“I put this whole experience down as a big factor in making me the person I became. Instead Jacks toughed it out, “becoming a man in every way” (there is a lurid tale about losing his virginity which involves a lot of sake and a middle-aged American woman) and was eventually awarded his black belt. “I became the youngest British person, at that time, to win my black belt and I did it in Japan where no foreigners my age had ever achieved this grade in judo before,” he says, proudly.
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It has a foreword by Brian Blessed, a former student of his, and it is as colourful as you would expect from a guy who was born in the East End of London, the son of a cab driver who overcame a severe birth defect (“a sort of hernia in my abdomen which went undiagnosed for eight years”) to become a judo champion who went to live on his own in Tokyo’s concrete jungle at the tender age of 15, where he was “thrown from pillar to post” by the older Japanese students at the feared Kodokan but who refused to give up and return to “a job on Marmite’s factory floor like many of my schoolmates”. Jacks has just written an autobiography about his life: Brian Jacks: The Mindset of a Champion.
He managed 100 in 54 seconds at a starkly lit Wycombe sports centre in the 1981 Challenge of the Champions. Jacks pioneered a ‘rocking’ technique in the parallel bar dips which was widely copied but never matched. Blond perm, freakish upper-body strength. Jacks is a name which may well be lost on anyone under the age of 40, but for those of a certain vintage, his performances on the cult programme Superstars - which used to pull in audiences of well over 10 million back in its heyday when it was presented by David Vine and Ron Pickering - encapsulated a more innocent sporting age. Bombastic, brazen, completely uninhibited. He has the sort of tan and complexion you might expect Ray Winstone’s character from the film Sexy Beast to have if they did a sequel in 20 years. Now 71, Jacks has been living in Thailand for the last 17 years after “getting the hump” with Health and Safety in the UK. Stay on the PGA Tour or head to the PGA Tour Champions Then he went to Bermuda. In his late 40s, with more than 600 starts on the PGA Tour and his job becoming more of a grind than a joy, doubts about his future in golf crept into his head. And that is colourful in every sense of the word. Brian Gay, unfortunately, was heading toward a crossroads. So begins an extraordinary hour in the company of one of the Britain’s most colourful sports stars. But I’m here to tell you: I’ve got an alternative.” “Everyone tells me the same thing,” he says. Jacks, a 10th dan judoka, is distinctly unimpressed.
This time, however, the object of Jacks’ intensity is not Daley Thompson’s clean and jerk score, it is the British Judo Association. Brian Jacks, superstar of Superstars, is wearing the sort of intense look he might have worn back in his 1970s pomp when he was preparing for an assault on the parallel bar dips or the squat thrusts.