By Keith Idec

Curtis Stevens will root for Daniel Jacobs to upset Gennady Golovkin if the hard-hitting middleweights meet later this year or sometime in 2017.

Stevens and Jacobs are Brooklyn natives who’ve known one another for years.

Their friendship aside, Stevens doesn’t think Jacobs will be able to withstand Golovkin’s vaunted power if they fight. As one of 36 men in the world who knows what it’s like to get hit by Golovkin in a professional prize fight, Stevens believes that’ll be too much for the talented, powerful Jacobs to withstand.

“Danny is an excellent boxer,” Stevens told BoxingScene.com. “But we all know that his chin is not that great. He may slide around through 12 [rounds]; he may not. It all depends if he gets hit.

“I know Danny personally. We all know he’s an excellent boxer. But we all know his chin is very suspect. If his chin wasn’t suspect, I would say it would be a hell of a fight. But being that his chin is so suspect, I believe it’ll be a matter of until Golovkin catches him.”

Golovkin stopped Stevens (28-5, 21 KOs) following eight mostly one-sided rounds nearly three years ago in The Theater at Madison Square Garden.

Representatives for Kazakhstan’s Golovkin (36-0, 33 KOs), the WBA’s “super” middleweight champion, and Jacobs (32-1, 29 KOs), the WBA’s “world” middleweight champion, have been negotiating for a possible December 10 bout between them, probably at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. If they cannot come to an agreement by October 10, the WBA will schedule a purse bid for a middleweight title fight it has mandated must occur next.

Stevens, meanwhile, is scheduled to appear on the Sergey Kovalev-Andre Ward undercard November 19 at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. His opponent hasn’t been chosen.

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.