By Keith Idec
NEW YORK – He won’t allow it to distract him, but Daniel Jacobs is somewhat bothered because some people are looking past his fight against Gennady Golovkin.
The WBA world middleweight champion has noticed plenty of fights fans and media overlooking his own shot at Golovkin because they’re convinced that the Kazakh knockout artist will walk right through him to set up a higher-profile fight against Canelo Alvarez. An Alvarez-Golovkin showdown only will happen, however, if Golovkin (36-0, 33 KOs) gets past Brooklyn’s Jacobs (32-1, 29 KOs) on March 18 at Madison Square Garden and Alvarez beats an undetermined opponent, either Mexican rival Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. or WBO middleweight champ Billy Joe Saunders, on May 6.
“Yeah, it leaves a little bitter taste in my mouth,” Jacobs said regarding Golovkin-Alvarez talk to a group of reporters recently at the Brooklyn Nets’ training facility. “But like I said before, it’s nothing that hasn’t happened in the past. I went through this before, where people overlooked me and thought that a certain opponent was gonna go right through me, and they actually planned for another fight. So it’s no different.”
Brooklyn’s Jacobs sensed former WBO middleweight title-holder Peter Quillin (32-1-1, 23 KOs) and his handlers looked beyond their December 2015 fight at Barclays Center, a middleweight championship match Jacobs won by scoring a surprising first-round technical knockout. Jacobs ruined Quillin’s plan and is confident he can wreck Golovkin’s blueprint for a lucrative fight against Alvarez (48-1-1, 34 KOs).
“Well, [Quillin] wasn’t gonna fight anybody [specific],” Jacobs explained. “But they just knew he was gonna win and move on to bigger and better [things], which was probably gonna be Triple-G. That was the talk. That doesn’t matter to me. Canelo-Triple-G, that doesn’t matter to me. My main focus is to get myself prepared a hundred percent, so that I can be ready for March 18th, for [36] minutes or less. Anything else, I don’t care. It’s in the wind.
“It’s like you’re watching social media all day, looking for what the fans say about you. Like I don’t care about that stuff. That stuff doesn’t matter to me. In fact, I sometimes turn my phone off or turn my notifications off. I don’t even like to go on that stuff, because at the end of the day that stuff does not matter. People’s opinion of you and what’s gonna happen, when they can’t predict the future, all that’s gonna do is just add to my frustration. And I don’t want that happening. I wanna have a good camp, focused. This is a big task and I just wanna mentally prepare myself for this.”
Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.
