By Keith Idec
Daniel Jacobs would “love” to fight Canelo Alvarez if the former WBC middleweight title-holder ever decides to return to the 160-pound division.
Jacobs understands, of course, that it’s highly unlikely that the Mexican superstar would agree to fight him, even if Alvarez advances back up to middleweight. The heavy-handed WBA world middleweight title-holder also acknowledged that Gennady Golovkin is the opponent he and Alvarez need to beat to be considered the middleweight champion of the world.
“That’s just something that I hope,” Jacobs told BoxingScene.com regarding what would be a lucrative, high-profile fight against Alvarez. “That’s just me wishful thinking. That’s my dream matchup, like fantasy football. But it’s a fantasy. I don’t see it happening. So that’s why I kind of just try to be a little bit vocal about it, just to put it out there and put some attention on it a little bit.
“But Triple-G is the guy that I want. Triple-G is the guy to beat. Canelo is not the guy to beat because he’s not a true middleweight and he doesn’t want to come up to the true middleweight limit and defend the title against true middleweights. I’m not gonna go down to 154 pounds to fight anyone, because I don’t even know if I can make that weight. So I’m not trying to fight for a junior middleweight title. I’m not built for that.”
The 29-year-old Jacobs (31-1, 28 KOs) is training for his September 9 rematch against Sergio Mora (28-4-2, 9 KOs) in Reading, Pennsylvania (Spike).
The Brooklyn native settled for the Mora rematch after a partial unification fight against WBO middleweight title-holder Billy Joe Saunders (23-0, 12 KOs) failed to materialize. Saunders’ seeming disinterest surprised Jacobs, but not as much as Alvarez avoiding Golovkin caught him off-guard.
Jacobs was as perplexed as most boxing observers when Alvarez (47-1-1, 33 KOs), rather than following through on a very public promise and challenging Golovkin (35-0, 32 KOs), moved back down to 154 pounds to face England’s Liam Smith (23-0-1, 13 KOs) for the WBO super welterweight title September 17 at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.
“He can prolong that [Golovkin] fight however long he wants because he knows he’s still good financially,” Jacobs said. “But it comes to a point where you start contradicting yourself and you start talking about that Mexican pride and you’ll fight him tomorrow, or bring the gloves back on and we can do this again, you know, you start to make yourself look like a fool.
“And that’s where the criticism comes in, because nobody’s saying he’s 100-percent wrong for what he’s doing. But he’s making himself look like an idiot when he says the stuff that he’s saying, and then make a date for two years later, when he just said he would fight him yesterday. So it’s crazy.”
Keith Idec covers boxing for The Record and Herald News, of Woodland Park, N.J., and BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.
