Daniel Jacobs will get his big chance in March vs. Gennady Golovkin
Brownsville middleweight Daniel Jacobs will get his big chance March 18. The moment will be huge. The opponent is daunting.
In a fight for the unified world middleweight title at Madison Square Garden, Jacobs will seek to unseat Gennady Golovkin. Known as “Triple G,” Golovkin is 36-0 with 33 knockouts, including a run of 23 straight dating to 2008. As the record plainly states, he is known for the power of his punch.
“That’s a big curiosity to me because everyone is talking about it,’’ Jacobs said Thursday at the Nets’ practice facility, where he will work with the team’s performance team. “I know that’s one of the main things we have to look out for, the power . . . It’s boxing, so if you get hit, you can get hurt. I want to feel that power, but not to the point it hurts.
“He has a huge knockout ratio. At the same time, I know I am going to be the best level of competition [he has faced],” said Jacobs, who is 32-1 with 29 KOs. “There might be things he was able to do with other [opponents] that he won’t be able to do on me.”
The Nets’ support of Jacobs comes from a relationship formed as he came back from a 2011 bone cancer diagnosis to fight at Barclays Center in 2012. Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, the umbrella group that includes the Nets, Islanders, Barclays Center, Nassau Coliseum and the Brooklyn Boxing franchise, now backs Jacobs and will provide the gear he will wear at the fight.
“He promised he’d win a belt at Barclays and he did it in 2014 . . . Hopefully he brings all the belts back to Brooklyn this time,” Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment CEO Brett Yormark said. “Danny will be afforded all the resources he needs.”
Jacobs said that after meeting with Nets players, “a lot of them said they’d be there to support me.”
The title fight is going to be worthy of plenty of buzz, with a sellout crowd expected at the Garden and an HBO pay-per-view audience looking on. Golovkin has been installed as a prohibitive favorite even though he will be going against a local favorite.
“On paper, we both have an 85 to 90 percent knockout ratio. We both are devastating punchers. We both have amazing skill,” Jacobs said. “He’s a very dangerous fighter, a very strong fighter, but . . . you believe in yourself and your ability and all will go well.”
In September, Golovkin scored a fifth-round TKO of 5-9, 148-pound Kell Brook, who was fighting on his home turf in England, but Brook was effective landing punches. Jacobs is bigger and stronger than Brook and hopes that bodes well.
“The Brook fight showed if you have speed and you have movement, you can hit [Golovkin],” Jacobs said. “If I put myself in that position — hey, if this guy can hit him and somehat hurt him — can you imagine what I will do landing those same punches?”
Yormark said Brooklyn Boxing will begin holding events at Nassau Coliseum — “big championship fights,” he said — on April 29, 2017, with at least two more to follow during the year.
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