It was the evening of Mike Jacobs’s bow-out from the Garden, the last promotion with which he was to be directly associated – the Kid’s last fight.
But the world’s champion fight promoter, the man who had set the stage for Joe Louis, Ray Robinson, Henry Armstrong, Barney Ross and a dozen other ring immortals, who had been associated with or personally promoted every million-dollar gate in the history of the game, whom the sport had made a multimillionaire, was winding up with a match that stood in pitiable contrast to the big-name shows and fat paynights of Jacobs’s prime.
It was just Pete Mead and Robert Villemain, a couple of middleweights of no particular distinction other than being able to bleed with considerable stoicism. The fight fans who had made a rich man of Uncle Mike were staying away from this one in such numbers as to mark Mike’s passing from the scene with one of the poorest gates in big-time boxing history.
With Mike’s stroke the year before, boxing had suffered its own collapse. For Mike Jacobs – Monopoly Mike as the sports writers liked to call him when they were being polite – had been to the boxing game what FDR had been to the game of politics. A standout. A natural. The Man. For all those constituents who went along with FDR, let us hasten to add that the only connection between the four-time winner and Squire Jacobs of Rumson is their pre-eminence in their respective fields. Notable differences are that Uncle Mike never tolerated an opposition party, never confided in any Brain Trust other than the one he carried around in his own bald pate and never cast anything upon the waters until he had made damn sure it would be returned at least four- or five-fold.
The evening of the Mead–Villemain box office fiasco found Mike Jacobs in his big, rambling country manse in New Jersey, a restless old man of 69 with a face not unlike that of a bald eagle, a comparison which one of his detractors (which seems to include the entire guest list of the Forrest Hotel and the whole schmear of Jacobs Beachcombers) ascribes to the fact that ‘having spent all of his life chasing a dollar, he just naturally began to look like one’. A sick man who has been down twice with cerebral haemorrhage and a heart attack, and who had been warned to take it easy if he didn’t want his licence revoked for all time by the only Referee he couldn’t approach, Uncle Mike was sitting around chewing on his toothless gums, squinting impatiently at television, pacing the oversized living room like a jungle beast not yet used to his cage. Suddenly, in the loud, harsh tone he uses for English, he ordered the ex-fighter chauffeur to drive the car around – he was going into town for his last fight.
‘Drive all that way just to watch a coupla bums?’ said Josie, his wife, a good-hearted, two-fisted, spade-calling, fifty-five-year-old bottle blonde and, like her husband, a graduate summa cum laude of the University of Hard Knocks.
By way of an answer, Uncle Mike chewed determinedly on his gums, a retort that has confounded some of the slickest and the toughest in a business where an honest man is automatically down in everybody’s book as a suspicious character.
‘Why doncha see it on the television?’ Josie persisted.
‘I’m goin’ in,’ Mike shouted in the voice he developed when he was first hawking excursion tickets at the Battery some 55 years before.
‘Seems like a helluva lot of trouble just to give the few bastards who’ll be there a chance to boo ya,’ Josie said.
For years the mention of Uncle Mike’s name from the Garden ring had been a cue for an expressive Bronx cheer from the fans. We’ll come every Friday and pay through the nose to see your shows, that prolonged razzberry seemed to say, but we don’t have to like you. In fairness to Mike, it should be explained that this personal unpopularity with the general public bothered him about the same way a horsefly disturbs the cast iron horse under General Sherman in Central Park. Mike has never run for any office except the box office. As long as the people paid the price on the ticket – or, better yet, a little something over the price – the people could call him anything they wanted – which they usually did.
‘Getcha coat, we’re goin!’ said Mike, who was once described as a man of a few ill-chosen words.
Having been Mike’s helpmate for some 35 years, Josie protested no further. For Mike Jacobs ran his household with the same iron hand and apparently iron lungs that have for nearly half a century terrorised his office help and business associates.
Even when Mike was being a charming and gracious host, he was inclined to couch his generosity in terms of harsh commands. ‘Go ahead, take more turkey,’ he’d bark at you, and should you mumble a polite ‘No thank you,’ he’d growl at the butler, ‘Put more turkey on d’ plate – MORE!’
So Josie got her coat while Mike, an impatient man with a deep compulsion to be on the move, bad heart and all, was already in the car with the motor going. In a few minutes they were roaring toward New York. Sixty miles an hour is crawling to Mike. Before his illness he had always done his own driving, and it was a common sight to the Jersey cops to see him careering through highway traffic at 80 miles an hour. ‘Compared to him, Barney Oldfield was a bum,’ said the valet and masseur who lived with him for years. ‘Every time I rode with him, I said, “Goodbye, life.” He cracked up five beautiful cars that I know of, but somehow he never got hurt. I’d’ve said that God was watching over him, only why the hell should God watch over a S.O.B. like that?’
As they shot through one small New Jersey town, a highway patrolman took pursuit, but when he was close enough to see the familiar licence number, he waved and turned away. Cops never bothered Mike. Early in life he had learned never to argue with the Shields. Not when there were easier ways to get around them.
They reached the Garden just in time for the usual gathering of celebrities in the ring before the main event. Commissioner Eddie Eagan, the gentleman boxer, Rhodes scholar and favourite target for uncouth remarks from the boxing fraternity, was receiving a medal from the French consul general for services rendered in France. The Honourable Mr Eagan had earned this award by suspending the officials who had been so provincial as to have voted for Jake LaMotta, the Bronx capitalist, in a tug-of-war with Monsieur Villemain.
The blundering if well-meaning commissioner had dealt harshly and perhaps impetuously with a popular local sportsman by the name of Rocky Graziano, and the fans were in no mood to look kindly upon his being given anything except the gate. His appearance in the ring was a signal for the kind of inverted cheer that had for years been Uncle Mike’s reception.
Perhaps to deflect these rude noises from himself to some other victim, Commissioner Eagan announced that Mike Jacobs was in the house for his farewell promotion and asked the fistic dean emeritus to stand and take a bow. To everyone’s amazement, not the least Uncle Mike’s, the fans rose as if this were Eisenhower and cheered and applauded for three minutes. For the first and last time in his 30 years of association with the game, Mike was in right with his cash customers.
‘Now what’s all the cheering about?’ we asked the fight manager sitting next to us.
The manager shrugged. ‘Go figure out fight fans,’ he said. ‘One minute they’re yelling for murder and the next minute they’re so sentimental they’re yelling for the fight to be stopped to save some bum a little punishment. One minute your guy’s a hero, and just like that they turn on ’im and call ’im a yellow bum.
‘Same with Mike just now. All of a sudden he got to ’em. They get thinking back to all the great fights he made for ’em, starting with Ross and Petrolle, then Armstrong–Ambers, Armstrong–Zivic, and the first Louis–Conn, and they remember how he tried to buck the gamblers and how he insisted his fights go on the square no matter what Dan Parker says. They think how much more he had on the ball than anybody else who ever set himself up as a fight promoter, how he was strictly a Big Dealer who came into the Garden when the joint was dying on its feet and built it up into the only major league club the boxing business has. Then they think of this guy living on a rain check, ready to cross over any minute, coming in on a slow night like this just to smell a little of that resin for the last time, and they think, well, let’s give the old bastard a send-off he’ll remember.’
After the fight some of the boys were sitting around Lindy’s, tearing into herring, chicken liver and Mike’s motives for having gone to all the trouble of coming in for this farewell appearance.
‘For a man who’s supposed to be guided strictly by what’s-in-it-for-me, doesn’t it seem he deserves a little credit?’ I asked. ‘He’s a guy who never cared anything about the limelight, so he didn’t drive all the way in from the country just to get a hand. Don’t you think it’s possible there’s a streak of sentiment in him? Now that he’s stepping down, maybe he can afford himself the luxury of acting like a human being once in a while.’
They looked at me as if I were from the country, which I was.
‘I think the only reason Mike came in was to count the house for the last time,’ an old-time fight manager said. ‘When he heard it was only $16,000, he thought they were holding out on him.’
‘Either that or he just didn’t know what to do with himself,’ a publicist said. ‘He doesn’t know how to sit still. He’s been hustling too long.’
‘If he ever gets to heaven,’ said the old-timer, ‘ten to one he finagles the choice tickets from St Peter and makes a bundle scalping ’em outside the gate.’
‘He was a promoting son of a bitch,’ the old-timer went on. ‘Did you know he made $80,000 off Caruso one season before the First War? Another time he did all right with Emmeline Pankhurst, the suffragette. He could promote shit and make you buy it for sugar candy.’
‘If it hadn’t been for him, Rickard would’ve gone broke on that Dempsey–Carpentier,’ the publicist said.
‘I’ll tell you the secret of Mike’s success, he never let his right hand know what his left was doing,’ the fight manager said.
‘Hell, not even his forefinger would know what his second finger was doing,’ said the old-timer.
‘Not to mention that middle finger,’ said the publicist, and everybody laughed.
‘Isn’t there anybody who likes him?’ I asked, for after all, I had no axe to grind. I had never had to go up against Mike on a business deal. I had never hated his guts like some of the fighters, managers and sportswriters who despised him for what they considered his ruthlessness and greed. And I had never gone to him with my hands out like certain politicians, law enforcement officers and a compromised minority of boxing writers to whom Mike was a friend as long as they could be of any use.
The old-timer shook his head. ‘His mother used to like him, but she’s passed on.’
‘He was sure good to his mother,’ the publicist said. ‘Only person he respected in his whole life, if you ask me. Gave her a car and a chauffeur and a swell apartment. Had a great big painting made of her. And he’s always been a sucker for kids. This little girl Joan he’s adopted, when he starts telling you how smart she is, he’s a typical doting pa.’
‘Didn’t he have any friends?’ I persisted. ‘Wasn’t there a special fondness for some of the fighters? Like Billy Conn?’
‘Sure,’ the old-timer said, ‘he was crazy about Conn. Especially that night Billy helped him draw that two million.’
That led to one of the classic stories of Mike’s capacity for friendship. One evening as Mike was leaving for the country, a marginal character called Billy Stevens happened to be hanging around the office. Billy was what might be called these days a five-percenter, a small-time angler who specialised in making himself useful to as many people as possible. This happened to be at a time when Mike was having a little more trouble than usual pinning Eddie Mead down to a Garden date for Armstrong, and Mike must have figured that Stevens might be able to wise him up as to just how well this horseplaying manager was fixed at the moment. Maybe Mike, a man of sudden moods, was feeling a little lonely too. Anyway, he asked Stevens to drive down and spend the weekend with him.
Throughout the weekend Stevens was wined and dined with a lavish hand, the way Mike knows how to do it when he’s out to please. Stevens talked freely, and Mike must have welcomed the information for when he put Stevens in his car to send him to the station late Sunday afternoon, he pressed his hand warmly and told him how much he had enjoyed the visit. ‘See you first thing in the morning, Mike,’ Stevens said, and Mike’s benign smile and nod seemed to indicate that nothing would please him more.
When Stevens got back to town that night, he told all his pals how badly they had misjudged Mike. ‘I never met a friendlier or more considerate guy,’ he insisted. ‘We hit it off something wonderful. From now on it looks like I’m gonna be his right-hand man.’
The next morning Stevens was in bright and early to begin his career as Mike’s right-hand and confidante. ‘The Boss ain’t in,’ growled Donnelly, the hulking ex-cop who guarded the door to Mike’s inner office. But Stevens smiled confidently. He knew the Boss’s habit of getting to his office every morning by eight o’clock. ‘Just tell him his pal Billy Stevens is here.’
In a moment Donnelly returned. ‘The Boss says – I mean I says – he ain’t in,’ said Donnelly, in a kind of ominous gargle, and started pushing Stevens away from the door.
At this moment Uncle Mike appeared. He could hardly avoid bumping into his erstwhile guest as he passed, but if he recognised him he gave no sign.
‘Hi, Mike!’ Stevens called. But though he was only a few feet away, Mike did not seem to hear.
‘But I just spent the weekend with him! I’m one of his close friends!’ Stevens screamed as he was being dragged along.
‘Hey, Boss?’ Donnelly called to Mike, now engaged in earnest conversation with his Girl Friday, Rose Cohen; the guard indicated Stevens and then, with an eloquent thumb gestured toward the main door. Mike merely nodded and, while his weekend guest was being propelled into the corridor, went on checking the number of tickets sent out for his next fight.
‘That’s our Uncle Mike,’ said the old-timer. ‘When you had something he wanted, he couldn’t do enough for you. But once he squeezed you dry, you could be lying in the gutter and he’d step right over you and never look down.
‘There never was a man in this town chased the dollar quite so hard as Uncle Mike. No pursuit of happiness for him; strictly pursuit of the buck. He’d tell you that himself. “If I made a hunnert grand this morning, I’d be out hustlin’ for a quarter this afternoon. I can’t help it. I got to be on the go,” he admitted one time. It’s kind of a disease. Mike came up out of the slums, one of 11 ragged kids in a couple of stinking rooms. He was out hustling a buck when most kids were still rolling hoops. By the time he was ten, he was a full-time business man.’
I made a mental note of this for future reference. It’s sort of a hobby, trying to figure out what makes a phenomenon like Mike Jacobs run. I had the feeling that night it wasn’t quite as simple as calling him names. He seemed to have the complexities of a Machiavellian prince, twentieth-century Eighth Avenue style, and I’d need the objectivity of Machiavelli himself if I were going to understand him.
Meanwhile I was listening to another anecdote in this fabulous career. The supply seems endless, for Uncle Mike, like Jimmy Walker, Wilson Mizner and a rare few, had become a legend in his own time. ‘One thing Mike had twice as much of as anybody else,’ said a sportswriter who had joined the table, ‘is chutzpah. I don’t know exactly how you translate chutzpah,’ said the sportswriter who happened to be Irish but had been raised in Lindy’s. ‘It’s like when you go to a dinner party without being invited, insist on being served first and then complain to the hostess the steak isn’t the way you like it. That’s mild chutzpah. But Uncle Mike was the all-time chutzpah champ. Like Joe Louis, he retired with the title undefeated.
‘For instance, the story of him and Fritzie Zivic. One night Fritzie calls him at his suite at the Edison. It’s pretty late and Mike is in bed. Fritzie says he could use five grand, against some future fight in the Garden. Mike blows his top. Who the hell does this bum Zivic think he is to wake Mike up in the middle of the night to put the bite on him? Why doesn’t Zivic go back to Pittsburgh and leave him alone? Who wants to throw money away on a stinkin’ has-been? He lets loose with a string of obscenities, including all the old standbys and a couple of new ones he invents for the occasion, and crashes the receiver back on the hook.
‘A few minutes later Mike’s matchmaker Nat Rogers calls with terrible news. Bob Montgomery was sick and the big lightweight match with Beau Jack was out the window. With only 48 hours to fight time, it seemed hopeless to find a suitable substitute match, and without one they’d lose a big paynight and have to return the sizable advance sale. “I thought of moving Vinnie Vines up from the semi-final,” Rogers said. Vines had been impressive as a minor club main-eventer and was considered a promising rookie. “But we’d need somebody with a name in there with him to draw any money.”
‘When Mike is faced with a crisis like having to pay money back, nobody in America thinks quicker. “Lissen,’ he says, “call Zivic right away. Right here in the hotel. Ask him what’s the big idea hangin’ up on me. Tell ’im I’m sore. Shut up. Do like I tell ya.”
‘A few minutes later a bewildered Zivic called Mike again. “Mike, what goes on? I thought you hung up on me.”
‘Uncle Mike’s tone became positively fatherly, for Uncle Mike. “Fritzie, would I do that? We’re old friends, ain’t we? We made a lot of money together.”
‘“’s funny, I was sure you hung up on me,” said Fritzie, not altogether convinced. “An’ all them things you called me.”
‘“Aah the fuckin’ operator cut us off,” Mike said. “An’ you know I’m only kiddlin’ when I call ya names. If I didn’ like ya I wouldn’ call ya anything,” and Mike with rare cordiality went on to inquire as to the health of Zivic’s wife and children and finally of the fighter himself.
‘“Feeling fine,” said Zivic, a cutie outside the ring as well as in. “I’m always in shape.”
‘“Then you’re fightin’ Friday night.”’
The last-minute match between a rising young star and a famous veteran caught the imagination of the fans, what might have been a night in the red turned out to be solidly in the black, and everyone was happy except young Vines, who proved too green for the ex-champion and was banged out by old Fritzie in two minutes of the first round.
Everyone agreed this was a typical Operation Jacobs. The popular pastime of putting the knock on Uncle Mike, indulged in even by those who had profited by his ingenuity, showmanship and readiness to pay off for services rendered, might have gone on into the small hours if Ray Arcel hadn’t come along at that moment and helped get things back in perspective.
Ray was something of a rarity in boxing circles for besides being an outstanding trainer and a manager of impeccable honesty, he never went in for the backbiting and belittling that monopolised the monologues of some of his prominent colleagues.
‘Mike may be a hard man to love,’ said Arcel. ‘Somehow I don’t think he even wanted people to like him. He was a lone operator. He played all his cards close to his chest. I don’t think he ever let anybody get very close to him. After all, he’s been operating in this town all his life. He’s worked with thousands and thousands of people and done favours for thousands more. Some of the biggest people in this city call him Mike, and yet he hasn’t got a single close friend.
‘But I’ll say this for Mike, we’ve begun to miss him already. No one else could make us that kind of money. Sure, maybe it was a monopoly and all that, but Mike knew how to fill a house. And the more money he made for himself, the more he made for our fighters. And I’ll say another thing for Mike. He drove the toughest bargain he could, but once he said you had a deal it was like money in the bank. You didn’t need a contract. If Mike said 25 per cent, he didn’t pay off on 24 and a half. He stabilised this business. Before Mike it was always hit or miss. But with Mike, if you had something to offer, you could count on a good living. And anytime you got in a hole, Mike was there to stake you. There was nothing small about him that way. I don’t know how many managers are into him for ten, fifteen thousand in advance for fights that never came off. And Mike’s never put the squeeze on them. When he goes, he’ll take at least a couple of hundred thousand with him in IOUs.’
The sportswriter pointed out that these advances, in Joe Louis’s case as much as a hundred thousand, had been Mike’s way of cornering the market on big-name fighters. Once they were into Mike for ten or fifteen Gs they had to fight for him to get off the hook. It was more binding than an exclusive contract, for contracts, as Mike was the first to know (and as will be investigated later in some detail), could be bypassed. But once you owe a man 15 or 20 or $25,000, and he runs the only club in the world where you can consistently make that kind of money for one evening’s work, you’re going to think twice before you skip off to fight some bum in Wilkes-Barre without the Boss’s okay.
‘If Mike had a monopoly,’ Arcel persisted, ‘it was because he was so completely head and shoulders above anybody else in this business that he naturally came to dominate it. His judgement of what a match would draw was uncanny,’ Ray Arcel said. ‘There were a lot of people who knew more than he did about fighters’ abilities, but nobody knew more about matching up the fighters who would draw the money. He could say Janiro and LaMotta – that’s good for eighty-six thousand and Janiro and Pellone won’t do better than forty-eight, and nine times out of ten he’d come within a thousand dollars of the final gross.’
‘You think he was good for boxing?’ I asked.
‘All things considered, I do,’ Arcel said. ‘After all it’s just a business like any other. The man who can make the most money for you is the man to have around. You check the records you’ll find the total income of main-event fighters doubled or maybe tripled while Mike was in the driver’s seat. Mike’s yearly business was two, three, four, sometimes five million dollars. You’ve got to figure the fighters were cutting in for 50 per cent of that. Would you rather gross a couple of hundred thousand with a guy you love like a father or five million with a so-and-so like Mike?’
There isn’t much question as to whether the fight game’s been good for Mike. The tallest Horatio Alger tale is mild stuff alongside Mike’s upward climb from the seamiest slums of Manhattan to the palatial home in New Jersey and only the Lord (and probably not even the Treasury Department) knows how many millions. Whether Mike’s been good for the fight game is what might be called along Forty-ninth Street a ‘mute pernt’. It’s good for an argument any time a fight crowd gets together, and even the sports columnists who have kept close tabs on Mike for years can’t seem to agree.
The New York Mirror’s Dan Parker, who preferred to call him Uncle Wolf, thought Mike the most arrogant and ruthless dictator the sports world ever had, and fired regular broadsides at him for allegedly favouring a fight manager’s clique, countenancing the sale of boxing titles, buddying up to mobsters like Frankie Carbo (whose fighters were always on the cards and sometimes gave performances that did not look altogether kosher), raising ticket prices beyond the pocketbook of the average fan, scalping working press tickets for outlandish prices, preventing first-rank fighters from their legitimate crack at titles and at least half a dozen other crimes against the public interest.
But Red Smith, an equally honest and able observer of Eighth Avenue doings, took a kindlier view: ‘Although it is certainly true that nobody ever exerted such absolute dictatorship as his over any sport and while it is probably true that no one else ever made such profits as he from boxing, it is emphatically true that no man ever ran boxing as well as he, anywhere . . . If anyone in the world has run fights on the level, Mike has.’
Jimmy Powers of the Daily News is on Parker’s side, agreeing with his colleague from the Mirror that the second Louis–Conn fight was ‘a swindle’, and out-Parkering Mike’s severest critic when he urged Mike to retire from fight promotion because he was running the game into the ground – not only in New York, he wrote, ‘but in other great cities of America where Monopoly Mike’s blighting hand has ruined the sport and left darkened arenas’.
But Jimmy Cannon of the Post, whose indictment of the game as ‘a racket founded on deceit and treachery’ is on record in any number of eloquent columns, who has called Mike ‘the stingiest man in the world’, who tabbed the build-up for the second Louis–Conn fight ‘a phoney’ and nailed the Louis–Mauriello match as an insult to the fans’ intelligence, still seems to agree with Smith that, by and large, Uncle Mike was on the square and promoted more memorable fights than any other single promoter.
The Broadway bard Damon Runyon, himself once a partner of Mike’s in the Twentieth Century Sporting Club, in one of his last comments on fistic matters seemed to line up with the opposition. Critical of Jacob’s monopoly, he wrote: ‘There is none of the old incentive to managers to hustle up new fighters . . . Mike Jacobs, the boxing Boss, has a radio deal that nets him a profit whether the boxing performers are stars or hamdonnies, so he has no interest in that constant development of new headliners that was once the lifeblood of the fight game.’
But it’s one of those endless controversies, for such respected newspapermen as John Kieran, Bill Corum and Frank Graham bylined that without being blind to the personal foibles of Uncle Mike, they considered him a beneficial influence. And, apparently, despite the violence of the opposition, the vote of boxing writers was in Mike’s favour, for prominently displayed in Mike’s richly, if somewhat eclectically, furnished living room was an impressive gold trophy inscribed to him from the Boxing Writers Association for ‘his lifetime exemplary service to the sport of boxing in America’.
Fighters themselves were as far apart on the question of Uncle Mike as the sportswriters. Jack Dempsey had been blasting Mike for years for monopolistic tactics he claimed were milking the game dry, choking off incentive and generally running it into the ground. But Joe Louis would tell you Uncle Mike always dealt fairly with him, that he gave greater opportunities to black boxers than anyone before him and that more good fighters were developed under his management than at any previous time because Mike’s shows raked in the kind of practical encouragement that talks loudest to hungry fighters. As of this writing, Gene Tunney had not been heard from. Perhaps it is not considered cricket for one millionaire and country squire to discuss another. Or perhaps Gene, as a student of Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw, went at it more subtlely and had Mike in mind when he made those general blasts against the low company of scurillous characters with whom one had to deal in the boxing business.
Despite the controversy over Uncle Mike’s business methods, there is one subject on which all disagreement ceases – his phenomenal capacity for success. With no education, no knowledge of a trade, no one to help him and no money in his hands that he didn’t earn peddling papers, running errands or slinging hash, he hustled himself a thousand-dollar stake before most kids are halfway through high school. ‘After 16 I was never broke again,’ he said. In the next half-century he rang the bell (a cash register’s, naturally) in at least three different fields – excursion boat concessions, ticket speculation and the fight business – with successful side forays into the stock market and real estate. As a ticket seller, his ingenuity amounted to genius. ‘Put a ticket in his hand, he could squeeze three times as much money out of it as anybody else,’ says an old associate. ‘I swear it was more miraculous than squeezing blood out of stone.’
The scope and cynical brilliance of Mike’s ticket speculation is a chapter in itself, to be studied in detail as a way of life that was paying top dividends come boom or depression. On the second Dempsey–Tunney fight he is said to have made as much money as the official promoter Tex Rickard just from the sale of choice, reserved seats at twice, three times (or ten times if he could get it) their printed value of $75. On the night of that fight he had so much money in cash that he broke it up into $20,000 lots, concealed it in the clothing of his various relatives and put them on a train back to New York with it. He was careful not to buy them Pullman berths though. ‘If I let ’em get comfortable,’ he told Bobby Dawson, the old boxer who served as a sort of rough and ready Knight of the Bath to Mike, ‘the sons-o’-bitches might fall asleep.’
When Rickard died in 1929, Mike made no effort to fill Tex’s shoes himself. Let the other fellow have the headaches, all I want is the choice seats to hustle, seemed to be his philosophy then. It was more or less by accident, as we shall see, that he found himself in the role of promoter bucking Jimmy Johnston and the Garden from 1934 until he came in as top man in 1937. But in the next decade he hung up box office records outside the ring that promise to stand as long as Joe Louis’s inside the ring. He staged sixty-one championship bouts, promoted three thousand boxing shows, signed five thousand boxers, grossed over $10 million with Joe Louis alone, staged approximately 70 per cent of all the bouts below the heavyweight division that grossed over $100,000 (totalling $3 million, with a mass attendance of half a million), attracted in a single year, to thirty-four Garden shows, nearly half a million people, grossed in that same year $5.5 million and sold tickets over a fifteen-year period to more than five million people who pushed at least $20 million through Mike’s ticket windows.
And yet, to anyone who knows the strange and devious ways of Uncle Mike, even this record of official financial success doesn’t begin to tell the story. For whereas Mike’s Twentieth Century Sporting Club might show a net annual profit of $200,000 or $300,000, Mike could make himself a hundred thousand or so in hidden profits from the ‘ice’ in selling ringside seats through the Jacobs Ticket Agency or through under-the-counter sale of seats in a highly privileged in-front-of-ringside section that Mike called euphemistically ‘the working press’.
At any championship fight this ‘working press’ was always an interesting gathering of big-shot politicians, Hollywood and Broadway stars, judges, and the Who’s Who of New York and New Jersey millionaire hoodlums, who might have paid anywhere from a 100 to 300 for their ‘complimentary ticket’. A ‘working press’ section of 500 or 600, at these prices, adds up to a nice little bonus, especially when it’s all in cash and not subject to luxury or income taxation.
But despite the commanding position he maintained in New York for three decades, surprisingly little was known about the personal life and actual career of Uncle Mike. As late as 1929 the ex-sportswriter Westbrook Pegler referred to him merely as ‘the box office man for Tex Rickard’. Except for occasional reference to excursion boats, the columnists seemed more interested in Mike’s exasperating presence than in his somewhat incredible origin, his grotesque childhood and the compulsive money-hunger of his young manhood.
Undoubtedly this reticence stemmed from Mike himself, whose habitual secretiveness found a natural ally in his inarticulateness when talking anything other than the fight business. People who worked and lived with him for years fell strangely silent when his early days were mentioned. His own family approached the subject with a strange caution, as if under a heavy load of pressure or fear. The one man most often mentioned as a personal friend, Captain George Foster, formerly of the New York Fire Department and now a baseball executive with the New York Giants, testified to Mike’s secretiveness even about matters which seemed relatively innocuous.
‘He wasn’t much of a talker unless there was some definite point to be gained,’ said Foster, the only one of at least 30 interviewees who confessed to a genuine liking for Mike. ‘Sometimes on the drive out to Rumson, he wouldn’t say a word all the way. Only once in a long while he’d let down and reminisce a bit. Mike knew how to keep things to himself. That was a large part of his success.
‘He knew who to take care of and he always paid off, and nothing small about it either. He was a great judge of human nature – knew just how far he could go with everybody he dealt with. That’s how he had everybody in his pocket, from the police to the boxing commission. Not always with money you understand. With tickets. With favours. He was a great fella for knowing the other fella’s weakness. Liquor. Girls. A mortgage falling due. A political jam. Some rap he could square. He was always getting you obligated. Not a bribe, understand. Just insurance against some time when you could do him a favour. And the fella could always depend on the fact that Mike would never talk. Operating in this town like he had all these years, he knew a thousand things that could hurt a fella. But he never opened his mouth. You’ve got to give him credit.’
That no one knows just how much money Mike had was an example of just how close he played ’em to his chest. Captain Foster is authority for the statement that Mike had more cash money than anybody else in America: ‘It runs into millions – hard cash.’ General John Reed Kilpatrick, president of Madison Square Garden, estimates Jacobs’s fortune as ‘several million anyway’. A sampling of opinions at Forty-ninth Street and Eighth Avenue, Lindy’s, Toots Shor’s and other strategic points ran from ‘at least a million’ to ‘maybe ten’.
But apparently not even Josie Jacobs, after living under one roof with him for thirty-five years, was completely taken into Mike’s confidence. At dinner one Sunday Josie was protesting what she considered the exaggerated accounts of Mike’s wealth. ‘Mike was a great promoter, but he never made as much money as people think,’ she insisted. ‘We’re, well, comfortable but that’s about all. Living like this, with his big family to support, an’ all my nephews and nieces to put through schools, in ten years we’d both have to go back to work. If we’ve got a million dollars, I’ve never seen it.’
When we first sat down to dinner the expression on Uncle Mike’s face had been positively benevolent. He had been beaming proudly when their adopted daughter, five-year-old Joan, sang all the lyrics to ‘Rolling Down the River’ in a clear, confident voice. But as Josie went on about their poverty, an expression began to cross his face that looked to me suspiciously like embarrassment. He began to growl and then to mutter to himself, and finally blurted, ‘OK, OK, talk about somethin’ else.’
Sitting on the impressive veranda under a bright canopy looking out across his well-kept lawns and broad fields and meadows rolling down to the Shrewsbury River, I tried to resolve the various contradictions in the tyrannical and somewhat sinister personality of Uncle Mike.
Secretive, friendless, inarticulate, he would suddenly drop in on his chiropractor or some other casual acquaintance for a few minutes of isolated garrulousness.
Greedy almost to psychopathic extremes, ‘the stingiest man in the world’; yet his long-time rival and enemy, Jimmy Johnston, was said to be into him for $13,000 when he checked out.
So ruthless and inhumane that at the time of his heart attack, a popular gag along Jacobs Beach was: since when can a man without a heart have a heart attack? Still, at the age of 65 he could take to his heart, in a way that could not be feigned, an adopted little girl.
So silent and poker-faced in his business dealings that even when his mind had been made up as to a certain match a year in advance, the principals would not know it until the last moment, yet whose very hardness seems to conceal an emotional instability that can give way suddenly to the most violent outbursts. His temper had sent more than one employee to the hospital with a nervous breakdown; its violence had been felt in a most direct way by Josie herself, and even the children were not immune when Mike flew into one of his tantrums.
‘He gets like this every time it rains,’ said one of his youthful relations as Mike, in a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde, was changing from a doting father, an amiable husband and a gracious host into the rampageous personification of abusiveness and pugnacity. ‘Uncle Mike has to have action all the time.’
A few moments after such an outburst, Mike would be as calm as if it had never happened. He might even grin at you sheepishly. But he would never apologise. ‘Mike never knew how to say I’m sorry,’ a close associate said. ‘He might call you some horrible names or even throw you out of the office and then start to feel bad about it, but the next time he saw you he’d never mention it, he’d just say “Hello, Joe, let’s get some lunch,” and pick up as if the fight had happened to two other guys. I wouldn’t say Mike had bad manners. I’d just say he never had no manners at all.’
Sitting with Mike on the comfortable veranda of the great 25-room house, I looked out into the driving rain and pondered these intriguing complexities of his character. More than ever, I wanted to get the whole story. But it was not one that any single person could tell me, not even Uncle Mike. In due time it led me literally from the Polo Grounds, where I talked to Mike’s ‘one friend’, Captain Foster, to the Battery, where I talked to 70-year-old Leonard De Conza, who remembered ‘hustling excursion tickets shoulder to shoulder with Mike some 50 years ago’. I walked through the wretched slum building where Mike was born. I strolled through the neighbourhood where little Mike hustled his first nickels and dimes, and I talked to a few old-timers who remembered his family. I talked to relatives, early associates, servants, managers, boxers, sportswriters, doctors, employees, to the distinguished General Kilpatrick and highly respected Ray Arcel as well as to jailbirds, gamblers and racketeers. I talked to whatever friends I could find; enemies were easier to locate. As soon as they heard I was on the trail of the true story of Uncle Mike, with no axes to grind but no punches to pull, they called to volunteer. I listened to as many as I could while reserving my right to evaluate, remembering that every man who comes to power in America gathers a fat list of Ins and Outs, and the Outs are bound to come up with some hair-raising tales. From George Washington down. Even if you’re an eagle scout and in step with the Lord.
But what stuck in my craw was that old-time fight manager’s crack about Mike’s childhood. ‘What got this man started on this golden treadmill?’ I asked myself. What pressures, what hungers, what influences?
And so I went back, all the way, to a birth certificate that said Michael Strauss Jacobs, born 10 March 1880, son of Isaac and Rebecca Jacobs, 651 Washington Street.
That’s just off Christopher Street, below Tenth, near the Battery, a block from the waterfront. A tough district even today. A tougher district when baby Mike came bawling into this world.
When Uncle Mike first saw the light of day – or what passed for light in the grimy atmosphere of a waterfront slum – his parents Isaac and Rebecca were living with six children in two small rooms partitioned off behind their tailor shop, in the heart of what was then a predominantly lower-class Irish neighbourhood.
Except for a privileged few, these were not the Irish of Tammany Hall and the Force, who had caught on quickly to big-city ways and had their pick of soft jobs and the graft that ran to countless milions every year. The Irish of Jacobs’s neighbourhood were more bare-window than lace-curtain, refugees from the terrible famines that racked their island from the mid-1840s on and drove a million and a half people toward the greener fields of America in a single decade.
But instead of green fields they settled for the steaming cobblestones of the lower West Side and wages of a dollar a day or less as sailors, brewery workers, stevedores and teamsters.
They were a hard-working, hard-drinking, quick-tempered, pugnacious, God-fearing lot, rarely more than a step ahead of starvation. Sanitation was a stranger. The closest thing to a bathroom was the dingy outhouse that had to serve all the families crowded into a two-storey tenement. For heat the slum dwellers broke up boxes or salvaged driftwood from the river to feed into their stoves. In 1880 the Board of Health described the conditions into which Mike was born: ‘The living have very little more ground space than is appropriated for the dead – a distribution which is not less fatal than it is impartial.’
Squalid but challenging, harsh yet teeming with vitality – such was the world in which this third son of Isaac and Rebecca first learned to crawl, to talk, to stand upright and – most important in that waterfront world of want and grab – to stand up to his fellow men.
To understand why a man called Isaac Jacobs should have chosen to set his family up as a tiny Jewish island in a swarming sea of Irish Catholicism instead of gravitating toward the ghetto on the opposite side of Manhattan, one has to go back to 1850 when Isaac’s parents emigrated from Poland to Dublin, Ireland. Driven across Europe by the pogroms, Isaac’s family was attracted to the sizable Jewish population in Dublin, where a popular synagogue was guided by a bearded rabbi, traditional in every way except that he spoke Gaelic as well as Hebrew; and his English contained as unmistakable a brogue as ever was heard in County Cork or Hell’s Kitchen.
Isaac was an infant when he was brought to Dublin. Growing to young manhood in that city, his brogue was a natural. He took pride in his perfect Gaelic as well, and as the years passed he seemed even to become convinced that he looked more like a true son of St Patrick than of Abraham. This may have been mere wishful thinking, a chameleon-like urge of a persecuted people to lose themselves in assimilation. But early photographs do reveal a round and ruddy face that might pass more readlily for a phiz of St Patrick than of Saul.
Tintypes of the Child Mike seem to repeat this Mendelian accident for they show us a moonfaced, strong-featured boy who must not have stood out too strongly from his Irish playmates – or should we say in that hungry world of shortened childhood, competitors. Whether justified or due to the pressure of environment, Mike and his brothers grew up believing they looked more Irish than Semitic. But it would probably be more accurate to say that Mike has one of those faces that give the lie to racial stereotypes.
It seems to be the kind of face on which no racial group has a corner – a strong, unhandsome face with a forceful, bulbous nose, eyes that narrow easily in a way that seems shrewd and appraising, a mouth that can change quickly from a hard, narrow line to an open, roaring furnace. The jaw – even when unsupported by dentures – is powerful without being oversized. Many a manager or unwanted boxer knows how this face can close up so that not a flick of eye or muscle gives the slightest indication of recognition; yet it has some of the qualities of those little rubber faces we used to squeeze into various expressions, for when it is genuinely pleased or ingenuously pleasing it can relax into a warm, infectious grin.
When they came to America, Isaac and Rebecca always gravitated to neighbourhoods that were Irish and close to the docks. Isaac was a tailor specialising in sailors uniforms, emergency repairs and pressing for crews arriving in port. When ships were being moored, he would be on the docks trying to coax a little business from the hard-boiled sailors, more interested in refreshing their thirst than their wardrobe. A little Jewish tailor trying desperately to make a way in America for his growing family, he would startle an Irish tar with a ‘Shure and ye’ll be wantin’ a fresh pair o’ duds fer to please the ladies, me boy’.
To which the growling answer would usually be: ‘The ladies I’ll be visitin’ ’ll take me as I am.’
Though Isaac worked from dawn until far into the night, the wolf was a permanent resident at the Jacobses’ door. There were nine children now, and Isaac had to supplement his meagre earnings by doubling as a ‘runner’ – a professional greeter and guide to immigrants arriving by steerage. These displaced persons of an earlier day, bewildered and unable to speak the language of this promised land, would rely on the runners to get them through customs, obtain the necessary entry papers and even find them a place to live.
It was a job that left a great deal to conscience, for it was a simple matter for the unscrupulous to find out how well-heeled the new arrival was and then extract from him all sorts of exorbitant fees on the pretext that he would have to return to the Old Country unless these were paid. Many an immigrant was separated from his life’s savings between the gangplank and the entrance to the street. Honest runners extracted small fees for their services and, judging from the poverty of the Jacobses’ menage, it seems more probable that Isaac was one of these.
Throughout the childhood of Mike and his eight brothers and sisters, it took all the resourcefulness of a strong woman like Rebecca to keep this overpopulated household alive.
The painting of Rebecca that hangs in the luxurious living room of Mike’s Rumson estate shows a matriarch of impressive physical strength and determination rather than a woman of beauty, delicacy or sensitivity. But these qualities would hardly have sustained her through the ordeal of raising nine children on Washington Street. The boys remember that it was their mother who taught them to fight back against the conditions that might have crushed them. One day when Mike was seven or eight years old, he came home crying that an older boy, a well-known Irish bully on the block, had called him ‘sheeny’ and pushed him off the landing into the river, at that time a favourite sport for kids whose only playground was the docks. As the youngest son, Mike was the family favourite, and his elder brothers were eager to avenge his injuries. But Rebecca had a different idea. ‘Let him learn to fight his own battles,’ she said. ‘Nobody ever helps anybody else in this world. Whatever he does, he’ll have to do himself. The earlier he learns that, the less he’ll be hurt.’
It was the only workable philosophy of survival. Mike went out and took his lickings. He learned to fight back. ‘Mike could handle himself as good as the next kid,’ his family remembers. ‘But he wasn’t the kind who went looking for fights. He was, well, like he’s been all the rest of his life. He was a good businessman, hard-working and smart even when he was selling papers. He knew how to keep his mouth shut and go about his business. But if someone tried to grab his papers away or push him off the corner, then he’d fight like a wild cat. He was a good strong kid. He’s always had an iron constitution. It wasn’t too easy being the only Jews in an Irish neighbourhood – even if our old man did talk their language. But the Irish gang on the block learned to respect Mike. He was just as tough as they were. Once they saw they couldn’t scare him, they stopped bothering him.’
Somehow, like the wretchedly poor Irish families around them, the Jacobses survived. The daughters helped with the cooking, washing and mending. For the boys, school soon became a distraction from the main job of bringing in those few extra dollars each week that meant the difference between frightful want and just getting by. At ten, Mike was a newsboy, proud of bringing home fifty cents a day. A scrapper’s ability is a traditional part of a newsboy’s equipment, but in those days it was a good 90 per cent.
An old man who remembers hustling papers in Mike’s neighbourhood around 1890 tells us, ‘If you had a bunch of papers under your arm, you were fair game in those days. You could never relax and you could never trust nobody. You’d be standin’ on a corner mindin’ yer own business and peddlin’ yer papers an’ first thing you’d know a fella’d come along and say, “Hey Johnny, or Mike, lookit the apples on dat dame leanin’ out the winder.” You’d look up and wham, it would be goodbye papers. Not just the boys either. The girls on that street and alla way down to the Battery were just as tough. They’d sneak up behind you, give you a push and be off on the run with a dollar’s worth of your papers. There was one girl I remember, we used t’ call her Dirty Mary. Dirty Mary by the time she was ten could swear like a sailor. She’d grab our papers an’ if we’d catch her she’d fight back just like a boy – only worse’n any boy because she’d scratch and bite and before you knew what happened you’d look like something that ran into Terrible Terry McGovern instead of a little girl.’
Many a time young Mike would come home scratched and bruised, but never without his day’s earnings. It was about this time that he included himself out as far as formal education was concerned. ‘What was the good of learnin’ all the crap,’ he reasoned, ‘when I c’n be out makin’ myself a buck?’ From that day to this, Mike has behaved with extraordinary consistency. Whatever you need to know, know it better than anybody else, has been his motto, but if you can’t make a dollar on it, don’t waste your time.
It is this that has made some outside acquaintances wonder how a man so singularly ignorant as Mike could be so successful. But the opposite side of this coin is single-mindedness, a trait Mike cultivated from the age of ten. On Washington Street every dollar Mike brought in went toward survival. A few years later money would be a ladder to lift him out of the slums. Then a cushion against a deep-rooted dread of insecurity. Then independence, power, compensation for all the things he never had, nor could ever learn to appreciate. Begun as necessity, moneymaking became not just a way of life but the whole reason for living, until at last the ragged ten-year-old newsboy clinging desperately to his newspapers would cross the finish line as one of that handful of American millionaires who did it the hard way, by making every one of those ten $100,000 himself.
But, to go back some 60 years and at least $999,999: Mike was peddling his papers on Fourteenth Street one day when a man who looked like a sharper came up and said, ‘Hey, kid, wanna make an easy buck?’ Mike hadn’t been on the streets for nothing. He wasn’t anybody’s sucker. ‘Whatta I have to do?’
‘Just stand in line at the Garden an’ buy me a couple o’ tickets.’
Half an hour later Mike had his dollar. He and the sharp-looking fellow in the derby did business regularly for a while after that. By the time he was twelve, Mike was earning three or four dollars a week as a ‘digger’ – a purchaser of tickets for scalpers who otherwise might become too familiar at the box office. At first Mike was a little puzzled. This fellow must certainly be a real sport to keep buying all these tickets. But his elder brother Jake soon put him wise. The fellow who was paying Mike a dollar to front for him in line couldn’t afford to use one of his own seats – not when he could sell them for twice their official price. After years of selling papers for pennies, Mike was impressed.
‘How much you think that guy makes a week?’
‘Oh, twenny thirty dollars easy,’ Jake guessed.
‘An’ that’s all he does, buys tickets and sells ’em on the street?’
‘Yeah.’
Mike didn’t say anything, but next afternoon when the scalper for whom he had been working gave him the money to buy some tickets at the Opera House, he bought them but didn’t return immediately with the money as he had done so many times before. Instead he loitered near the lobby on Fourteenth Street. He saw a couple go to the box office and turn away disappointed. The house was sold out. ‘Hey, mister, wanna buy two good tickets?’
He quickly disposed of his $2 tickets for $4 each. Then he went back to the scalper who had broken him in. ‘Here’s yer two bucks back,’ he said. ‘I’m through workin’ fer ya.’
‘What, you don’t want to make a dollar for doing practically nothing?’ the scalper demanded.
‘Nope,’ Mike said, ‘Take ya dough.’ Even at 12, he had learned never to do any more talking than you had to.
With his $2 profit, Mike was in business. Next day he bought his own tickets. He held them until show time and sold them for a nice profit. But this time the sharp who had first put Mike to work as a digger saw that his young stooge was brazenly muscling in on his territory. He followed the 12-year-old speculator around the corner and jumped him. ‘Yer a smart punk. Lemme catch ya doin’ that once more and they’ll find ya in the river.’
It was the newsboy battles all over again, in an even rougher league. But Mike knew a simple law, and he lived by it. Next day he was back at the same spot scalping his tickets. The older scalper tried to bully him off the kerb. Seeing a cop on the corner, Mike yelled ‘Help! Help!’ The officer came running. ‘What’s the trouble, me boy?’
‘This crook tried t’ gyp me on a ticket, an’ when I squawked he started chokin’ me,’ Mike said.
The cop turned on the scalper suspiciously. ‘I’ve had me eye on you,’ he said, and started going through the man’s pockets. He found a dozen choice seats for performances all through the week. ‘I ought to run ye in for a dirty scalper,’ he said, ‘but this time I’ll be easy on ye. If ye know what’s good fer ye, stay away from this theatre.’
Righteously the cop pocketed the confiscated seats, for in those freebooting days (and has it ever changed?) the boys in blue were a law unto themselves, and it was common practice for a patrolman to advise a well-known thief that he would be run out of the district unless he agreed to a 50–50 split. Mike watched the cop pocket the wad of tickets with a plaintive eye. ‘Gee, I sure wish I could have a couple. It’s me old lady’s birthday an’ I wanna surprise her.’ The appeal to mother love pierced the formidable blue uniform and went straight to its wearer’s Celtic heart. ‘Here they are, me boy, and God bless ye mother.’
It wasn’t more than five minutes later that the cop caught Mike across the street from the theatre in the act of selling his tickets.
‘Why you dairty little liar!’ he boomed. ‘And you tellin’ me they were to surprise your own mother!’
‘Who’s a liar?’ young Mike demanded, in an early display of that chutzpah that was to carry him boldly through crises all his life. ‘How c’n I buy me old lady a surprise if I don’ sell them tickets?’
If the amiable symbol of law and order on Fourteenth Street had any answer for this, it is lost to history. Mike’s benefactor, it seems, just stared at this resourceful young man in stupefied amazement, perhaps even in awe. ‘He had more get-up-and-go than anybody around,’ a relative recalls. ‘You’d have to get up awful early in the morning to try’n get the jump on Mike – and then you’d find he’d been up an hour before that.’
Mike’s beginnings as a ticket scalper hardly lend themselves to precise reporting for a lot of tickets have moved through the box office window (or out the back door) since then, and fact, legend and faulty chronology seem to become almost hopelessly entangled after 60 years. A contemporary of Mike’s insists on a different version. According to him, Mike, as a newsboy outside Tammany Hall on Fourteenth Street, had scraped up an acquaintance with Joe Bannon, then a young politico, later the Hearst executive and long-time friend of Mike’s. They had joshed back and forth about the respective merits of two of the greatest featherweights of all time, George Dixon and Terrible Terry McGovern. When the two were finally matched at the Broadway A.C. in the bout hailed by turn-of-the-century sportswriters as the ‘Battle of Little Giants’, Joe Bannon gave Mike a pair of complimentary tickets and told him to take his brother. But when Bannon looked for the Jacobs boys at ringside, he saw a couple of strangers sitting in the seats he had given Mike. The Dixon–McGovern battle had New York fight fans at fever pitch, and tickets were at a premium. ‘No matter how bad Mike wanted to see the fight,’ this story goes, ‘he couldn’t miss a chance like this. He sold those tickets for $5 apiece.’
It’s a good story and at least half true, for Mike was a newsboy outside Tammany Hall, he did wheedle complimentary tickets to the Coney Island and Broadway A.C. fights and sell them whenever he could, and he did meet Joe Bannon early in his career. But the Dixon–McGovern fight took place in 1900 when Mike was 20 years old, and according to all the evidence we can muster, Mike had long since graduated from the newsboy ranks. In fact some of those who regard themselves as experts in Jacobsology insist that Mike was a successful full-time ticket broker at the age of 13. But Mike’s elder brother Jake was also scalping tickets from the kerb in the ’90s, and since their careers run parallel for a time, our ageing witnesses may be confusing the two.
At any rate, there can be little doubt that at an age when most of us are struggling over multiplication tables in our copy books, Mike was learning his arithmetic in the hard-headed Fourteenth Street School of Economics where the problems were far from hypothetical: if you work eight hours to make fifty cents peddling papers, Q.E.D. you’re a sucker. If you can buy a ticket for a dollar and sell it for two, you’re getting smarter. If you can finagle a couple of comps to a big fight and find a sport to buy ’em for a sawbuck, you’re wising up to how the game is played in Little Ol’ New York.
In this school of economics, you went to the head of the class by looking sharp, acting sharp and being sharp years before you ever needed a shave. Young Mike never had to read Adam Smith to master individual enterprise. All he had to do was keep his eyes open and his mind on the main chance. When he was thirteen or fourteen, for instance, he happened to be in a candy store when he overheard an advance man for May Irwin offering the proprietor two tickets to her coming comedy if he would insert a poster in his window. Mike lingered until the legman had left, then asked the owner if he was going to use the tickets. When the shopkeeper protested that he had no time for such dalliance, Mike said, ‘I’ll give ya four bits for the two of ’em.’
It was found money for the proprietor, and he gladly parted with the tickets. Mike followed the advance man for 12 blocks. Every time he saw the May Irwin poster in a store window, he went in and offered to buy the complimentary seats for a quarter apiece. In an hour’s time he had bought up 20 of them. He held on to them until the day of May Irwin’s appearance. She was one of the great favourites of the day, and by loitering around the ticket window Mike had no trouble selling his tickets at what averaged out to a dollar apiece. Five dollars had brought him twenty. More than his poor old man made in a week of 16-hour days of backache and eyestrain. Poor Isaac could only shake his weary head in wonder when his youngest son would come home with such a fortune made in a single afternoon – ‘An’ fer doin’ nuthin,’ he’d mutter to himself.
A new century was dawning, with new values, new opportunities, new shortcuts that Isaac, with his needle and thread and stoop-shouldered resignation to poverty, would never understand. When you ask Mike or Jake today to describe their father, they shrug in the familiar gesture of the inarticulate. ‘He was a schneider, a tailor, he worked hard all his life, just work work work morning, noon and night – what do you want from him, a poor tailor with no time for anything but work?’ A schneider, a nonentity, a human machine for cutting and sewing materials, a shadowy symbol of drudgery who rose before it was light and did not grope his way to bed until the night was half gone and still made less money than his youngest son could make in half an hour of what the lad called ‘smart hustling’.
On Mike’s block only the dull-witted of the new generation went in for back-breaking manual labour. If you had any brains or ambition or starch you collected from Tammany on Dough Day, voted a dozen times on Election Day and planned a lucrative career in politics. Or you joined one of the gangs and muscled in on the thriving industry of crime in lower Manhattan. You gambled or managed boxers, or if you stood in right with your district leader you opened a saloon, a sporting house or a cock-fighting pit. In those days when it would have been about as possible for a DeSapio to head Tammany Hall as for Paul Robeson to be elected Imperial Wizard of the KKK, you didn’t get these soft touches merely by being born under the Shamrock, but it helped. If, like Mike, you didn’t happen to wear the green but still found yourself allergic to poverty and unremunerative sweat, you clowned like Eddie Cantor if you had talent, you bullied your way up like Monk Eastman if you had the muscle or you played the angles every way from the middle like our Young Man With a Ticket, little Mike.
But those who tell those gaudy stories of Mike’s taking over New York’s ticket business at the age of twelve not only anticipated Mike’s actual development by some thirty years but distract unnecessarily from one of the more vivid periods of Mike’s sixty-year pursuit of the buck that little animal Manhattanites have hunted with such vigour from the time when Peter Minuet swung his big real estate deal with the Indians that gave him the island for twenty-four bucks.
In the mid-1890s, if you were poor but ambitious and lived below Fourteenth Street, you either gravitated toward Tammany Hall and the old Madison Square Garden to the north or to the Battery at the southernmost tip of the island. From there the big excursion boats carried holiday crowds to Dreamland Park or Atlantic Highlands. On a warm summer’s day Battery Park was a favourite place for promenading couples and curious tourists waiting to board the Rosedale, the Dreamland or the John Sylvester. Nearly all of Mike’s sisters and brothers worked these excursion boats as ticket sellers, candy butchers and later as concessionaires. Mike was hawking candy and popcorn on the boats at about the same time he was breaking into the ticket business as probably the youngest scalper on the sidewalks of New York.
But, just as he resigned as a ‘digger’ as soon as he had learned enough to go into business for himself, he considered it a sucker’s play to spend time making money for someone else. The prevalent slogan of ‘A Fair Day’s Work for a Fair Day’s Wage’ was much too slow for this particular teenager. Soon he was selling tickets to the boat on a commission basis.
Old Lenny De Conza, still going strong at the Battery in the Coney Island Booth in the early 1950s, remembers well when he and Mike were rival ticket butchers. ‘Yessir, he was quite a fella,’ Lennie recalled. ‘He was sellin’ tickets to the old wooden boats and I was sellin’ ’em for the new iron boats which were a whole lot better. But that didn’ stop Mike none. In them days we’d just stand out here at the dock with the tickets in our pockets and yell “Getcha tickets for Dreamland Park”. No booths or nothin’, understand. Well Mike, he’s always tryin’ to outhustle you, he gets the idea of buildin’ a portable booth, and he carries it around with him through the park, wherever the crowd happens to be.’
De Conza, a vigorous old man with a seagoing complexion though he had been standing there at the water’s edge for half a century, interrupted his narrative to call to a passing couple, ‘Tickets to Coney Island – only ten cents.’ Then he reached back through 50 years to pick up his memories of Mike in the days when the fight promoter was better known as Steamboat Mike. ‘Once he set up them booths, we all had to have booths to keep in competition.’
‘Then you were all even again?’ we suggested.
He grinned, and we noticed that in spite of his Italian name he looked like a florid-faced Irishman too; he even talked like one. They say married folks grow to look alike, and maybe this begins to happen to a fellow living all those years among the Irish. ‘Wasn’t too easy to keep up with Mike. By that time he was out of ticket sellin’ and had his own concession. On the old Dreamland I think it was.’
It isn’t easy to lower a bucket through more than half a century and come up with the exact year, but Mike himself remembered that one way or another he had managed to save $1,000 by the time he was 16, for it was always his nature to save money as well as make it. With his savings he bought his first food-and-drink concession. One of his sisters had the Rosedale, but Mike wasn’t interested in working for anybody, not even a member of his own family. He was generous in his contribution to the family household but, as Tex Sullivan was to describe him later, ‘He was always a single-O guy. He liked to handle everything himself, and even if you were his own brother he wouldn’t tell you his business.’
An excursion-boat concession at the turn of the century was – in the current Broadway cant – a nice thing to have going for you. But young Mike introduced any number of refinements that not only gilded the lily but enabled him to cash it in for gold. When you fed your best girl peanuts and pop through the courtesy of Steamboat Mike, you were apt to pay not only through the nose but through the eyes, ears, throat and any other vents you happened to have on you.
Mike, for instance, was obligated to provide a free lunch for each excursion ticket. But by working out the logistics of Coney Island appetites, he found he could cut the cuffo meal in half by having his butchers ply the passengers with salted peanuts for the longest possible period before the free lunch had to be served. Salted peanuts naturally led to mass thirst, and Mike always made sure there was no water available so his parched customers would turn more eagerly to his soft drinks.
‘If you was an excursionist on one of those boats,’ another old-time Battery character chuckled, ‘it was just like having Mike’s hand in your pocket all the time. F’instance, once in a while a broad ’d be afraid of gettin’ seasick, so Mike was right there with his own seasick remedy – only ten cents – for what was actually cold weak tea with a squirt of castoria in it to make it taste like medicine. One day on board, Mike noticed a fella’s straw hat blow off. Next day he had a little rubber band gadget that fastened from your lapel to inside your hat and sold for a nickel. He was always schemin’ up new ways to hustle a couple of extra dollars that nobody else’d ever dream of.’
By the time Mike was in his early 20s he had extended his operation to a small fleet of excursion boats. But it doesn’t seem to be true, as often reported when Mike’s life is reviewed, that he was out $12,000 when the General Slocum went down with the loss of a thousand lives in the spectacular river fire of 1904. Mike is often charged with having owned the ill-fated boat whose skipper was prosecuted for negligence, and his enemies will even tell you it was his niggardliness with safety equipment that led to the fantastic loss of life. It is altogether possible that Mike will have to outdo One-Eyed Connolly to crash the gates of heaven, but – if contemporary news accounts and ownership papers are to be believed – the Slocum affair doesn’t seem to be one of his sins. His only connection with the tragedy appears to be that his brother Jake managed the concession on the doomed ship and was one of the few who managed to swim to safety. But good stories never die, no matter how many times corrected, and this one goes on to relate how Mike, to recoup his 12 grand, capitalised on his own hard luck by running sightseeing boats to the scene of the catastrophe.
As with many stories of Uncle Mike, and a good many anecdotes in general, this one smacks of a hindsight characterisation truer to Mike’s modus operandi than to any specific event. Like the story of the Dixon–McGovern complimentary tickets, it seems true enough in essence, for it so closely resembles another account of Mike’s well-known ability to roll with a punch that we pass it on as authentic. In addition to his excursion boat and ticket activities, Mike invested in an amusement pier at Coney Island. A fire destroyed most of the pier, and one day when Mike came out to itemise the damage he found a couple of fishermen sitting on his pilings. That was all he had to see. Next day when the fishermen came back they found the wreckage of the pier had been roped off, and a sign tacked up: ‘Private fishing grounds – 10 cents an hour, 50 cents all day’. The reports that have come down to us claim that Mike did all right that summer, maybe even a little better than he would have done with his amusement pier because there was no overhead.
That Mike should size up the situation, hurry off to make his own sign, and then tack it up himself indicated a pattern of behaviour he was never to outgrow. Even as a millionaire fight promoter, his associates remember his helping to set up the seats for a championship bout at the Polo Grounds or impatiently grabbing a hammer from the hands of a workman not moving fast enough for him and nailing up a sign himself. Almost always, this was a sign of impatience, of restlessness, of dissatisfaction with slower-moving, slower-thinking men. Once at his New Jersey estate I even saw him grab a tray of steaks from his butler’s hand and serve them himself because his guests’ plates weren’t being filled quickly enough.
Whether he was a pauper or a millionaire, his habits remained remarkably unchanged. Years after it was no longer necessary, he still rose at dawn, just as eager as ever to be on the move. No matter how extensive his office or his household staff, he was always driven to do everything himself, down to the most menial details. If some men succeed by the ingenuity of their schemes and some by sheer hard work, it would seem as if Mike wanted to make doubly sure, for no schemer ever worked harder and no worker ever schemed so incessantly.
Of course excursion boats were a seasonal trade, but since Mike had been a newsboy outside Tammany Hall, he solved that problem by moving into the Hall as a busboy and in time a waiter. These were the days of Boss Croker, Police Chief Devery, Silver Dollar Smith, Al Adams the policy king, Jim Maloney the pool room king, Frank Farrell the gambler and Senator ‘Big Tim’ Sullivan, who had a hand in almost everything and who held the boxing clubs of his day in the same single-handed control that Mike was to exert 40 years later.
Those were the days of uninhibited corruption, when a Tammany leader could even write a book defending what he liked to call ‘honest graft’, when Senator Sullivan and Chief Devery could be Farrell’s partners in the powerful gambling syndicate and when ‘How He Did It the Books Don’t Show’ was not only a popular song but a good-natured slur at the Boss who had started out as a poor man and within five years had $350,000 in race horses, a Fifth Avenue mansion, a private railroad car, a great estate in England and no one knew how many millions in cash. Croker himself had stated that he had never bothered with banks and preferred to keep all his money where he could get his hands on it.
To all these men of power, young Mike turned an obsequious smiling face. They liked him as a ‘good, smart, willing lad’, tipped him well, and in time he became a head waiter. More valuable than the material tips were the psychological ones as to how to deal with big-time politicians. From Big Tim and the others he learned that every man – except perhaps the hated Republican Reformers – had his price, a lesson Mike was to embellish with the years. The atmosphere of that Tammany dining room was composed of unabashed self-interest, limitless greed, diabolical intrigue, an intricate system of pay-offs and under-the-table deals, a ready acceptance of the meanest sort of alliance as long as it was profitable, and of course the most cynical disregard for public service or social responsibility.
If the streets of the lower West Side were Mike’s elementary school where he learned to hustle and gouge and scrounge, Tammany Hall might be considered the finishing school, where a young, heady, self-reliant opportunist, who naturally looks up to the big men of his day, learns the fine art of the finagle, the fix, the pay-off, the business – how to win friends and influence people in a way Mr Carnegie would never dream of. The immediate political connections were valuable. Through a benevolent despot like Big Tim, he might pick up tickets to one of the fifty local boxing clubs that could be more profitable than the change he found on the table. For an up-and-coming ticket broker there could be no more strategic spot than this hub around which all the entertainments of the city revolved. But this tough-fibred, alert young man with his eyes and ears open and his mouth discreetly shut, was also absorbing a course in Political Economy ever so much more pertinent than any he could have learned at the Harvard Business School.
From these men he learned only what he wanted, or what he needed, to learn. The carousing, the easy living, the wenching, the gluttony, the thirst he left to those who had more money or more time. Without being exactly an ascetic, he was a non-drinking, non-smoking, non-merrymaking young man who took his young ladies in his own way, careful not to let them deter him from the business at hand. This was another characteristic he carried throughout his career. He was rarely seen out after dark except at his own promotions. Some said he was too miserly. Some said his only real pleasure came from conniving. Some said he never cared enough about his fellow men and women to have any desire to go out among them congenially. If he wanted them, they came to him, at his time and place to suit his purposes.
It would seem in the nature of things that so concentrated a young man should shy away from entangling alliances with the opposite sex. And even when Mike was in his early 30s, he seemed content to remain a single-O guy in his private as well as his public life. But, as it must to nearly all men, love – or what passed for it on the Battery in 1910 – finally caught up with Mike and dropped him for the count.
On a routine check of his concessions one summer afternoon, he couldn’t help noticing the new cashier. She looked like the kind of strawberry blonde they were singing about, fresh of face, trim of figure, a 16-year-old eyeful. Next day Mike was back to check his concessions and this new cashier again. He took her to dinner, and she told him her story. Her name was Josie Pela, and she had run away from home in upstate New York because her father, an unemployed actor, wanted to marry her off to an old man who, in telling the story years later, Josie dismissed as ‘just some old jerk’. For years she had helped her mother take care of her ten brothers and sisters, and she wanted to see a little of life before she settled down, so she decided to take her chances in the big city. But she wasn’t going to desert her family. She had her looks and a healthy instinct for landing on her feet, and somehow she was going to lick this town and do her family more good than if she had remained a small-town girl.
Neither Mike nor Josie would tell me just how the romance blossomed. Broach the subject to Mike and you’d get one of his customary growls. Although Josie was a good deal more communicative – and under the proper stimulation as loquacious as Mike is taciturn – she was inclined to gloss over the actual courtship.
‘But after all,’ I insisted in our conversation, ‘it isn’t every romance that unites two people and keeps them together all their lives.’
‘Are you kidding?’ said Josie, as much of a realist as Mike, which may help to explain the bond between them. ‘Whatta you talking about – romance! Lookit Mike. You think he looked any different then? Had a little more hair, tha’s’ all. I was a good-lookin’ young kid tryin’ to get ahead in the world. He was a smart fella who knew his way around. He made me a good proposition an’ I took it.’
While that may hardly be the sentiment of young lovers in the romances lady authors like to write, it seemed to have sustained Mike and Josie through 40 years of intimate partnership which has withstood even the most intense pressure of family disapproval, for Mike’s mother, the powerful matriarch of the House of Jacobs who died a few years ago, never hid the fact that she considered Josie a designing shiksa adventuress.
If she was – and no one would tell you more honestly than Josie just how practical were her girlhood hopes and dreams – she had found an ideal running mate in Mike.
‘Mike and I, we never kidded each other,’ Josie reminisced in a way that isn’t exactly satisfying to sentimentalists. ‘Each of us knew what the other one wanted. I got a living out of it and money to send home. But don’t let anybody tell you I didn’t work for it. We both worked like dogs. Mike ’n I earned every dollar we got. We made a helluva good team.’
Pressed for some memorable detail of the early days of their union, Josie recalled, ‘In them days, before the war, the other war, Mike got a nice price for the boat concessions and went into the ticket business full time. He didn’t have no office yet; he’d sell ’em right off the kerb outside the Garden – the old Garden. He’d be on his feet so long hustlin’ tickets he’d come home with his feet bleedin’. I’d soak his feet in warm water and tell ’im he oughta take it a little easier. But you know the Boss. He’d say “Aah, it’s nothin’”, and next mornin’ he’d be up at the same God-awful hour figurin’ how t’ get the jump on the other scalpers. The Boss isn’t the easiest fella t’ live with, but you gotta give him this: he didn’ have no inside track to the box office like he had later on. Six days a week he hadda pound the pavement outside the Garden or the Opera House or the fight clubs. Believe me, hustlin’ tickets wasn’t all cumshaw in them days. No big office where the buyers came to you. It was stric’ly heel ’n toe.’
Then, maybe she caught a look in my eyes, maybe it was all in her own mind, for she added, ‘All right, maybe you think he was mostly heel. But he hadda keep on his toes t’ clear twenny dollars a day. I oughta know. I’m the guy who pulled off his socks when he came home. As I’m sittin’ here, it was sweat ’n blood. You c’n forget about the tears. Win or lose, up or down, I never saw the Boss cry in his whole fuckin’ life.’
Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t through the old Garden box office and choice fight tickets that Mike Jacobs cornered his first market in the ticket business. It was through Grand Opera. The incongruity of the Marx Brothers at the opera had nothing on Mike, the precocious teenager who was hustling opera buffs outside the Metropolitan Opera House. In the beginning he doubled as ticket speculator and seller of librettos and the guttural come-on of Mike’s ‘Get yuh Traviatuh librettos here’ seems to have been a familiar sound to operagoers of that day.
Why Mike should have been hawking for small change after his profitable venture in excursion boats wasn’t clear until an old student of Jacobsiana explained, ‘You gotta get Mike’s philosophy. No matter how much hay you make while the sun shines, never turn down the nickels, dimes and quarters in the rain.’
That Mike should latch on to the Metropolitan Opera House rather than the Garden, where he might have felt more at home, is further evidence, if we need it, of his instinct for moving to the right place at the right time. Those were the days before radio or the movie boom, when the opera was in its glory and Caruso, Dame Melba, Galli-Curci, Geraldine Farrar, Tito-Schipa and the other great names at the Met were not only hailed as great voices but as the Gables and Garbos of the hour. The Met didn’t need Billy Rose to advise them. Caruso and Melba singing La Bohème or any of the other reliables gave ticket brokers an early taste of the South Pacific squeeze. There was no limit as to what a scalper could charge for those precious ducats. It was more or less a matter for his own conscience. Old ticket brokers who still carry the scars recall this as giving Uncle Mike considerable latitude.
The big trick in the ticket business is how to corner the choice seats for hit shows. Ticket brokers had always been willing to do business with box office men. But Mike, as he was to do so many times, made the big move that soon made him the man you had to see if you wanted to hear Caruso or Tito-Schipa. In his own inimitable way he got to the impresario of the Metropolitan Opera House, Gatti-Cazazza. In his stylish Vandyke and his cutaway, ‘Gaz’ was a resplendent figure in pre-war society, moving in so completely different a circle from that of Uncle Mike that it hardly seems possible they should touch at all. But the touch is something young Mike knew all about, and, if old-time ticket men are to be believed, his early lesson as to every man’s price gave him the inside track to the Met in a way his rivals never would have thought possible.
‘What sort of fellow was he to do business with in those days?’ I asked a veteran ticket man on the Rialto. ‘Lemme give you this example,’ the old speculator said. ‘The president of Cuba came up with a big party for the opening of the season and wanted a box. I told him I was sure I could get them and rightaway called Mike at the old Normandie Hotel. I knew he was going to hit me over the head with a hammer, but this Cuban bigshot came up every season and was too good a customer to turn away. Mike says $500 for the box, which is like holding me up in broad daylight – that’s almost $100 a seat – but he had me by the short hairs so I say OK I’ll send my man right over to be sure and hold them. When my guy gets there Mike has sold the tickets out from under me for $600. But at the last minute he calls me. He’s got a last-minute cancellation on a box for my presidente. Only by now the tariff is $700. In this business most of us learn to scratch each other’s backs. But not Mike. Turn your back to Mike and ouch! Right between the shoulder blades.’ The old ticket man shook his head. ‘Seven hundred berries for a fifty-dollar box. It’s 35 years ago, and it still hurts.’
When the opera company went out on tour after its New York season, Mike went along to continue the good work. It may have startled the leading citizens of the hinterland to hear this hard-faced man in the black derby assuring them that he had ‘t’ree good ones left for La Boheemey’, but his relationship with the opera, like the occasional happy marriage of opposites, was mutually beneficial. Asked one time to name his favourite opera, Mike came up with ‘Carmen – always give us the biggest play’. Josie Jacobs remembers this tour with the opera company as the closest thing to a honeymoon she and Mike ever had. ‘Them opera people was good sports,’ she remembered fondly. ‘But behind all that fancy talk they’re just as cute as the jokers in the fight business.’
Of course Mike couldn’t differentiate between the styles of Caruso and Tito-Schipa any more than, in later days, he could between Louis and Conn. But nobody alive had a more accurate idea of just how much these opera boys would draw. ‘It was kind of a sixth sense, hard to explain,’ the old ticket broker had to acknowledge. ‘He’d have it about a show or he would have it about a certain personality. He could go out of town and see a show and he wouldn’t even be able to tell you what it was about, but he’d say “No sale” and by God the thing would come in and go right on its face. Same with Caruso. Rightaway he knew this was something special. He could smell a hit from here to Hoboken.’
At the close of one opera tour, Mike guaranteed Caruso $1,000 a night for ten one-night stands. Mike is said to have made more than Caruso on the deal. An inveterate, if not insensate, radio listener of the louder-the-better school, Mike happened to tune in one evening on an old recording of Caruso’s Martha. Mike isn’t known for his appreciation of classical music, but this time he stared dreamy-eyed into the loud speaker, to all appearances completely under the spell of the golden tenor. When the final high note of the solo died away and Mike failed to come out of his trance, the wife of a Garden official who happened to be sitting near him couldn’t help observing, ‘Mr Jacobs, I’ve never seen anyone so carried away. I had no idea you were so fond of operatic singing.’
Abruptly Mike snapped out of his reverie, clacked his false teeth together and growled, ‘Aaaah, I was just thinkin’ of 80,000 bucks.’
Opera stars, famous beauties, Mansfields and Barrymores, six-day bike racers, or a boy with two heads were all grist to Mike’s opportunistic mill. When Emmeline Pankhurst, the British suffragette leader, arrived for an American tour, she was detained at Ellis Island as a subversive agent. American suffragettes paraded, picketed and demanded her entry, the chief result of which was that Miss Pankhurst received a million dollars’ worth of free publicity.
When Mike noted the size of the crowds Miss Pankhurst attracted, he decided to enlist, temporarily, in the cause of women’s suffrage. That such a drawing card should waste her services for free was a challenge to everything he held dear. The way we heard it from our old box office man, Mike took it upon himself to convince Miss Pankhurst that she should cash in on her popularity. ‘But, my good man, I’m not in this crusade for profit,’ the feminist reminded him.
‘But ya dames need dough,’ Mike persisted. ‘Lookit ya fines, the bail and a little ice for the politicians won’t hurt you none either.’
‘I didn’t realise you were interested in the cause of woman’s emancipation,’ Miss Pankhurst said.
‘Lady,’ Mike is supposed to have answered, ‘if dat means what I t’ink it means, it’ll be a shot in d’ arm for d’ matineee business.’
Though a rather unique approach to woman’s suffrage, this apparently had its appeal. Emmeline Pankhurst did consent to a commercial tour which contributed substantially to the lady militants’ war chest, with something left over for Uncle Mike.
‘Them broads had a pretty good racket,’ said Mike years later in a rare moment of nostalgia.
When America went to war in 1917, the army had neither the time nor facilities to set up elaborate PX (post exchange) centres and snack bars to keep the GIs in candy, cigarettes and short orders, as they would later in the Second World War. This phase of army life was left to private enterprise. Enterprise, officially defined as ‘boldness or readiness in undertaking, adventurous spirit or energy’, was where Mike came in. With his excursion-boat training Mike was a natural concessionaire, and as a member of the top brash who knew how to get to the top brass, he soon tied up every kind of concession the camp at Spartansburg, North Carolina, was handing out, not to mention a few the CO hadn’t even thought of.
When you went home for a furlough, you bought one of Mike’s cardboard imitation leather suitcases. Then you went down to Mike’s bus line, the only one in town. Mike’s laundry kept you in clean linens. Josie ran the coffee-and-doughnut stand that did such a rush business; she remembers her arms going numb after standing over that hot counter all day. To keep the boys in haircuts, Mike imported 50 barbers from New York City; the profits from this branch of his scalping activities were said to be in the neighbourhood of $5,000 a month – a pretty nice little neighbourhood in anybody’s town.
After operating Jacobs PX Inc. (but apparently unlimited) for a year, Mike reputedly sold out for $100,000. That instinct for divining just how long a show would run and how deep to buy in seemed to extend even to international fields, for Mike sold out at the time when the Germans were on the move and the concession seemed to be worth several times what the buyers had paid for it. But a few months later the Hindenburg Line was broken, and not only the kaiser was out of business. By this time Mike was back in New York ready to cash in on the entertainment boom that came with the Armistice.
But the hundred grand he and Josie cleared in addition to their weekly profits wasn’t all take-home pay, Mike told us at his home one afternoon in a particularly affable mood (the advance sale on the Louis–Nova fight having already passed the quarter-million mark). Written off as overhead were the nine Packard limousines delivered as a little Christmas remembrance from Michael S. (for Santa) Jacobs. Not to mention another couple of thousand for Class B cumshaw to field-grade officers.
The Roaring Twenties got off to a flying head start in 1919 when Alcock and Brown beat Lindbergh to the first non-stop transatlantic flight by eight years. Ina Claire starred in The Gold Diggers, women’s suffrage got the green light in the Senate, the Ziegfield Follies featured Irving Berlin’s A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody and a young man who seemed bent on committing manslaughter became the most famous fighter in the world by breaking the jaw and a couple of ribs of the ponderous, 36-year-old giant who happened to be champion of the world.
Tex Rickard’s Dempsey–Willard promotion at Toledo drew nearly half-a-million dollars, doubling the all-time box office record set by Tex himself with Johnson and Jeffries in 1910. The twenty thousand spectators who saw Dempsey batter big Jess into helplessness in nine minutes paid an average of more than twenty dollars apiece for this privilege. Despite a blazing temperature of 103, ringside seats were going for as much as a $100 a throw by fight time. A triumphant young nation in a holiday spirit was getting ready for the biggest mass binge since the days of the Caesars.
The country had had its fill of solemn, long-faced politicians. They were ready to turn their ears and their pockets inside out for Babe Ruth, Benny Leonard, the Four Horsemen, Red Grange, Bobby Jones and the young man from Manassa who could bust you open with a left hook. Post-war America was looking for laughs, for thrills, providing a new kind of gold rush for the movies, the Follies, the big games in the college stadiums, the fights. Tex Rickard, the flamboyant, mercurial figure who had worked his way east from the saloons and gambling rooms of Alaskan mining towns to cabarets in Seattle, big-time gambling and fight promotion in the Nevada gold fields, knew the times were ripe for lavish spectacle.
It was Rickard’s gambling philosophy that when you had a hunch, back it with everything you’ve got. Now he was ready to let all the chips ride on Dempsey in 1921 and a public going sports mad. In his suite at the Hotel Commodore he frightened his associates with the size of his thinking. He was going to stage a heavyweight title fight that would make his Dempsey–Willard look like nickels and dimes. A man with a rare gift for selling his dreams, he reached outside the sports world into the highest theatrical circles for his backing – William A. Brady and C.B. Cochran.
With the exception of three or four black heavyweight threats who might have given Dempsey an interesting evening but were not to be invited to the party, there wasn’t anyone around who figured to give Dempsey any trouble. But this was the least of Tex’s worries, for he was the master of the dream-up and the steam-up, and with his native understanding of mass psychology he cast around for a challenger who lent himself to high-pressure salesmanship.
Georges Carpentier was a happy choice. He was a Frenchman, which gave the match an international aspect, a war hero, which contrasted him dramatically with Dempsey’s slacker reputation, and seductive to ladies in a blond, debonair way, which gave the match the modern touch of sex appeal. That Carpentier was merely a light heavyweight who had won his title from the ageing Battling Levinsky, and that he was actually on the decline after almost 100 fights over 15 years was to be conveniently overlooked. But Carpentier and manager François Deschamps had few illusions when they went in to make their deal with Rickard. After the destructive fury Dempsey had unleashed on Willard, it seemed as if Carpentier was being asked to take greater chances than when he had gone into combat against the Hun. The only thing that could lure them into such a match was the promise of more money than any pugilist had ever received, $200,000.
The champion, said Dempsey’s mouthpiece Doc Kearns, sharp as a razor blade and just as double-edged, was entitled to at least 100 grand more than the challenger. Not even 40 per cent of the gate would satisfy the astute doctor. Rickard, the plunger, was really over his head this time. With two such unprecedented guarantees before a ticket was sold, there wasn’t a house big enough for the kind of business he needed to get off this half-million dollar hook. So the enormous bubble grew and grew. He would build an arena specially for the occasion, with the largest seating capacity in the world, 100,000 seats.
When Rickard broke ground for this at Boyle’s Thirty Acres outside of Jersey City, Brady and Cochran were convinced they had involved themselves with a madman. No match in boxing history had drawn over half a million dollars, but Rickard was sleepwalking into one that would need nearly a million to break even. His backers were sensible showmen, not wide-eyed gamblers. They picked up their marbles and went home.
Meanwhile the lumber mill was calling for its money. The contractor threatened to pull his men off unless Tex put the cash on the line. Tex Rickard, in New York to establish himself as the greatest fight promoter of the day, was on the verge of going bust, just another country boy who finds himself outweighed and overmatched in the big city.
At this dark moment in walked Uncle Mike, angling for the sort of inside track he had had at the Met. In a rare moment of discouragement, Tex said, ‘Don’t bother me, there’s not gonna be no fight.’
‘No fight!’ Mike said. ‘There’s gotta be a fight. This is the biggest fuckin’ thing that ever hit the fight business. It’s a million easy.’
‘Yeah,’ said the despondent Rickard. ‘I know. But I wish you could convince my backers.’
Mike picked his nose thoughtfully. ‘What we need those suckers for?’
‘Who else c’n keep this thing going?’ Tex said. ‘If I don’t get twenty thousand to the contractor by four o’clock this afternoon, I’ve got no arena. And that’s just fer openers.’
Mike reached into his pocket and pulled out 20,000-dollar bills. ‘Go pay the son of a bitch. An advance on the first five rows of ringside.’
Tex began to look more like his usually ebullient self. ‘I’ll need 200 grand to open the show. The rest c’n come out of the receipts.’
‘Tex,’ Mike said, ‘ya fight is in.’
‘Mike, you’re saving my life,’ Rickard said. ‘I’ll never forget you for this.’
‘Aaaah, nuts,’ Mike said. ‘Just be sure ya don’t forget me when them seats come off the press.’
Then Mike went out to do a selling job among his fellow speculators. For years they had been suspicious of him as a predatory lone wolf who never ran with the pack, but this time Mike was all for intra-professional solidarity. He convinced eight brokers to put up $25,000 apiece in return for choice sections of the house (after Mike got his, of course), and Rickard was saved.
Rickard’s million-dollar daydream, which had frightened off the two outstanding showmen of the day, and which Uncle Mike had reached into his own sock to rescue, exceeded Tex’s wildest hunch and Mike’s shrewdest calculations. Official receipts were $1.8 million. Even Doc Kearns messed up on this one, for his $300,000 guarantee didn’t look quite so large when compared with the $720,000 Dempsey might have earned for 40 per cent of the gate.
Although Mike was actually a silent partner of Tex’s in this extravaganza at Boyle’s Thirty Acres, advising him on the price range, the fine art of stretching a ringside and squeezing the maximum out of general admissions, Mike didn’t ask to be cut in on the profits. His pick of reserved seats was adequate compensation, even for Mike. What his take-home amounted to that hysterical July evening no one can say exactly, but a former associate of Mike’s, who prefers not to be identified, put it this way: ‘Suppose Mike had 5,000 choice seats. The last two or three days New Yorkers were ready to hock their wives’ jewellery or maybe even their wives themselves for a ringside seat. It was nothing for a guy to grab ten at two hundred bucks apiece. Let’s say Mike’s profits averaged 50 bucks a throw. That adds up to a quarter of a million – more ’n they paid Carpentier.’
In 1923, Tex Rickard – now universally acclaimed as the greatest fight promoter of all time – served up two more spectacles, each drawing eighty thousand fans, first when poor old Jess Willard, now a blubbery forty-year-old has-been, was resurrected to build up Luis Firpo, and then when Firpo fought his knock-down-drag-out with Dempsey in Rickard’s second million-dollar gate. The sports pages of that day failed to give Mike a single call. As far as the general public knew, Mike was just another ticket broker. But you couldn’t insult Mike by keeping his name out of the paper. Although Rickard might have found himself back in the Southwest bending over a wheel if it hadn’t been for his timely assist, Mike always refused to discuss his landing-of-the-Marines act. ‘Tex don’t need no help,’ he’d growl when the question came up of Rickard’s debt to him. Until Mike needed the spotlight to puff up his own promotions, he seemed perfectly satisfied to work behind the scenes. As long as he got the spot cash, the other boys could have all the light they wanted.
In a game noted for its feuds, Tex and Mike worked in unusual harmony from 1921 until Tex’s death in 1929. But their friendship wasn’t the kind to warm the hearts of fustian poets like Robert W. Service and Nick Kenny. If there are any vitamins in the human soul that create the capacity for friendship, Mike had a total deficiency of them. He and Tex had this in common, that each was to dominate the boxing world, and to some extent the entire sports world, as no one ever had before them. But there the resemblance stops. Tex was a good-humoured, gregarious, witty, yarn-spinning man who liked to lift one with the sports crowd at La Hiffs where Heywood Broun, Damon Runyon, Grantland Rice, Tad Dorgan, Hype Igoe and other good men of the day had a circle as congenial and amusing, if only slightly less cerebral, than the celebrated one at the Algonquin.
Even though this was the world in which Mike made his living, he seemed always a stranger to it. If he came to La Hiffs it was either to grab a bite and get out or to pick up the tab for someone with whom he was ready to deal. In general the sports crowd at La Hiffs that followed Toots Shor to his congenial spa on Fifty-first Street were a relaxed, companionable, friendly drinking lot, good listeners and good storytellers who could sit from dinner until closing time over coffee or highballs, a goodly company. But Mike, even when he became the professional centre of this world, had a pathological inability to offer or accept companionship. Just as fish in underground pools have been found with no eyes at all through generations of disuse, Mike offered an interesting field for research as a man under such compulsion to look after No. 1 that he becomes totally, physically blind to the pleasures of sociability.
Although Mike always worked closely with Tex, he wasn’t one for keeping all his eggs, or rather his tickets, in one basket. At heart the same little hustler he had been on Fourteenth Street 30 years earlier, he had learned to play no favourites and to regard personal loyalty as a business liability. His relation to Rickard and to Jimmy Johnston, the fast-talking little manager who occasionally turned promoter, was unique in the business world. For Mike, by advance purchase of the best part of the house, actually bought himself a voice in the promotion (and what an overpowering foghorn it was!). When Jimmy Johnston matched Gene Tunney with Carpentier in 1924, Mike guaranteed to take enough seats to assure Jimmy of a promotional success. A few weeks later Mike heard that the fading Frenchman was going west for a fight with Tommy Gibbons shortly before the Tunney fight. Gibbons, the best defensive heavyweight boxer of the day and the only man to stay fifteen rounds with Dempsey in nearly ten years, had beaten everybody in sight with the exception of the incomparable Harry Greb. Despite his knockout by Dempsey, Carpentier was still a popular figure, and his coming fight with the new light heavyweight champion, Gene Tunney, promised another nice paynight for Mike. To jeopardise this by letting the ageing Carpentier meet a cutie like Gibbons in a Western ring for pin money seemed to Mike not just a bonehead play but a backstab at his own investment. ‘What if this Carpentier busts a hand or stinks up the joint so bad he kills our gate? Christ he’s been fightin’ 18 years,’ he screamed.
Jimmy Johnston, who usually knew more angles than a geometry teacher but had somehow slipped up on this one, shook his head. ‘I know, Mike, it’s got me worried. We’ll just have to pray to God that Carpentier comes through.’
Mike looked at him sourly. ‘God ain’t gonna be stuck with the stinkin’ tickets.’
When Sid Terris, the Jewish pride of the East Side, met Jimmy Johnston’s perennial favourite, Johnny Dundee, in the last show at the old Garden on Twenty-fifth Street, famous figures from the past as well as an impressive turnout of New York celebrities were on hand to ceremonialise its passing. Joe Humphries, the little man with the big voice – whose never-use-a-one-syllable-word-when-five-will-do delivery has come down to us in the eloquent verbiage of Harry Balough and Johnny Addie – was not a man to underplay a good scene. The fight could not go on until he had delivered an elaborate funeral oration.
‘Before presenting the stellar attraction in this, the final contest in our beloved home, I wish to say this marks the “crossing of the bar” for this venerable old arena that has stood the acid test these many memorable years.’ Humphries was actually weeping as he recalled the great deeds accomplished there by John L. Sullivan, Jim Corbett, Bob Fitzsimmons, Dempsey, Leonard, Dundee himself. ‘And let us pay tribute to Tex Rickard and the other great gentlemen and sportsmen who have assembled within these hallowed portals,’ Humphries went on. Then, raising his arms to the rafters, he sobbed, ‘Goodbye, old temple, farewell to thee, oh Goddess Diana standing on your tower. Good night all . . . until we meet again.’
Some ringside spectators were visibly moved. Their lives had revolved around this sports centre for a third of a century. The passing of the old Garden was a turning point in the life of New York. The arena was built to service a city of less than two million, and people had wondered how a twelve-thousand seat hall could ever be filled. Now the huge enclosure wasn’t large enough for a sports-mad city that had tripled in size. Among those listening to Humphries’s requiem, none should have felt more involved than Mike Jacobs. When he was still in short pants, he had stood outside this place as a ‘digger’ for small-time scalpers. Now he had the Garden ticket office in his pocket and was growing quietly richer with every show. As Humphries reached his tearful peroration, Mike was seen to lower his head and hide his face in his hands.
‘Lookit Mike – by God, I think he’s bawling,’ said George McKitrick, a crony of Johnston’s and Jimmy Walker’s.
Johnston took a quick, sceptical look and said, ‘Nah, he’s figuring how much better he’ll do at the new Garden with twice the seating capacity.’
Officially the Jacobs ticket office moved north with the Garden to the Forrest Hotel, but Mike’s real office was a secret room on the fourth floor of the Garden, not much bigger than a good-sized closet. From here he had a direct inside line to the Garden box office. According to a well-known boxing press agent who went back a quarter of a century with Mike, ‘He had the inside track on all tickets for all Garden events because he staked the box office men. He was ready to stake everybody from top to bottom. He staked the switchboard girls who kept him informed as to what was going with Garden plans. He staked everybody and anybody who could help him run this business from the secret cubby hole on the fourth floor. The main thing I remember about Mike, he was always there with the ready. With Uncle Mike, the scratch was always up. And his mouth was always shut.’
The most incredible part of this operation, according to our informant, was that Mike year after year was able to keep his actual presence in the Garden a secret. The office he used was a spare belonging to one of the Garden concessions. There was no listing for it in the Garden directory, nor any identification on the door. He’d enter the Garden by a side entrance, go up a back elevator, and slip in and out of this secret door. Command posts in combat zones maintained no tighter security. ‘I swear, not even Garden officials knew Mike was up there,’ one of his former employees said.
To Garden officials, even though they realised he helped them fill the house, Mike Jacobs was never entirely persona grata. While acknowledging his uncanny box office sense, they didn’t exactly want to lie down in the same bed, or the same building, with him. But Mike, as usual, got his way by moving in first and worrying about the legalities later. This was another lesson he learned early and practised to the end.
As a result of Mike’s talent for obscurity during Rickard’s regime, his name was practically unknown to readers of the city’s press throughout the ’20s. The only reference in the files of the old New York World deals with a now-forgotten suit against Rickard in which Mike was a witness. Richard Fuchs, former secretary to circus head John Ringling North, claimed Rickard and the Garden Corporation owed him $189,000, 10 per cent of the first Dempsey–Tunney gross, for arranging the deal by which the fight was brought to Philadelphia in 1926. Jacobs was called in because Fuchs claimed Mike, as a partner of Tex, was in on the deal and was actually supposed to split the fee 50–50 with him. Fuchs described Mike as ‘the man who had exclusive access to the Garden box office. He’s the official distributor of Garden tickets. Every agent who gets tickets for Garden events must get them from him.’
Mike denied this as well as the suggestion that he was Tex’s silent partner and guiding hand. He also testified against Fuchs that neither of them had gone to Philadelphia to help arrange the title fight. The plaintiff was finally awarded $3,000, and it was largely due to Mike’s testimony that the court decided against the full sum Fuchs was claiming. When she heard the verdict, Mrs Fuchs sobbed, ‘I just can’t understand how Mr Jacobs can do this to us. We always thought of him as one of our best friends. Why, he gave us the baby carriage for our first baby.’ She was led from the courtroom in tears.
One of the minor sensations of the trial was the revelation of Mike’s relationship to the Garden that no one had known before, not even his closest relatives.
‘What are your connections with Rickard?’ Fuch’s attorney, B.F. Norris, had asked.
‘I’m a stockholder in the Garden,’ Mike said.
‘What?’ Norris asked in amazement. ‘Since when?’
‘Since 1926,’ Mike admitted, and even he couldn’t suppress a tendency to smile.
It wasn’t until 1935 that Sid Mercer, one of the few sportswriters for whom Mike never seemed to develop any genuine liking, described in the New York American the pivotal role that Mike played in engineering the Dempsey–Tunney return fight in Chicago.
According to Mercer, though Billy Gibson, Tunney’s manager, had promised Dempsey a return match, Rickard had been unable to persuade the new champion to sign for the bout. The main hitch seemed to be that Tunney and Gibson had had a falling out, and the champion was using this as his reason for not going along with his manager’s agreement. With a crew of sportswriters who could bring public pressure to bear, Rickard and Mike went to St Louis where Tunney was appearing in vaudeville. There, said Mercer, Uncle Mike, who apparently had arranged the trip and took personal charge of the writers, served as mediator between Tunney and Gibson and was able finally to bring them together. Although Mike, characteristically, denied he had anything to do with it, Mercer claimed that Rickard gave Silent Mike full credit for working out the bugs in this latest ‘Battle of the Century’ that drew an all-time record gate of $2,658,660.
When Tex Rickard died in 1929 and Madison Square Garden was left without a first-string promoter, the eminent gentlemen who ran that high-grade sweatatorium never thought of looking for Tex’s successor on the fourth floor of their own building, where Mike Jacobs ruled the Garden’s ticket business from his clandestine office.
Instead they turned to Mike’s old – oops, we almost said friend – Jimmy Johnston, whom his pals liked to call the Boy Bandit, though it is widely doubted that Jimmy ever stole anything more valuable than a decision or another manager’s fighter. And even these he always had the grace to return to their rightful owners when he was through with them.
At the party in the old Madison Square Garden Club given to celebrate Johnston’s ascension to power, no one was more prominent than Uncle Mike, who wound up handing out the beer. ‘Leave it to Mike to ace his way into the job that gets everybody coming to him,’ the sharp-tongued Jimmy said to his chum Mayor Walker that night.
Uncle Mike was never much of a drinking man, but this night he raised his mug with the others when Johnston was toasted as the man who would pick up in the ’30s where Tex Rickard had left off in the ’20s. The cream of the sports world – from Extra Heavy to Watered-down – were gathered there that night: Jim Farley, Damon Runyon, General Phelan, Jack Kearns, Dan Parker, Francis Albertanti, Bill Farnsworth, Francis Wallace, Joe Humphries, Fire Captain George Foster, Colonel John Hammond, Joe Gould, Jim Coffroth, Bill Duffy, Bill Corum, Wilbur Wood – people who knew boxing from every possible angle. Yet not one of them could have guessed that fewer than three years later this ticket shark who had never actually promoted a fight would dare to challenge the mighty Garden itself, and before many years had passed he would not only have Johnston’s job but Rickard’s title as the champion fight promoter of all time.
Uncle Mike’s debut as a fight promoter came about more or less accidentally. Damon Runyon, Ed Frayne and Bill Farnsworth, the three key men in the Hearst sports department, heard from Colonel John Reed Kilpatrick that the Garden, in the course of its new ‘no benefits’ policy, was washing its hands of Mrs Hearst’s annual Milk Fund show. Deciding to stage their own promotion, Runyon and his associates turned to Mike Jacobs as the logical man to handle their ticket sale.
Thus the Twentieth Century Sporting Club was founded, with Jacobs, Runyon and the two Hearst sports editors said to hold 25 per cent of the stock. Of these only Frayne had a covering letter from Jacobs to establish his legal claim. The others, perhaps fearing to be nominally involved in the event the Garden should find cause for legal action, were content to be invisible as well as silent partners. With his talent for holding on to what is his, and sometimes even what isn’t, Mike locked the stock in his safe in the old Hippodrome, where the young fight club took offices and planned its first promotion.
Back in the breadline days when a fight between ranking heavyweight contenders could draw only $10,000, their first venture – the Barney Ross–Billy Petrolle Milk Fund Show – did all right. Not a man to separate himself from a good thing, Mike, with the backing of the Hearst group, decided to go on and buck the Garden as a rival fight club.
It was hardly a secret to the sports world that Runyon, Frayne and Farnsworth were carrying water on both shoulders by putting in with Jacobs while retaining their positions on the Journal and the American. When the Garden heads pressed their claim that it wasn’t exactly sporting for them to head sports departments reporting Garden events while sharing in the promotion of a rival outfit, Frayne and Farnsworth left their papers. Runyon’s unique position as a nationally known columnist saved him from the fate of his colleagues, who suddenly found themselves working exclusively for the Sporting Club, which soon came to mean, as we shall see, working for Uncle Mike.
It struck Jimmy Johnston as highly amusing that a mere scalper and a couple of sports editors working out of the creaky old Hippodrome should give the mighty Garden any competition. Jimmy called the rival operation amateur night and said the only way to fill the Hippodrome was to bring back Houdini to raise his elephant to the ceiling. Jimmy and Mike would ride each other in a good-natured, spiteful way about their promotional contest. ‘Mike, why don’t you stop all this nonsense and come back to the thing you’re suited for, the ticket business?’ Jimmy, a gifted needler, would say. ‘We’ll work together the way we used to.’
‘Aaaah, go fuck yourself,’ Mike would answer with a good-natured scowl. ‘Your stinkin’ shows don’t do enough business t’ give us a play on the tickets.’
Mike was hardly exaggerating. In the trough of a depression, the free-spending sports fans of bygone years were home making out their monthly budgets. For all Jimmy’s ingenuity, popularity and connections, even the Garden regulars seemed to consider the place off limits. In addition, Jimmy had a lot of old friends among the managers, and he might have been more inclined to use their boys than to reach out for better fighters. As a result, Garden talent reached a low-water mark that hasn’t been equalled since the doldrum years of the Second World War, when most of the good fighters were in uniform. In due time fight fans got the Garden habit again and would pack the joint to see Johnny Awkward meet Joe Tank. As a promoter, Jimmy Johnston was a good fight manager.
Meanwhile Mike was going on about his business, stoically ignoring the depression and fighting a two-front war, against his partners and the Garden. For the boys who had put him in business, Mike devised a somewhat unusual treatment. He not only failed to take them into his confidence, he refused to talk to them at all. He reached the office at eight o’clock every morning and cheerlessly did the work of ten men, including everything from helping to nail the seats down to convincing (‘put this two Gs in ya pocket an’ fergit it’) the best Garden draws to switch to Uncle Mike.
A one-man man who would go to almost any lengths to be loyal to himself, Mike was soon convinced that his partners had signed on with him under false pretences and that he was the victim of their plot to share equally with him while he did all the work. He began to feel that he should have it all. This was a feeling that was always to come over Mike as naturally as dizziness to a victim of vertigo. Since Frayne and Farnsworth no longer had their influential newspaper jobs, there was some basis for his contention that they had lost their initial value to him and that the original agreement should therefore be null and void.
Probably more painful to them than the financial wrangling that everyone went through with Mike was the fact that he seemed to take a sadistic pleasure in humiliating them in front of newspapermen who had respected them. Mike would hold press conferences without them, let them cool their heels outside his office, cuss them out like office boys and if a reporter should ask a question he preferred not to answer, he’d say ‘Ask Farnsworth’, gloating in the failure of this popular, former big-time sports editor to know the plans of the club of which he was nominally vice president.
The Sporting Club prospered moderately through its first year, but it was still more of a thorn than a lance in the Garden’s side. Things might have gone on this way if it hadn’t been for a young black heavyweight fighting out of Chicago in 1935. Mike was down in Miami staging a show with Barney Ross when one of Barney’s managers, Sam Pian, a Chicagoan, told Mike a kid named Louis with 14 straight wins was Murder Incorporated.
Ever since the Jack Johnson days, good black heavyweights had either settled for Europe or served themselves up as human sacrifices, fattening the records of the white mediocrities who passed for contenders. In the dog days between Tunney and Louis, Tom Heeney, Young Stribling, Phil Scott, Primo Carnera and other alleged fighters met each other in a round-robin of waltzes, foul claims and Italian fandangos that injured no one but the public.
If the game were to survive, much less revive, it stood in urgent need of such a fighter as Joe Louis, who was apparently both able and willing to fight, two qualities conspicuously lacking in his predecessors. Though the pigment of his skin was not quite as lily white as that of Phaintin Phil Scott or Tearful Jack Sharkey, it occurred to Mike Jacobs and Jimmy Johnston at about the same time that more of an asset than the proper pigmentation was a right hand that could knock you dead.
The Boy Bandit, always a fast man with a telephone, got the name of Louis’s manager and put through a call to him in Chicago. The duel between Johnston and Jacobs was reaching its climax.
‘Mr Roxborough,’ said Johnston, ‘I hear you’ve got a pretty good thing out there in the way of a heavyweight. I’d like to give him a chance in one of the Garden shows this winter.’
Roxborough told Johnston how much he thought Louis was worth for his first Garden appearance.
Johnston hit the ceiling, which was very nearly zero in this particular instance. ‘Listen,’ he snapped, ‘I don’t care how many guys you’ve knocked silly out there, don’t forget he’s still just another nigger heavyweight.’
There was a click at the other end of the line. Mr Roxborough had hung up. Someone had neglected to tell Jimmy Johnston that Mr John Roxborough had two things in common with his fighter: the colour of his skin and the strength of his pride.
It isn’t often that one pays so dearly, or so promptly, for his bigotry.
While Johnston was being caught with his racial slip showing, Mike Jacobs was heading for Chicago to size up Louis and talk matters over with the astute black businessmen who were managing him. Of course the first thing he did (‘the scratch was always up’) was to lay on the line a sum of money said by insiders to be at least $20,000. That was for openers, to prove his intentions were strictly honourable (like an old-country bridegroom getting up some of the dowry money before he kisses the girl). Then he told Roxborough and Julian Black, in his own blunt way, that he was going to expect young Louis to go out and win every fight as fast as possible. Mike knew this is what they were hoping to hear.
It’s one of the nicer ironies that Uncle Mike Jacobs, so often associated with all that is greedy, underhanded and corrupt in the boxing game, and whose interest in civil rights had never been conspicuous, rates the credit for giving a black man the first chance at the heavyweight crown in America (Jack Johnson having had to chase his champion to Australia). Not that Uncle Mike deserves a Spingarn medal or a place among the great American humanitarians. He was simply shrewd enough to appreciate how times had changed. Depression and the dreary succession of palefaced hammola champions had broadened the outlook of fans who no longer pleaded for ‘white hopes’. Now they didn’t care whether their ‘hope’ was white, black, green or pink-striped as long as he could hook off the jab, take you out with a right hand and bring some excitement to the heavyweight division that had slumbered since the Dempsey days.
When Mike came back to New York he had an exclusive contract with Joe Louis. That little piece of paper tucked away in his safe at the Hippodrome was as good as legal tender for $15 million, payable in gate receipts to come.
One of Uncle Mike’s curious contradictions is his schizoid attitude toward money. Said a well-known manager after years of trying to match wits with him, ‘Mike loves his little larcenies. I used to let him think he was nicking me for a grand here and there just to keep him happy.’
But this same manager pointed out, ‘This is a big-league town, and if you want to cop the pennant you can’t do it with bunts and squeeze plays. Mike could squeeze against the little guys, but every time he went against the big stuff he swung with everything he had.’ For example, he cited not only the tidy sum Mike was out before Louis faced a single major opponent but the excursion to Detroit Mike set up for all the New York sportswriters to unveil Louis against the highly rated Natie Brown.
‘That little outing must’ve set Mike back at least 20 Gs,’ the manager said. ‘See what I mean? Nothing chintzy there. So Mike was in around 40 Gs already when Louis was still fighting for chicken feed. Rickard always gets the credit as the top-drawer gambler with the big vision, but from where I sit Mike had it all over him. Don’t forget Tex operated in the boom days. Mike had a depression going against him. Everything mean and small you can think of you can put down about Mike, and the odds are 10 to 1 you’ll be right. But if you want to keep the picture in focus you’ve got to get in somewhere how Mike thought big and shelled out big, always looking for the big angles where a Jimmy Johnston was playing for the little ones.’
That summer, while the Garden operators looked on in helpless confusion, sixty-two thousand people in Yankee Stadium saw Joe Louis cut down the hapless superstar Primo Carnera in six rounds. The firm of Jacobs & Louis Inc. was on its way to the greatest financial coup in the history of the business.
Statistics are usually the province of the fellows in the green eyeshades. Magazine writers are supposed to run from this like malaria mosquitoes. But you can’t ignore a couple of statistics that went off with the roar of 16-inch guns, almost blasting the Garden high command from the desks of its flagship on Eighth Avenue. Just two weeks before Mike’s first big outdoor show had filled the ballpark, the Garden-promoted championship bout between Max Baer and Jimmy Braddock drew only half as many fans to the Long Island Bowl and did less than two-thirds the business of Mike’s non-title fight.
But Mike had just begun. While Jimmy Braddock and the Garden sat on their championship, Mike promptly signed the ex-champion, Baer, to meet the Brown Bomber in another huge outdoor fight that September. Louis was now the biggest attraction since Dempsey, and sportwriters estimated that the fight would draw over half a million dollars. But they underestimated Mike, who with this match set the pattern for all the great outdoor promotions of the next decade.
If Mike sold every seat in the house his gross should have been $750,000. But Mike confounded the experts that September by coming up with the first million-dollar gate since the crash. Adding that extra quarter of a million is about in a class with dealing 70 cards out of a regular 52-card deck. And like all sleight of hand, it’s simple when you see how it’s done.
Mike kept an eye on his ticket sales the way an old man does on an attractive young wife. If he saw a greater demand for $30 seats than 20s, he’d revise his seat plan to stretch the $30 section at the expense of the $20 seats. A little foresight in having printed differently priced tickets for the same seat gave Mike flexibility. Similarly, if the queue was a block long at the $3 window while the customers seemed to shy away from the five, he’d drop the window on the threes so bleacherites would have no choice but to go for the next price range.
Another cute innovation of Mike’s was a new section euphemistically called ‘raised ringside’. These seats, set up behind the already ever-enlarged ringside, turned out to be bleacher seats at ringside prices. With apparent benevolence, Mike would give away hundreds of these seats as ‘complimentaries’. On a ‘raised ringside’ ticket the benefactee would have to pay only the tax plus a ‘service charge’ of five to $10. Since Mike’s generosity did not include sharing this income with his fighters, he could net nearly as much on his comps as with his regular ticket sale.
This is probably the only time a man has ever played a 70,000-seat arena as if it were an accordion.
On Broadway they say, ‘Old scalpers never die.’ Old scalper Mike Jacobs doubled in brass as a promoter who gave himself the choice tickets with which to speculate. First he’d turn over the first three or four rows of official ringside to the Jacobs Ticket Agency, which, it was announced many times, had no connection whatsoever with the Twentieth Century Sporting Club. Quick thinking on the part of brother Jake, apparently, nabbed those prize seats before the other agencies could get around to them. Next came one of the most ingenious devices for making money since Gutenberg invented the printing press. For important fights there were always three or four rows for the working press between the ring and the first row of the regular ringside. While a majority of these went to boxing writers, a large number were gifts to city officials and influential friends or were sold for the high dollar to Hollywood, Broadway stars, wealthy New Yorkers and others who enjoyed paying an extra C-note or two for the privilege of sitting among the working press.
There would usually be a call from one of the boxing commissioners for seats for the top officialdom. Mike would invariably say the demand for press tickets was much greater than expected. To accommodate the commissioner he would have to set up a few extra rows, a condition to which the commissioner would agree.
This casual addition of a ‘few extra rows’ would give Mike several hundred additional seats in front of ‘ringside’ for his own play. It was an open secret in the fight game that these seats were usually sold in blocks to such well-heeled sports fans as a certain well-known racketeer with the same name as a prominent Hollywood comedian. He would go for whole rows of these seats, parting with five or $10,000 as casually as you drop a coin in the phone slot. The big man would then distribute his seats among the politicians and various others who might be useful. Any boxing reporter can tell you of the strange and wonderful gathering liberally sprinkled through the working press. With this little gimmick, Mike would probably pick up an extra 50,000 or more, a nice bit of gravy, none of which ever showed on his vest or in his books.
Since this was a slice off the top before the fighters’ cut, I asked the manager of a former Jacobs main-eventer if he and his colleagues had been aware of the practice and whether they resented Mike’s doing them out of gross income they should have been sharing with him. The answer was, ‘Nah, everybody knew what Mike was doin’. But he was makin’ more money for us than anybody else could, so we figured let ’im have his little larcenies.’
Jacobs & Louis Inc. went on expanding through 1935–1936 until an unexpected setback at the hands of Der Führer’s most prominent exponent of Strength Through Joy, Max Schmeling. Oddly enough, Schmeling was managed by that droll little enemy of the English language who spoke only the purest basic American (‘I shoulda stood in bed’), Joe ‘Yussel’ Jacobs. An unconfirmed rumour has it that when the two fighters were called to the centre of the ring for final instruction, the referee wound up with, ‘And may the best Jacobs win.’
Schmeling’s incredible victory – Louis’s only defeat in a brilliant 13-year run before his retirement and sorry comeback – appeared to be a body blow to Uncle Mike’s ambitions. Herr Max went back to the Third Reich where the party leaders made him their poster boy of the Master Race, the perfect example of Aryan supremacy over the decadent, mongrelised democracies. The following summer he was to return to meet Braddock for the championship under Garden auspices. It looked like a sure victory for Joseph Goebbels’s favourite athlete as well as a clean-cut decision for Jimmy Johnston and the Garden over Uncle Mike and his defeated heavyweight.
At this point Uncle Mike began to demonstrate the shiftiest footwork since Benny Leonard’s, only matched by that of Braddock’s pilot, Joe Gould, a managerial Fred Astaire, who could spin so rapidly that no one ever was able to tell in which direction he was really looking. Together with the Schmeling directorate and the Garden management they began to play a game of ‘Braddock, Braddock, Who Gets to Fight Braddock?’ that was to involve more techniques of high-level intrigue than even occurred to the Borgias. Before old Jim Braddock finally put his championship on the line, not only rival boxing promotions were involved but rival state boxing commissions, rival political organisations, and eventually President Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler themselves.
Again, not just good timing but the very fortunes of the time were to carry Mike forward. For if the year had not been 1937, when Nazi bestiality was beginning to shock the entire civilised world, even Mike might have hesitated before so brazen a move as attempting to ‘steal’ Champion Jimmy Braddock from the Garden and the title match with Schmeling that had the official sanction of the New York Boxing Commission.
Fortunately for the firms of Jacobs & Louis Inc. and Gould & Braddock Inc., the Anti-Nazi Boycott League, headed by such civic leaders as Samuel Untermeyer and Jeremiah T. Mahoney, took a dim view of Herr Schmeling, arguing, not without reason, that he was an outstanding representative of Goebbels’s propaganda mill and that a victory for Max would be a source not only of American dollars for Germany but of invaluable ammunition for its psychological warfare machine. If the heavyweight championship went to Germany, the Anti-Nazis feared, the astute Mr Goebbels would see to it that it remained there.
At this point Mr Gould, a charter member of the No-Stone-Unturned Club, ripped a page out of Gallup’s book by polling boxing writers on the respective box office strength of a Braddock–Louis and a Braddock–Schmeling fight. According to his pollsters, anti-Nazi feeling was running so high that a Schmeling fight would be effectively boycotted and could draw two or three hundred thousand at most while Louis-Braddock looked like a sure three-quarters of a million.
From that moment on Mr Gould became an even more confirmed Anti-Nazi than he might have been before, while Uncle Mike, sublimely oblivious of Gould and Braddock’s contract with the Garden, began pulling out all the stops in an effort to talk the champion into breaking with the Garden and meeting his Brown Bomber instead.
Throughout this crucial period Uncle Mike was the epitome of generosity and benevolence. Gould’s and Braddock’s every wish, as we used to say, was Mike’s command. He even sent them his personal tailor to make them as many suits as they wished at his expense. When Owney Madden, one of Braddock’s sponsors, strolled back into town after having been officially banished, and the city’s reformed police force threatened to lay hands on the eminent visitor from Hot Springs, somehow Uncle Mike saw to it that Mr Madden wasn’t embarrassed during his stay. Meanwhile he and Joe Gould began feeling each other out in a memorable series of tête-à-têtes combining the most accomplished arts of seduction, poker, chess and Big Three conferences.
When rumours of Gould’s defection floated back to Schmeling, he was outraged. He made daily calls on Gould, begging him not to pull out of the fight. Not only had he promised his Führer that he would grab the world’s championship for Der Vaterland but he stood to make himself a hatful of Uncle Sam’s certificates, something he always showed the highest respect for, no matter what his Berchtesgaden friends may have thought of what else we had to offer.
Finally, in a fit of frustration, Schmeling sailed home to the Reich. Meanwhile, with Braddock’s crown in the pot, the poker game went on. The Garden raised, and Uncle Mike raised again. For Gould it was every fight manager’s wish-dream come true. The has-been he had rescued from the relief roles and shrewdly resurrected just a few years earlier was now the prize over which the mighty Garden and Mike Jacobs the mighty upstart were struggling for promotional supremacy. Whichever syndicate could stage a Braddock fight first had the heavyweight title, and whoever controlled the title controlled this multimillion-dollar industry. It was as simple as that. The fact that Schmeling had been declared the rightful challenger and that Braddock and the German had contracts with the Garden hardly gave Uncle Mike a moment’s pause. His attitude toward contracts had always been somewhat unorthodox. No man had greater respect for them when they were to his advantage, or was quicker to shrug them aside if they got in his way. Said General John Reed Kilpatrick, who seemed to admire Uncle Mike in a quizzical way, ‘Mike’s philosophy was always to do it first and worry about the legalities when he came to them.’
With a ‘damn-the-injunctions, full-speed-ahead’ attitude, in the face of the boxing commission edicts, previous contracts and threatened lawsuits, Uncle Mike kept his sights fixed on the heavyweight championship that had been for so many years an established Garden property. Using his Garden contract as a wedge, Gould was determined to pry Mike loose from more money than any pugilist had ever received, but the steepest demands Gould could make (and he was an inspired demander) would not stop Mike from coming on.
During these hectic crossfire negotiations, Joe Gould was at the home of his aged mother when her phone rang and she said to Joe in her halting accent, ‘What’s this? Somebody is making a joke maybe? Germany is calling us?’
Joe picked up the phone. It was Max Schmeling. After tender inquiries into the state of Joe’s health and that of his family (while indescribable pogroms were raging throughout Germany), Schmeling said, ‘Joe, I am speaking from the office of one of the most important people in Germany – in the world,’ he corrected. ‘Reich Minister Goebbels wants to talk to you personally.’
‘Mr Gould,’ Goebbels began in broken but understandable English, ‘we are ready to make you a very interesting offer to bring your champion to Germany to fight Max.’
Said Gould, ‘Just a minute, Mr Goebbels, has Max told you the kind of a deal we want?’
‘He has given me a general idea,’ Goebbels answered. ‘But let me hear from you exactly what you want. The match will be very popular in Germany, and I am confident we can meet your terms.’
‘All right,’ Gould said. ‘I’ve got three conditions. If you can agree to them I will bring Braddock to Germany.’
‘Excellent,’ Goebbels said. ‘I feel sure I can arrange everything to your satisfaction. Now your three conditions, please.’
‘In the first place,’ said Gould, ‘I want 500,000 in real money – I mean American dollars – deposited in my name in a New Jersey bank before we get on the boat.’
‘I can promise you that will be done,’ Goebbels said without hesitation. ‘Go on, Mr Gould.’
‘Secondly, I want to bring over an American referee, and one of the two judges must be an Englishman. We won’t mind if the other’s a German,’ Gould continued.
‘One minute, please,’ Goebbels said, and apparently after conferring with Schmeling he told Gould, ‘Yes, we will agree to that also. And now, please, the third point.’
‘The third point,’ Gould said matter-of-factly, ‘is that you get Hitler to stop kicking the Jews around. Unless he opens the concentration camps, gives them back full citizenship and property rights, you know what you and Max can do with your fight.’
But before Gould could finish, the receiver had been slammed down at the other end.
‘Nu?’ Gould’s mother asked. ‘What is all this big conversation with Berlin?’
‘Aw nothing,’ Gould said. ‘I just told Goebbels and Hitler what they could do with themselves.’
Mrs Gould looked at her son with an affectionate scepticism. ‘Oh Joe, you’re always such a kidder,’ she said.
Soon after Goebbels’s failure to grab the title fight away from Mike Jacobs, who was working around the clock to grab it away from the Garden, Gould announced that the champion would not go through with the Schmeling fight but would meet Joe Louis in Chicago for Uncle Mike instead. The boxing commission called Gould on the carpet, where he stoutly maintained that it was his responsiblity to protect the economic interests of Mr Braddock and that he would be derelict in these duties if he were to permit him to go through with the Schmeling fight in the face of the threatened Anti-Nazi boycott.
Gould’s sense of duty was to be profoundly influenced by Uncle Mike. Not even a demand for a guaranteed $400,000 seemed too much to ask by Gould for his renovated titleholder. Tomcats yowling on a back fence had nothing on Jacobs and Gould as they went round and round in the final stages of their deal. But Mike had to have Braddock and that title at any price, and he finally acceded to Gould’s unprecedented demand for 10 per cent of the net receipts of all Jacobs’s heavyweight promotions for the next ten years.
Gould had him over a barrel, but as soon as Mike got back on his feet he quickly talked Joe Louis into kicking in 10 per cent of his purses for the next ten years and taxed each of his partners 5 per cent. Gould’s haymaker was neatly sidestepped by Mike, allowing his partners to absorb the blow.
With unerring judgement, Uncle Mike chose Chicago as the site of the title bout, for the Windy City was not only the scene of Louis’s early triumphs but a convenient distance beyond the jurisdiction of the New York Boxing Commission that was trying to block the bout. Two steps ahead as usual, Mike had also foreseen that in welcoming a chance to put one over on New York, Chicago and Illinois officials would give him every possible protection. Lawyers for the Garden were trying to stop the Louis–Braddock fight by injunction, but Mike lined up behind an impressive forward wall of legal heavyweights who formed a flying wedge against the Garden diehards. The injunctions were gradually shaken off, and the game was won when a New Jersey judge whose name really was Guy W. Fake decided that Gould and Braddock’s service contract with the Garden would not prevent the champion from placing his title at the disposal of the new firm.
While Louis and Braddock were getting ready for the fight that Uncle Mike had already won, regardless of the outcome, Max Schmeling returned to go through the motions of his quixotic ‘phantom fight’ with Braddock’s ghost. In an effort to strengthen his and the Garden’s legal case, he went into training, weighed in the day of the ‘fight’ and made a token appearance at the empty arena that evening.
On the night of the real fight, Gould says he insisted that $400,000 in 1,000-dollar bills be delivered into his hands at the hotel before he would consent to bring Braddock to Comiskey Park. ‘Whatsa matter, Joe, don’t you trust me?’ Uncle Mike exploded.
‘Sure I trust you, Mike,’ said Gould. ‘But I’ll trust you even more when I’ve got the 400 big ones in my pocket.’
Despite the machinations that had surrounded it, the Louis–Braddock fight re-established the prestige and dignity of the heavyweight title. Louis fought at the top of his power and skill; Braddock went down as old champions are expected to, with proud and unflagging courage.
Mike had the Garden on the ropes now. Like his star, Louis, he was ready to move in for the kill. ‘Now I want to show ’em who’s boss,’ he confided to sportswriter Wilbur Wood. ‘I wanna do something twice as big as any promoter ever thought of.’
‘Twice as big,’ Wood thought a moment. ‘Why don’t you stage two championship fights the same night. No one’s ever pulled that off before, Mike.’
For a moment Mike chewed restlessly on his bridgework. ‘I’ll double that. I’ll give ’em four championship fights,’ he said.
That September his Carnival of Champions lived up to its name when two great titleholders, Barney Ross and Lou Ambers, retained their crowns while Harry Jeffra and Fred Apostoli reached the top of their divisions in brilliant battles. But the real winner, of course, was Uncle Mike. Although his grandiose promotion was in the red, he now had a corner on the boxing market. Monopoly Mike, as he began to be called, had exclusive contracts with five champions, and since no contenders could meet these champions without first signing over to Mike complete control of their future services – a device the Garden operatives somehow had overlooked – he could write his own ticket, for a price Mike was never shy about marking up.
The Garden was ready to cry Uncle. ‘Uncle’ Mike was officially invited in. Mike’s rival, Jimmy Johnston, a congenital up-and-downer, was on the outside looking in. He swore he would wipe Twentieth Century Sporting Club off the fistic map. His first move in that direction was to form the Thirtieth Century Sporting Club. He was going to top Mike in everything, including ten millenniums. Unfortunately for Jimmy, his millenniums didn’t last out the year.
Just a little short of 50 years from the time Mike first hustled up to the box office in knee pants as a digger at the old Garden, he was the unchallenged tsar of the fight business, with the Madison Square Garden for his winter palace and Yankee Stadium for his Midsummer Nights’ dreams of further million-dollar gates.
When Mike Jacobs was dominating the fight world as single-handedly as Hitler did in his sphere of influence, I happened to spend a weekend at his first country estate in Rumson, New Jersey.
My personal friends Billy Soose, the newly crowned middleweight champion, and his manager, Paul Moss, were going down to talk over possible opponents for Garden matches that autumn and asked me along. Remembering my Emily Post on uninvited guests, I hesitated. ‘Listen,’ my objections were brushed aside, ‘half the people there will be brought by somebody else. As long as we’ve got the title and Mike needs us, he wouldn’t care if we brought our two-headed cousin.’
Thus assured, if not flattered, I was headed for the Fontainebleau of the undisputed monarch of the cauliflower kingdom.
I found a sprawling 25-room New Jersey mansion in a section known locally as millionaire’s row, overlooking close-cropped rolling lawns and beautifully kept gardens. The house and veranda were already crowded with weekend guests, boxers, managers, members of Mike’s staff, sportswriters and several individuals who always seemed to be in the money without any readily identifiable occupation.
Except for tag-along freeloaders like me, every one of the guests was there for tactical reasons. Mike’s business fever never slacked at nightfall or weekends. He knew exactly what he wanted from each invited guest.
Lunch was an elaborate and drawn-out barbecue of prize steaks and home-grown corn and tomatoes in which Mike took justifiable pride. A delicious sauce was announced as Mike’s own recipe. At Mike’s insistence, everyone ate twice as much as he really wanted. Like moneymaking, eating seemed to be a ritual feverishly indulged in though divorced from need. For an introverted but hardly introspective personality, apparently these activities helped fill a social vacuum.
Defensive, suspicious, obsessed and ceaselessly driven – not from miserliness or power-madness, as one able sports columnist believed, but by a tight, hidden knot of insecurities – Mike impressed me as a victim in a contemporary inferno doomed to run all his life at full speed in a giant squirrel’s cage.
At least he seemed to be the only one at the picnic who wasn’t having any fun. All weekend he moved restlessly among his guests like a campaign manager at a political convention. The late Hype Igoe, a beloved sportswriter of the old days, stretched out comfortably on a hammock after a rich meal and began to soliloquise: ‘Ah, what a day – a wonderful meal, the sky as clear as glass, the trees full of singing birds, the air perfumed with all these flowers, the soft hum of the bees in the garden, what an unforgettable sense of peace.’
Near the hammock, Mike had been pacing as if this broad terrace were a confining cell. ‘Aaaah, yuh nuts,’ he growled at Igoe, ‘there ain’t no action.’
All during the barbecue the talk around Mike was fight business. Then he spent the rest of the afternoon in conference with managers and boxers, one or two at a time, in his circular garden house decorated with photographs and cartoons of famous fights and fighters. That evening the talk around Mike was more fight business. Never could this one lick that one but how much would they draw? An interested manager would suggest a match, and Mike would veto it with a contemptuous ‘Nah’ and a clacking of the false teeth of which he had dozens of sets, none of which he had ever had the patience to have properly fitted.
After dinner Mike hurried his guests into his cars, raced to a small New Jersey fight club, caught the main event and whisked them back again. Nearly everyone sacked in without delay. I picked up a book on the nightstand. It was one of Nat Fleischer’s colourful biographies of ex-champions. Then I heard someone prowling around the hall and opened the door to find Uncle Mike in a bathrobe. I followed him downstairs into the kitchen for cold chicken and back to his study. He started his record player, and while the room filled with Sam Taub’s blow-by-blow description of one of Mike’s Garden fights, he paced the floor. When the long transcription came to an end, Mike played another one. Instead of reading himself to sleep, he listened himself to sleep with round-by-round playbacks of his own promotions. I could imagine him finally dropping off by counting customers as they passed through the turnstiles.
Although he was known to dose himself with sleeping pills, I heard him moving around several times during the night. When I mentioned this later to Bobby Dawson, for years Mike’s personal attendant, Bobby said, ‘Whenever he couldn’t sleep he’d wake me up, two, three o’clock in the morning. Sometimes he’d even want to go for a ride. You’d’ve thought sleep was tryin’ to cheat him the way he hated it.’
Next morning at 6.30 Mike was fully dressed and miraculously refreshed and reinvigorated. At eight o’clock, with a portable radio at arm’s length and the volume turned up to a deafening blast, Mike was talking to several other early risers about a possible opponent for welterweight champion Red Cochrane. Out of the depth of my innocence I found myself, in a timid voice, suggesting Ray Robinson, universally recognised in those days as ‘the uncrowned welterweight champion’. Uncle Mike looked down the table at me in teeth-clacking disgust. ‘Aaaah, we got too many coloured boys on top now. Public’s gettin’ tired of ’em.’
This opinion, it occurred to us, was not tainted with racist sentiment. In fact it was not to be confused with any sentiment, living or dead. It was completely regardless of race, colour or creed, as one of Mike’s lieutenants Mushky Jackson might say. It was cold-blooded showmanship, in the same golden rut with the Hollywood producer who decides that ‘The public’s tired of platinum blondes’ or ‘child stars’.
Next day at the Jacobs manse was not unlike the first, except that we dined inside at one of the two dining-room tables that had been bought as a compromise solution to the running argument between Mike and Josie as to which table had the most class. Theirs is a union that apparently thrives on argument, for after 30 years Mike and Josie could not seem to agree even on what flowers to plant in their garden. As a result they each had their own flower garden, identified by their names painted on wooden signs.
Unexpectedly Mike has a genuine but inarticulate appreciation for flowers. He made sure we noticed the size of the peonies and sunflowers that had been planted for him, and gloated a little over their superiority to Josie’s. ‘I got the biggest fuckin’ flowers around here,’ he said. A number of rare plants and flowers in his garden were given to him by wealthy neighbours in exchange for fight tickets.
Mike’s only other diversion that weekend was reviewing his horses as they were jumped over barriers for him. He watched this a few minutes, barking out crisp orders for particular hurdles he wanted the animals to clear, then suddenly lost interest and led a prominent manager back to his garden house to do some business.
I watched in a kind of horrified awe as Mike fastened himself on guest after guest like some insatiable bee, drawing from each whatever he had to offer. A new opponent was written in for Louis. A fight was switched from New York to Detroit because of Uncle Mike’s shrewd hunch that it would have greater appeal for Midwesterners. A match in London couldn’t go on until it had Mike’s approval. A boxer who had beaten the champion of his division several times in non-title bouts was vetoed because he lacked colour and box office appeal. A manager who had been holding out stubbornly for 30 per cent agreed to take 25 per cent for his fighter after Mike had softened him up with a $1,000 ‘personal advance’. That extra 5 per cent would have taken around 5,000 off the top of Mike’s promotion. Since the manager would have had to split this with his fighter, he did just as well by taking Mike’s advice to ‘put this in yuh pocket an’ forget it’.
None of these practices were original with Mike. They were as much a part of the fight business as the collodion used to close the wounds of the hirelings who provided the Garden entertainments. What Mike did was what any successful monopolist must do, perfect the techniques of total control.
That afternoon Mike rushed us to a nearby army camp to watch Buddy Baer, who was getting ready for Louis on Mike’s Bum-of-the-Month road show. When we got back, a restless, aggressive house guest, expected 24 hours earlier, finally put in an appearance. It was Billy Conn, the feisty light heavyweight champion.
‘What yuh havin’ for dinner?’ Conn wanted to know right away.
‘Chicken fricassee,’ Josie Jacobs said.
‘Aaah, fricassee my ass,’ said Conn. ‘I’m leavin’ for a steak.’
‘Who needs yuh, yuh bum?’ Josie yelled after him when the highly combustible Mr Conn had departed, not to appear again that weekend.
‘Aaah, lay off him, he’s a good kid,’ Mike snapped. He had just begun the build-up on Conn as Louis’s next major opponent.
The young cock o’ the walk among Pittsburgh toughs and the crafty old man from the waterfront with the strip-hammer mind had something in common, one couldn’t help feeling. It just went to prove once more what softheaded mush all racial generalisations are. The youthful boxer and the ageing promoter were moneymen with the same insecure arrogance and graceless drive.
Perhaps it’s because he’s been so systematically cadged that some visitors have considered Uncle Mike an ungracious host while others are impressed with his openhanded if uncouth hospitality. When Colonel (later General) Kilpatrick called one Sunday afternoon, he noticed that Mike was serving his fight crowd, along with beer and ordinary domestic wine, some bottles of pre-war Château d’Yquem. A connoisseur of wines, the Colonel knew how precious that scarce and famous Sauternes was, and it horrified him to see it being guzzled by roughnecks as if it were draft beer. ‘For heaven’s sake, Mike,’ the Colonel exclaimed, ‘if you’re lucky enough to have Château d’Yquem, don’t waste it on them. Save it for someone who appreciates it.’
Uncle Mike’s guests usually enjoyed the run of the house with the best of food, whisky and cigars. But always a quick-tempered, quick-changing man, Mike’s inability to work out the bugs in a promising match or some other momentary frustration could bring about a startling transformation from generosity to unabashed inhospitality.
Joe Bannon, the Hearst executive, perhaps the nearest thing to an old friend Mike had, was down with some associates one weekend when Mike suddenly flew off the handle about the obscene spongers eating him out of house and home. Bannon was so shocked he locked himself in his room while he packed to leave. Uncle Mike was genuinely hurt by this reaction. After all, he and Bannon had hawked newspapers together 50 years before. Bannon had helped him along with fight tickets at the turn of the century. For one of the few times in his life, Mike was actually contrite and anxious to make amends. ‘Joe, I didn’ mean you, fer Chri’sake. You c’n drink all the fuckin’ Scotch you want. I meant those two grabbin’ friends o’ yours.’
Mike was genuinely mystified when Bannon still insisted upon leaving and on cancelling out their friendship.
On another occasion an erudite sportswriter dropped a sarcastic remark about the skimpy, catch-as-catch-can collection of old detective stories, moth-eaten novels and boxing books that didn’t begin to fill the bookcases in Mike’s library. ‘Mike, once in a while you get somebody down here who knows how to read,’ the newspaperman said. ‘This is the crummiest collection of books I’ve ever seen.’ Mike turned to one of his lieutenants and snapped, ‘Go out ’n’ get enough books to fill all them spaces. The best they got in the store.’
When I left Rumson that Sunday night, I was convinced that not even in Hollywood, where shoptalk is as insistent as any place I know, had I ever run into such unrelieved single-mindedness. For three full days, with only a few hours off to rest those super-charged batteries, this man had talked about fighters, talked to fighters, watched fighters train, watched fighters fight, dealt with their managers or, in desperation, when everyone else had gone to bed on him, listened to transcriptions of old fights he had promoted.
Mike’s critics attributed his success to his having been born completely devoid of scruples that would slow down the ordinary man. But in fairness to Mike, Jacobs Beach has never lacked for a full complement of gentlemen who are not exactly weighed down with ethics and yet who remain on Hungry Street. The boxing business undoubtedly offered Uncle Mike an ideal field for his kind of operation, but anyone who combined his intuitiveness with such marathon energy and dawn-to-midnight concentration probably would have been a tycoon in any business.
No one could watch Mike at his job of putting over a big fight and make the mistake of ascribing his success entirely to ruthlessness and chicanery. Even when Mike was a millionnaire grossing three to five million a year, he ran his powerful corporation with the minute-to-minute personal touch of a hot-dog vendor. He had squeezed out his original partners, Runyon, Frayne and Farnsworth, reducing the latter to a humbled minion who had to come to him for small loans. He had everything sewn up so tight that a rival promoter couldn’t hire himself a hall in New York, not even one of the armouries. Yet he not only continued his incredible practice of reaching his office by 8 a.m. and supervising all the office work down to the smallest detail, but even went in for the legwork of a common usher.
At million-dollar fights Mike could be seen serving as his own sentry between the ringside and the next expensive section. ‘If ya don’t watch everything yerself, they’ll rob ya blind,’ he used to say. If he spotted any confusion he’d beeline to the argument and personally escort the customers to their seats. Once, when general admissions were lagging, Mike grabbed a megaphone in reversion to his excursion-boat days and started barking, ‘This way, fella. Lotsa good seats left.’ At another championship fight Mike was found outside the stadium directing traffic. At one of the Louis title bouts, a particularly conscientious usher grabbed Mike as he brushed by him at the entrance to the ringside section. ‘Hey, Bud, where you think you’re goin?’
‘I’m Mike Jacobs,’ said Mike Jacobs.
‘How do I know, lemme see your ticket,’ the usher insisted.
Mike was starting to lose his renowned temper. Then suddenly in the middle of an eloquent profanity, the nearest thing to a warm smile in Mike’s possession spread over his face. ‘What the hell am I talkin’ about? You’re protectin’ me – keep up the good work, kid, don’ let nobody in, no matter how they con ya,’ and he pumped the confused usher’s hand enthusiastically.
Mike’s ability to police his fights was another distinctive talent. Ragged policing can be the margin between a financial winner and a loser. Mike has said that he solved his police problem ‘by invitin’ the Mayor as my personal guest in the workin’ press. To protect the Mayor the Police Department sent inspectors, captains and lieutenants. Lieutenants gotta have sergeants and corporals to boss around. I never had no trouble gettin’ my fights policed.’ It was also a question of knowing how to get his working-press tickets into the right hands, he might have added. In the same way, when Mike wanted to squeeze into his arena several thousand more spectators than the laws of public assemblage allowed, he could be confident that the key officials were on his side.
Like many great captains of industry, Mike seemed to have an intuitive sense of public relations. It is hardly fair to attribute this – as do some of his enemies – to his systematic staking of certain boxing writers, a practice inherited from Rickard’s day. Emile Gauvreau, when he was the fiery editor of the old New York Graphic, was asked by his publishers to find out from Rickard why he never advertised his fights in their paper. Gauvreau told me that Tex’s answer was, ‘Why should I pay for an obvious ad when I get better advertising this way?’ Rickard proceeded to show the editor a list of boxing writers on his weekly payroll. None of the major boxing writers today would compromise themselves in this way, and Mike is usually canny enough to know which men would be tempted and which ones insulted by such an offer. One time he erred, though, was when he sent John Kieran a $100 gift certificate for Christmas with a note asking the eminent columnist of the New York Times to accept the gift in the spirit offered. Kieran returned the certificate in the next mail with his own note telling Mike to take back the certificate in the same spirit. ‘I always got along fine with Mike after that,’ Kieran told us, with that twinkle in his eye. ‘I have a hunch the people he can’t control are the only ones he really respects.’
Whether this open-mindedness could be stretched to include his severest critic, Dan Parker, is somewhat doubtful. Mike’s staff, whose fear of him actually sent several members to the hospital with nervous breakdowns, learned to anticipate his moods by the tone of Parker’s columns in the New York Mirror. On the mornings when Parker lowered the boom on Mike, his employees braced themselves against his tantrums. ‘If Parker would only stop beating the Boss over the head,’ a member of his staff said once, ‘I think I could cut my breakdowns to one a year.’
One of Parker’s needles that jabbed deepest under Mike’s skin, strangely enough, was over the paltry sum of $500. Although Mike’s promotions ran to many millions every year, he insisted upon operating his St Nicholas Arena ‘farm club’ under his Garden licence, though the cost of a separate licence was a mere tax-deductible 500, much less than he spent on various personal indulgences every week. Parker kept badgering the boxing commission to make Uncle Mike pony up the extra fee until at last even that amenable organisation was nudged into action. Since Mike needed that extra 500 about as much as he needed a comb and brush, his stubborn efforts to hold out on the State of New York seem to us to fall into the province of the psychoanalyst rather than the moralist. Second cousin to the wealthy ne’er-do-wells who hold up dance halls for the thrill, Mike seems forever driven to see just how much he can get away with, even when he’s already gotten away with enough to retire on.
Not even a blast from Dan Parker could rouse Mike to anger more quickly than the sight of Joe Gould after a Louis title fight coming up to collect his 10 per cent. The contract he had signed with Gould and Braddock in his determination to lure them from the Garden was a repugnant document to him now. If you have ever seen a giant tarpon trying to throw the hook you have a graphic picture of Mike fighting to extricate himself from Gould’s hold. He would ignore Gould’s calls, refuse to see him, try to bulldoze him into settling for a fraction of the amount accumulating under the contract and even tried legally to set the agreement aside on the grounds that it had been signed under duress. But Gould, one of the sharpest ever honed, had taken care to post-date his contract after the Braddock–Louis fight, and when Gould sued Mike for holding out on him, Mike reluctantly settled out of court.
At one point Mike owed Gould $11,000 and stubbornly refused to pay. When Gould finally cornered him, Mike said, ‘All right, tell ya what I’ll do with ya, I’ll settle for 10,000.’
‘The one grand didn’t mean a thing, it was just Mike’s way of showing ’im who could outsmart who,’ observed an Eighth Avenue philosopher. ‘Mike’s always had the courage of his unprinciples.’
But it would be a mistake to conclude from this that Mike is totally devoid of business ethics. He could be impeccably reliable when dealing with the strata he still looked up to – the Stanton Griffises and Bernard Gimbels. Ed Barrow of the Yankee Stadium, for instance, will tell you that in his rental dealing, Mike’s word was so dependable that they could actually dispense with a contract. The face Mike presented to those whose respect he coveted, apparently, was in striking contrast to the one he showed the people he considered beneath him.
One attack that never failed to set up storm warnings in the offices of the Twentieth Century Sporting Club was the charge that Mike played footsie with the mob, whose fighters had an inside track to Garden bouts and Garden victories. Dan Parker pointed openly to the sale of titles with the apparent blessings of Uncle Mike and a spineless boxing commission, and fingered a number of suspicious matches between boxers generally conceded to carry the colours of the mob. In the Post Jimmy Cannon described the familiarity with which muscleman Frankie Carbo would stroll in and out of Mike’s office.
As with so many other phases of Mike’s career, there’s plenty of evidence both to hang and acquit him. Mike has, at times, shown his contempt for the adventurers who safari through darkest Manhattan. When a mob-controlled champion was going to meet a challenger I knew, talk around town had the mob buying off the referee and one of the judges. The challenger’s manager wrote an anonymous letter to himself ostensibly warning him of the impending steal. The manager then showed this letter to Uncle Mike. Mike went straight to Commissioner Phelan and, with oratory that was eloquently loud if monosyllabic, demanded that the untainted young challenger be given full protection against the sordid influence of ‘them motherfuckin’ thieves’. The commissioners, and in turn the referee and judges, were so intimidated that they leaned over backward to take the title away from the mob on a hairbreadth decision, breaking the underworld’s hold on a crown that had been its personal property for years.
On the other hand, Carbo’s performers were frequently booked on Garden cards, and Mike’s relations with the mob were usually cordial. He found it easier to do business with legitimate managers, however, and for that reason he looked their way whenever he could. A pragmatist with no set code of ethics, presiding over what might be called the septic tank of American sports, Mike would neither encourage nor squeeze out the racketeers.
As a showman, though, he knew how fixed fights could sour the fans, and his influence was largely on the side of legitimate contests. If Uncle Mike had been tempted to tamper with the results of his own matches, he certainly would have the night Lou Nova, the Nature Boy with the Cosmic Punch, met Joe Jacobs’s Tony Galento, of the publicised beer belly and the pier six style. This fight was so painfully on the level that Mike lost his best prospect for a ballpark fight with Louis that summer. Ordinarily the new challenger coming on should dispose of Louis’s last victim in less time than the champion had taken. If Louis had run up a score of four rounds on Galento, for instance, Nova might have been expected to mark his card for a birdie three.
But Nova was knocked out by the already discredited Galento. It took Mike and his crack PRO, Harry Markson, two years to resell the public on the far-fetched idea that Nova had enough of a chance with Louis to attract a gate of $600,000. To round out the Galento fiasco, the match turned out to be one of Mike’s few box office mistakes. In the vast Philadelphia stadium they drew an anaemic $68,000, and Harry Markson, Rose Cohen and the rest of the loyal Jacobins came back to the hotel in a funereal mood. But instead of brooding in his room that evening as might have been expected, Mike reversed his field by seeking out the sportswriters and displaying more cheerfulness than they had ever seen in him before. He laughed and joked with the reporters all evening and even cut loose with an improvised tap dance. ‘Why, he was almost human,’ one newspaperman recalled.
Harry Markson, Jacobs’s appointed director of boxing at the Garden, was fascinated by this almost inexplicable trait of Mike’s. A literate, quiet-mannered, college graduate who looks like a radio writer or an English instructor that somehow wandered into Jacobs’s offices by mistake, he told me, ‘One of the most amazing things about Mike was the way he acted in adversity. When things were going great, when he had a sell-out, he’d be in a terrible temper. But every time he suffered a big setback, like that Nova–Galento night, he’d fool everybody by being so pleasant you’d hardly recognise him.
‘Like the day of the first Louis–Buddy Baer fight. We only had the Washington ballpark for this one night, and if we were rained out we’d be sunk. That afternoon it started to shower and by evening it was a regular storm. Everybody but Mike is going crazy. He’s the only one who doesn’t even mention the weather. Instead he starts telling us funny stories about the old days when he was running excursion boats to Coney Island. The rain cut our gate at least by half. But coming out after the fight, Mike still doesn’t say a word about it. To make it worse, it was still drizzling and there wasn’t a cab in sight. There we were standing in the rain with nothing to think about but our hard luck. “Tough night, boss, looks like you got the elements against you,” someone said. Mike just shrugged. “Aaaah, what’s the difference, I been battlin’ the fuckin’ elements all m’ life.”’
Why a man who has made the pursuit of a buck a personal crusade for half a century should laugh off his losses and fly into his worst rages on his biggest paynights is one for the head doctors. Meanwhile Markson had a ready explanation. Like all champions, Mike knew intuitively when to dig in and when to lay back. He’d come up through a tough enough school to learn how to roll with the punches in order to live and fight another day. And from his excursion-boat days he knew the weatherman was one fellow who couldn’t be influenced with a couple of ringside tickets.
In the last days of a Louis–Schmeling or Louis–Conn promotion, Mike’s office was a madhouse – thousands phoning for tickets, wanting to speak to Mike personally, begging for a chance at a pair of ringsides or willing to let Mike name his own price for a couple in the working press. There were last-minute requests from the big men for whom seats had to be found up close. This called for fancy juggling and hair-trigger decisions on the phone. It was uncanny, said Markson, how Uncle Mike could carry the entire ringside seating plan in his head. In these last-minute switches he’d say, ‘Put White in Row 4 Section C and give Brown those two seats in Row 1 Section A next to Senator Green.’ According to Markson, ‘He could remember where 10,000 people were sitting. When it came to tickets he had a mind like an IBM machine.’
As the fight grew closer and the pressure on Mike intensified, he began to do a frighteningly convincing imitation of a high-tension wire. On D (for Dough)-1, the manager of a former Garden headliner came in to hit Mike for his usual complimentary tickets. The manager had been on particularly friendly terms with Mike when his fighter was a drawing card. He was so sure he could still count on Mike that he had already asked a friend to see the fight with him. Mike noticed him out of the corner of his eye and pulled one of his old tricks. He flew into such a profane rage at one of his secretaries that she burst into hysterics. He picked up the phone and shouted an obscene insult at someone trying to con him into free seats. He wheeled on one of his oldest executives and screamed, ‘Tell your fuckin’ brother-in-law he c’n buy his own fuckin’ seat.’ Then he turned on the waiting manager. ‘Well, whatta you want?’ ‘Nothing – nothing at all,’ stammered the now thoroughly intimidated supplicant, and slunk out.
During the war Mike’s unpopularity, as well as his fortune, increased when he insisted on pushing ringside prices to 20 and $30 because he knew the money was around even if the boxers who rated that kind of admission price were doing their fighting with M-1s. This annoyed some of the boxing writers who held to the quaint notion that monopoly involves a sense of social responsibility. But it was the proposed Louis–Conn Army Relief show that had sports fans ready to turn Mike in as everything from a black marketeer to a fifth columnist, or a Fifth Communist, to quote Mike’s Vice-President in Charge of Malaprops, Mushky Jackson.
Louis and Conn were ready to fight for the title with all receipts going to Army Emergency Relief when suddenly Secretary Stimson cancelled the match because ‘this promotion would not be in the best interests of the War Department’. Inevitably Mike became the scapegoat. Up to his old tricks, a majority of fight fans thought.
According to John Kieran, vice chairman under Grantland Rice of War Boxing, Inc., what really happened was this: a general representing the War Department came up with the idea of staging an Army Relief bout between its two famous GIs, Corporal Louis and Private Conn. With War Department approval, Rice and Kieran asked Mike Jacobs to promote the fight without compensation.
It was at a press conference set up to launch the publicity campaign for the fight, ironically, that Grantland Rice first heard of the alleged arrangement by which Louis and Conn were to repay Mike’s advances of $135,000 out of Army gross receipts. Rice resigned, and Kieran inherited this hot potato.
According to Joe Louis, a War Department spokesman had told him he could receive an additional sum to pay off his back taxes if he put his title on the line. Kieran, who somehow managed to keep his head in the crossfire of charges and countercharges, tried to remind everyone of the goal – $1 million for Army Relief, a sum that could not be raised at a single stroke in any other way. After all, Louis was being asked to sacrifice the one asset with which he thought he could surely clear up his debt to the government after the war. And since the money from Mike had been advanced against a rematch with Conn, it wasn’t exactly a Truman Committee scandal that Joe should want to write it off so he could come out of the army in the clear.
When Louis held to his original understanding of the terms, a major general threatened to send him overseas into the front lines.
Louis looked at him impassively. ‘General, I’m in the army. I’m ready to go anywhere anybody else in this army goes.’
Without warning, Kieran was summoned to the Pentagon and told the fight was off. In the course of a routine press conference that morning, he learned, a Washington correspondent, looking for something to spice his story, had asked, ‘Mr Secretary, what about the 100,000 Mike Jacobs is getting out of this Louis–Conn fight?’
This was a bombshell to Stimson, who knew nothing of the arrangements made by his own department representatives. Without investigation, he made the decision to cancel the fight. Kieran tried to give Stimson a first-hand report that had Jacobs completely in the clear. But the secretary of war refused to reconsider. Perhaps Mike had played wolf so often that even when he honestly wanted to help the flock, the shepherds – from force of habit – shuddered at his presence.
When told the fight was off, Mike sent Secretary Stimson this message: ‘I offer my services free in an advisory capacity to any officials designated by you to stage a championship bout between Sergeant Louis and Corporal Conn who have both advised me that they will engage in such a bout without any compensation.’ Mike went on to say that he was willing to advance the money necessary to promote the show, that all revenue from radio and film rights would go to Army Relief, and that he already held $250,000 for the army in advance sales.
Although it seemed to be an army snafu, Stimson replied that his decision was final. The real loser was Army Relief – by some million and a half dollars.
Of course certain Eighth Avenue cynics will tell you that even a 100 per cent benefit fight could be of personal benefit to Uncle Mike because he still could work his old tricks with those ringside and working-press seats.
Jacobs & Louis, in Dun & Bradstreet terms, was a multimillion-dollar concern that was out of business the first time any challenger succeeded in putting Joe down for ten. Thus the champion – and indirectly Mike – made a contribution not to be passed over lightly when the title was twice put on the line in 1942 with all receipts going to Navy and Army Relief. It was Walter Winchell who asked Mike if he would promote a benefit show for the navy. Mike asked, ‘How much money d’they want?’ Twenty-five thousand, he was told. ‘Hell,’ Mike sneered, ‘that kind of money ain’t worth my time. I’ll get ’em 75,000.’ He did, by presenting the first heavyweight championship bout ever fought for charity.
Did Uncle Mike have any particular friends among the thousands of boxers he presented? Barney Ross, Jim Braddock, Billy Conn and Joe Louis, I was told. I couldn’t help observing that each of these men marked a significant step upward in Mike’s fabulous ascent. Ross was the first champion to line up with Mike against the Garden. Braddock brought him the heavyweight title. Conn was the lever to his biggest gate. And, of course, Louis was the jackpot.
No, Mike had an interest in these boys beyond their earning power, Mushky Jackson insisted. Especially affecting was his feeling for Joe Louis, I was told. ‘Why in some ways they were almost like father and son.’
In what way did Mike reveal this tender, little-known side of his character?
Mike’s apologist paused, frowning in deep thought. ‘Well, no one can say that Mike ever held out a nickel from Joe. He paid him every cent Joe’s contract called for.’
In Mike’s business, apparently, you must love a fighter like a son to allow yourself to be swept to such extremes of generosity.
As soon as the war ended, Uncle Mike went to work on the Louis–Conn rematch he had been nursing all these years. His first edict was that neither man should engage in the usual tune-up bouts, even though both were obviously rusty after four years of inactivity. But of course it was this very lack of condition that Mike was most anxious to hide.
Next he manipulated the appearance of a claque of old champions, managers and assorted experts at both training camps. Their ostensibly objective reports described the sluggishness of the champion and the splendid condition and undiminished skill of the challenger who had come so close to whipping Louis in their first fight. Mike paid off his Charlie McCarthys with fight tickets and an extra buck or two if they could get him to hold still long enough.
Discerning sportswriters nailed this for the empty come-on it was, but Uncle Mike had mastered the high-pressure art of repeating the fiction till it passes for fact. Under his bombardment, the odds began to shrink and fight fans began to seethe with the old fever that grips them when they think they smell blood and the promise of a new champion. Even Jackie Conn, the challenger’s brother, wasn’t immune. ‘You know, Billy’s so worked up that I’m honestly worried about his injuring Joe permanently,’ he confided to me in Toots Shor’s on the eve of the fight.
The first Louis–Conn had been scaled from a $25 top, and it was believed that Mike would raise the price of ringside seats to 40 or $50. One afternoon a sports columnist, Stanley Frank, asked Mike what price he had finally decided on. Mike, always keenly aware of the value of trial balloons, said he hadn’t made up his mind yet, and added, apparently as a laughing afterthought, ‘Hell, I might even charge a $100, who knows.’
Frank used the $100 figure in his column, and the following day, to the amazement of Mike’s staff, requests for tickets, backed up by cheques as large as 1,000 and $2,000, began pouring in. That, of course, fixed the price at an all-time high. Sportswriters abused Mike for bilking the public, but Mike just shrugged off the epithets and kept on working the old ticket squeeze he had perfected.
Those $100 tickets, 10,000 of them, brought in $1 million alone, a record of its kind. Mike’s personal contribution to inflation hardly made him an object of affection among boxing fans, but the second Louis–Conn was the greatest attraction since Dempsey–Tunney, and every true follower of the game had to be on hand.
The fight itself turned out to be an odoriferous anticlimax, for here was a slower and clearly less effective champion while the intervening years had left the challenger with nothing but a wooden and overcautious style that made a mockery of Mike’s overexuberant price scale. Mike’s fatherly regard for Billy Conn cooled rapidly.
A heart attack at the age of 67 benched Mike temporarily, but it was impossible for him to stay away from his office. ‘What ya want me to do, Doc, stay down in the country and listen to my fuckin’ heart?’ he had protested. He dropped by the office when Harry Markson and Mike’s counsel and first cousin, the Honourable Sol Strauss, were pegging the price for the first Louis–Walcott fight at $25. ‘Thirty,’ Mike growled. But Walcott was hardly considered a worthy opponent for Louis, Mike’s aides pointed out. ‘Twenty-five dollars would be safer.’ Mike shook his head. ‘Thirty,’ he grunted.
He drove back to Rumson and immediately called his office on the phone. ‘How much ya chargin’ for the fight?’ ‘Thirty,’ he was told. Mike sighed with relief. ‘Good. I worried all the way out. I thought maybe I let ya talk me into 25.’
With Mike’s $30 top, the Louis–Walcott gate set a Garden record. Louis was fading fast, and Mike knew the fans would pay to see him closing out his career, no matter whom he fought. As it turned out – though not even Mike could be credited with that much forethought – the aged Walcott who wasn’t expected to last a round knocked Louis down twice and came within a sentimental hair of scoring the greatest upset in the history of the title. It was like a farewell present from the boxing business to the faltering Uncle Mike, the perfect build-up for his final million-dollar gate.
Depite doctors’ warnings that he must slow down, Mike was back working at his usual pace – on the forthcoming middleweight match between Marcel Cerdan and Georgie Abrams, when he dropped in to see Doc Crozier, the chiropractor with whom he was on unusually friendly terms. ‘He’d sneak in a side door into a small private office as if he was trying to get away from people. He said he could relax with me. He’d talk about the old days, investments, a million different things, but he’d get grouchy and shut up if you switched to boxing. Or if any of the fight crowd happened to come in.’
On this particular day Mike was feeling particularly expansive. He had just cleaned up a small fortune in a New Jersey real estate deal. Tickets for Cerdan–Abrams were moving nicely. The day after the fight, he was leaving for Florida. ‘There’s plenty of money to be made these days,’ Mike was saying. ‘Tell you what I’ll do with you, Eddie. I’ll give you some stocks to buy. Do what I tell you and you’ll make a bundle.’
Crozier noticed, as Mike was talking, that he had begun to stammer. The words seemed to catch in his throat. ‘Plenny money,’ he repeated, then he half rose and started to remove his shirt. ‘Think I need a little rub, Eddie. Feel kinda worn out.’
Then he collapsed over the chair. As he fell, Crozier said, a huge wad of money disgorged from his pocket and fell on the floor near his head. When Crozier counted it later, it added up to $1,000 in small bills.
Mike lay in a coma for several days. Jimmy Walker and Jimmy Johnston had just passed on, and superstitious Jacobs Beach was convinced that Mike would complete the fatal trinity. Or maybe it was just wishful thinking. When one disgruntled manager heard that Mike was fighting for his life, he said, ‘I haven’t been inside a church in years, but today I’m goin’ in an’ really pray.’ ‘I never knew you liked the guy so much,’ said a Garden hanger-on. ‘Like him!’ the manager exploded. ‘I’m goin’ in an’ pray like hell he don’t recover.’
That seemed to be the sentiment of an overwhelming majority in the fight world. But Mike was crossing them up as usual. He didn’t care what the doctors said. Or that the columnists had already started to write his obituary. He wasn’t ready to check out yet. As usual, he had the last word. To everybody’s amazement, including his physicians, he began to rally. Though partially paralysed, he was back on his feet sooner than could have been expected.
Along Jacobs Beach the fight mob that had lived in his shadow for years laughed off his amazing recovery: ‘Mike’s just too stubborn mean to die.’
The House of Jacobs might have been left without heir or heiress if it hadn’t been for an unexpected turn of events a few years earlier. At their winter home in Florida one afternoon, Josie was visited by a manager’s wife who was trying to adopt a baby. Impatient with the red tape, she was about to give up the idea when Josie said, in her rough, impulsive, good-natured way, ‘You wan’ a baby, I’ll get ya a baby,’ and she put through a mysterious call. When the baby arrived, it was, the two women agreed, about the poorest excuse for a baby they had ever seen, homely, scrawny and suffering from acne. Josie’s friend said it wouldn’t do, and Josie waved it away impatiently. ‘Take it back. Take it back.’
But the image of this scrawny, unwanted infant seemed to haunt her. After a few beers she picked up the phone and asked, ‘You still got that homely little excuse for a baby?’ Each time she’d hear that no one seemed to want this sickly little foundling, she’d be more disconcerted. One afternoon, when she and her friend were sufficiently beered up to feel particularly sentimental, she called about the infant once more. Suddenly she said, ‘So nobody wants the homely little thing? Bring it here. I’ll take it m’self.’
The fairy tale of the ugly duckling has nothing on the Jacobses. Joan grew up to be a bright and attractive young lady on whom Mike seemed to lavish all the affection he’d been saving up in the 70-year war of attrition he’d been waging against his fellow man.
The last time I visited the big country house at Rumson, Mike was sitting in an easy chair, apathetically enfeebled, barely able to raise his left hand in greeting. Everyone had told me what a lonely man Mike was these days. The essential friendlessness of his life was weighing on him at last. Now that the boxing game was struggling along without him, almost no one came to see him. He had been a single-O guy all his life, but a busy one. Now there was nothing for him to do but sit there and stew and listen to the countdown of his own heart.
Little Joan came over with two doll dresses Josie and her Aunt had made for a children’s party the following day. The warm paternal smile that came over his face looked almost grotesque on this hard old man. ‘Look, Daddy, which dress do you like best?’ Joan wanted to know. The one with the best dress would win the prize at the party, she explained.
‘You think you’ll win?’ I asked.
‘Sure, I’ll win easy,’ Joan said, in a way that made me wonder if she hadn’t already acquired some of her foster father’s drive. Mike grinned at her proudly.
Watching her go skipping off with her dolls, I suddenly felt overwhelmed by the thought that all the scrapping, the hustling, the conniving, the blood and sweat and larceny and ruthlessness that goes with control of America’s most brutal business winds up in a multimillion-dollar fortune to be inherited by a little girl who arrived from nowhere one afternoon and, thanks perhaps to that extra beer, was allowed to stay. As fairy godfather and godmother, Mike and Josie are right out of Damon Runyon at his best. Only Runyon, with the help of the brothers Grimm, could have dreamed this one up.
A little while later I was in the kitchen with Josie, who was reaching way back for adoring stories of her father, a travelling actor who, she said, had fought with Napoleon III.
Suddenly Mike lurched through the door in a black temper. His strength had returned surprisingly. ‘Don’ blab everything you know!’ he shouted. ‘You’ll help ’im knock my brains out.’
‘But I was only talkin’ about my old man . . .’ Josie protested.
‘Aaah, shut up!’ Mike growled and, miraculously, he slapped her with the arm that had seemed useless an hour before.
When he stormed out, Josie wiped the corners of her eyes with her sleeve. ‘It ain’t his fault. He just don’ know what to do with himself now that he ain’t workin’.’
I tried to understand. I thought of Mike as a kid on the waterfront battling for survival. There the golden rule was twisted out of shape to read: ‘Do it to him before he does it to you.’ In his great mansion on millionaire’s row, with his black servants, ex-fighters as drivers and handymen, and his fleet of Cadillacs, he was still battling for survival in the only way he had ever learned, by striking out at everything he couldn’t control.
Josie walked us to the door. She was still apologising for the business in the kitchen. ‘Mike’s gotta have action,’ she said. ‘Without action, he’s nothin’. But whatever you write, you gotta put this in. He was the best goddamn promoter there ever was, or ever will be. After him, they threw away the combination.’
Yes, and maybe that’s a good thing, I couldn’t help thinking as I turned back for a last look at this vast estate that had become a desolate mausoleum for a lonely and friendless old man who had made such a spectacular success in life and had nothing to show for it but money.
[1950]