Mom, The Mettlesome Manager

Moments later, her father, Phil Kaplan, who lives in North Miami Beach, appears at the door. "Last week I threw a waffle party for 150 people," he says. "I am the waffle king." Kallen greets him with a big hug and kiss. There are a dozen people in the room, and she is taking care of all of them.

Jackie Kallen's day is 27½ hours long. She doesn't waste much of it on such things as food or sleep. "I'm like one of those windup toys," she says. "You wind me up in the morning and I go all day until I fall over; then you wind me up again."

Kallen had two young sons, Bryan and Brad; a husband, Mike; a house in West Bloomfield, Mich.; and a twice-weekly newspaper entertainment column in 1978, when she wrote a story about an unknown local welterweight boxer named Tommy Hearns. Two weeks later, she was doing free-lance public relations for the Kronk Boxing Gym, where Hearns trained in Detroit.

After 10 years with Kronk, she met Bobby Hitz, a journeyman heavyweight who asked her to be his manager. "I didn't think twice," Kallen says. "I was like the girl who's always dreamed of getting married and the first guy that asks her she says, 'O.K.' "

In 1989, in the gym where Hitz trained, Kallen met Toney, a reformed drug dealer whose former manager, also a drug dealer, had recently been killed. At age 20 Toney was raw, but he possessed a fire, an anger, that attracted Kallen. He reminded her of Hearns. She promised him he would be a world champion. "When she started this business, she told me she would find a champion, and I thought she was crazy," says Mike Kallen, a general contractor. "I asked her if she had any idea how few champs there are out there, but damn if she doesn't have one."

Toney, a 22-1 underdog, won the IBF middleweight title on May 17, 1991, by knocking out Michael Nunn with a vicious left hook in the 11th round in Davenport, Iowa. Afterward Toney said, "This is an early Mother's Day gift for my mother, Sherri, and a late birthday gift for my other mother, Jackie."

The six fighters that Kallen handles never forget their mothers. They all have two moms, the obvious one and the one that gave birth to them. "She's like a typical Jewish mother, taking these guys in and making them feel like part of the family," Brad says. "James is like my brother."

Says Jackie, "My stable is kind of like the Osmonds of boxing. My fighters are like my kids, they all need their hugs and kisses."

Kallen recently purchased a home for her kids in a Detroit suburb, a dusty warehouse that is being made into a gym. She visualizes boxers dancing in a ring in one corner, the rhythmic pounding of speed bags along the back wall. In another corner she sees herself at a desk with the phone in her ear. She likes to refer to the gym as the House That Toney Built. Amazing what one left hook can do.

Not to mention the right hook. Kallen's marketing strategy yielded a $10 million deal with Top Rank for six Toney fights, beginning with a title fight against Mike McCallum set for Aug. 29, in Reno.