By Jeff Aranow: From listening to Daniel Jacobs talk this week, you would think his fight this Saturday night is against Gennady “GGG” Golovkin instead of unbeaten Luis Arias (18-0, 9 KOs) on HBO. In his interviews, Jacobs has been getting a lot of mileage talking up his loss to Golovkin from March 18, saying he should have won the fight.
(Photo credit: Ed Mulholland-Matchroom Boxing USA)
Jacobs says half the people in boxing think he won. It’s unclear why Jacobs is so focused on his fight with Golovkin, and not on his task at hand in 27-year-old Arias, who he’ll be fighting at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, New York.
All the talk that Jacobs has done about his fight with GGG will end up backfiring on him if he loses to Arias or is made to struggle. Even if Jacobs wins and looks bad, it’ll give Arias room to do exactly what he’s doing now by denying that he lost and treating the defeat as a victory.
”I think with the GGG fight, even being arguably was one of the biggest underdogs that he’s faced and being the one to actually take him 12 rounds, backing him up and doing all the things I was doing inside the ring to gain his respect,” said Jacobs via Fight News. “That wasn’t the typical Triple G that you guys are used to seeing. People view the fight 50-50, some people felt like he won and some people felt like I won, but at the end of the day I feel like we ultimately won,” said Jacobs.
No wonder Arias feels like he’s being overlooked like Jacobs. He’s not even talking about Arias. Jacobs has spending most of the time talking to the boxing media about Golovkin, Saul Canelo Alvarez, David Lemieux, Billy Joe Saunders and Jermall Charlo. There’s no other way of viewing what Jacobs is doing other than him disrespecting Arias by not treating him like he’s a threat to beating him.
Jacobs freely admits that he hand-picked Arias from a group of names that was offered to him by HBO for this fight on Saturday. Jacobs doesn’t name the other fighters that were on the list. It would be interesting to know who the guys are that Jacobs rejected for the fight. It wouldn’t be surprising if Demetrius Andrade was one of the names on the list. That would be a very hard fight for Jacobs if he had to mix it up with Andrade. But it might not take Andrade to beat Jacobs, because Arias has a real chance of beating him.
Arias beating a good fighter in Arif Magomedov by a 5th round knockout in his last fight on June 17. It’s hard to picture Jacobs doing a better job in stopping Magomedov than Arias did in that fight.
”For me it wasn’t really a loss, I truly deep down in my heart feel like I won, despite what the judges may have scored it,” said Jacobs in continuing to talk about his loss to Golovkin. ”I just knew that this guy they created to be the boogey man, this guy that they created to be the most feared boxing pound for pound guy in the world, I was the one who neutralized him to just the jab and he was the one who on numerous occasions knocking out everybody and outscoring guys with power shots. I was the one who came out with more power shots than the both of us,” said Jacobs.
It looked to me like Golovkin came out with a game plan to just jab and beat Jacobs the same way he did David Lemieux by fighting on the outside. In the weeks before the fight, Golovkin was quite honest with his game plan for the Jacobs fight by saying, “I want decision fight. I NEED decision fight.” Just from what Golovkin was saying, he wasn’t going to approach the Jacobs fight like he’d done his others. He said he wanted to box Jacobs, and that’s exactly what he did in pounding out a 12 round unanimous decision without taking any unnecessary risks in the process.
It’s too bad Jacobs isn’t talking about what Arias brings to the table in this fight, because he’s the one that he needs to be focusing on rather than droning on about the past in continually talking about the fight with Golovkin. Jacobs seems to be fixated on the Golovkin, which suggests that his self-confidence about his boxing talent isn’t what it should be. If Jacobs, 30, really believed in himself, he wouldn’t be dredging up the past repeatedly in talking about the Golovkin fight over and over.
It reminds me of the way a fisherman talks when discussing a massive fish that ‘got away’, and not letting go of the story. Yes, Jacobs came close to catching that gigantic fish in the Golovkin fight, but he blew his chance to win the fight by running too much in the first 6 rounds. Even in the second half of the fight, Jacobs was running after getting staggered in the 10th round. Jacobs was on his bike again when he got hurt by Golovkin. Jacobs got knocked down in the 4th. If he wanted to win the fight against GGG, he should have stayed on his feet for the entire 12 rounds instead of getting toppled over by one of the few meaningful punches Triple G threw in the fight.
”My talents spoke that night, we’ve got a new wave of fans, a new wave of respect in the boxing community and this is just a new chapter for me but it was disguised in the loss,” said Jacobs in reveling in his loss to Golovkin.
Jacobs should realize that his triumph in losing a close decision to Golovkin could quickly be forgotten about if he loses or struggles against Arias on Saturday. The boxing fans are not going to sit there and listen to Jacobs still talking about the Golovkin fight if he loses or is made to look bad by Arias. The fans are going to tune Jacobs out, and wonder what’s going on with the guy. That’s why Jacobs should forget about the Golovkin fight and concentrate on Arias, because this fight could turn out to be a real disaster for him.
