Jacobs Not Sure Virgil Hunter Will Be In His Corner Vs. Golovkin

By Keith Idec

NEW YORK – Daniel Jacobs doesn’t know whether Virgil Hunter will work his corner March 18.

All Jacobs knows is that Hunter has volunteered to help his longtime trainer, Andre Rozier, prepare him for the biggest fight of his career at Hunter’s gym. Brooklyn’s Jacobs (32-1, 29 KOs) is scheduled to officially start training camp Thursday at King’s Boxing Gym in Oakland, California, to get ready for his huge fight against Gennady Golovkin (36-0, 33 KOs) at Madison Square Garden.

“We didn’t discuss anything like that,” Jacobs said of Hunter possibly joining Rozier in his corner for the Golovkin fight. “I just know that he’ll, if anything, give us maybe some pointers. He’s a master in the game, Virgil, so anything coming from Virgil would be awesome. And him and my trainer, like I said before, have a great relationship. So I just thought it’d be perfect.”

Hunter – who trains Andre Ward, Amir Khan and Andre Berto – offered his gym to Jacobs and his team once he learned the WBA world middleweight champion intended to train in California or Florida for his HBO Pay-Per-View main event against Kazakhstan’s Golovkin.

“Virgil and my trainer, Andre Rozier, have been friends for more than 20 years” Jacobs explained. “We were wanting to get out of New York City for this camp. Don’t wanna be here in cold weather, there’s a lot of distractions. Don’t wanna be forced into a lot of media work as well. So we figured we would go somewhere where it was warm.

“Florida was an option. California was an option. I just thought it would be best suited for us to go out to California. And Virgil opened up his gym to us to train at his facility. And I’m a big fan of Andre Ward, so just rubbing shoulders with him and being in the gym with other world champions – Amir Khan, Andre Berto, so on and so forth – I just thought it would be a good fit. … I wanna focus solely on the task at hand, which is a big task, and I don’t want any distractions.”

Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.