Sport: Boxing Boss

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Having for a generation applied himself with resource and concentration worthy of a more respectable cause, last week Michael Strauss Jacobs finally emerged at the pinnacle of the prizefight business. No one in the business was at all surprised, for the man who taught the late Tex Rickard more than one trick of the trade has for years been climbing the ladder of his chosen profession like a Horatio Alger hero.

The penultimate Jacobs business triumph, which paved the way for his finally leasing the boxing rights at the great Madison Square Garden last week, was his promotion of the Braddock-Louis fight in Chicago last June, first heavyweight championship bout not staged by Madison Square Garden in 18 years. But the final spurt which sent him on his way to becoming top man in U. S. fight promotion began in 1934 when Madison Square Garden, longtime promoter of at least one annual boxing match for Mrs. William Randolph Hearst's Free Milk Fund for Babies, decided to discontinue that practice. Asked if he would stage a fight for the Milk Fund, Mike Jacobs, No. 1 Manhattan ticket speculator for a decade, promptly formed the Twentieth Century Sporting Club, became a fight promoter in opposition to the Garden. In 1935, after signing up a promising young Negro heavyweight named Joe Louis, he made $160,000 for the Milk Fund, $130,000 for the baseball parks where the fights were held, unknown sums for himself.

When last year he brought Max Schmeling from Germany to give hitherto undefeated Joe Louis a terrible beating, it did not jar Mike Jacobs. Although the logical sequel would have been a match between Schmeling and World Champion Jim Braddock, who was under contract to the Garden, that sequence of events was not considered by Jacobs to offer the maximum profit. There was a rapid flurry of decisions by the New York State Athletic Commission, lawsuits, injunctions, statements, challenges and denials—and presto! the Garden's champion was set to defend his title against Joe Louis in Chicago. The Garden's long control over the heavyweight fight industry was out for the count of ten when Braddock, its erstwhile "Cinderella Man," hit the canvas. Next; week Max Schmeling arrives in the U. S. There is every possibility that he will now have his long-delayed try for his second world's championship, only this time both champion and challenger will belong to the Jacobs stable.

Habitual million-dollar gates died with Tex Rickard and the Coolidge boom. But Rickard, for all his promotional flair, never made the money out of the fight business that Mike Jacobs has. A peanut peddler and candy butcher on Coney Island excursion boats, Mike Jacobs first began doing business with Rickard in 1916 when Rickard moved into New York with the Jess Willard-Frank Moran championship fight. Jacobs bought up a huge block of tickets, paid Rickard a premium and sold them for a profit. Years later, as boxing promoter at Madison Square Garden, Rickard was supposed to have continued the practice on a far larger scale. By controlling the fighter, promoting the fight and speculating in his own tickets at his Broadway ticket agency, Jacobs has now perfected a unique system for profiting in the fight business.