities. He managed Floyd Patterson to the heavyweight championship of the world almost thirty years ago. But boxing passed him by. And left him in exile in the country.”
The image cut to D’Amato in the Catskill gym.
“He considered himself a teacher, a shaper of character … and then suddenly Cus D’Amato is handling fire again. Michael Tyson, a wild, angry teenager from a nearby reform school. Cus, who never married, adopted Michael, took him into his home, taught him about jabbing through fear.”
Kuralt talked about each giving the other the same gift, “a future.” The piece flashed back to D’Amato’s time with Patterson and their eventual estrangement. Kuralt then dug up Patterson and asked if he had any advice for Tyson: “Have faith, confidence in the man you trust. In Cus.”
D’Amato claimed, rather incredibly, for Tyson had had only three pro fights up to that point, that he could “go down in history as the greatest fighter of all time.”
Kuralt then all but sainted D’Amato. “Cus D’Amato is more than a manager of champions. He’s a savior of souls. He saved Floyd Patterson and he is saving Mike Tyson.”
