By Allan Fox: WBA World middleweight champion Daniel “The Miracle Man” Jacobs (32-1, 29 KOs) did his thing last Friday night in beating the light hitting grizzled 35-year-old veteran Sergio “The Latin Snake” Mora (28-5-2, 9 KOs) by a 7th round knockout, and now he wants to fight Gennady Golovkin (35-0, 32 KOs) next. Jacobs says that if IBF/IBO/WBA/WBC middleweight champion Golovkin wins his fight tonight against challenger Kell Brook (36-0, 25 KO), then that’s the fight that he wants next.
“I want to prove to the world that I’m the best middleweight. If GGG gets the victory tomorrow, that’s who we want,” said Jacobs.
What we saw of Jacobs last night against Mora, he might be able to give Golovkin some problems, but it will depend on how well he can take the body shots that he’ll be getting hit with. Jacobs was there to be hit last night by Mora, but he was able to take the shots because there was no power behind them. Golovkin is a much bigger puncher, and if he catches Jacobs with one of his hard head and body shots, it’s hard to imagine him being able to take it.
Jacobs’ main weakness as a pro is his chin. We’ve seen him get hurt before and even stopped in the past by Dmitry Pirog. Jacobs had the same problem as an amateur. He always had good punching power and hand speed, but his ability to take heavy shots has caused him problems.
The 29-year-old Jacobs does not have much choice in the matter though. The World Boxing Association president Gilberto Mendoza has already said he’s going to order the Golovkin-Jacobs fight. The only way Jacobs could get out of that fight is if he vacates his WBA (regular) 160lb title so he can avoid fighting GGG. That would look really bad, and I don’t know if Jacobs’ career would survive a move like that.
For whatever reason, Jacobs hasn’t become a star, and he doesn’t seem to be getting any more popular despite him being a world champion since 2014. You can blame a large part of that on the match-making that’s been done for Jacobs since he became the WBA 160lb champion. He’s been matched weakly with the exception of his fight against Peter Quillin, who Jacobs knocked out in the 1st round last December.
I think it looked bad for Jacobs to be fighting Mora last night rather than a good contender. To turn Jacobs into a star, you can’t do it by putting him in with old fighters from the last like Mora. You’ve got to put him in with the best contenders in the division and hope that he’s got the talent to beat them. Instead of Jacobs burning up two fights against Sergio Mora in career wasting fights, Jacobs should have been matched against the likes of Tureano Johnson, Chris Eubank Jr., Andy Lee or Curtis Stevens. It’s hard to believe that those fights couldn’t have been made. I think the fans would have preferred one of those guys being put in with Jacobs rather than Mora. At least if Jacobs had beaten guys like that, it would have helped make him a bigger name. I don’t think the boxing fans would have been booing last night if Jacobs had fought those kinds of fighters.
Jacobs knocked Mora down five times in the fight in dropping him in rounds 4, 5 and three times in round 7. Mora had little punch resistance, and he had nothing to throw back at Jacobs other than a weak variety of punches. Jacobs got brave after he discovered that Mora didn’t have enough power to give him any problems. The fight then became a full on route with Jacobs chasing after a shaky looking Mora and teeing off on him when he would stop.
It was not a good fight to watch for boxing fans, considering it was so one-sided that the fans were booing. They thought it was going to be a real world title fight between two evenly matched fighters. It wasn’t. Mora looked like an aging amateur fighter that was dragged out of a local gym and thrown into the ring with Jacobs. Mora didn’t belong in there with Jacobs, and it was embarrassing to watch. You have to wonder what Jacobs’ management was thinking in making this fight. Did they not realize how old, weak and mediocre Mora is at this point in his career or did they not care? Someone should have told Jacobs’ management that nothing good could come of putting him back in with Mora for a second fight after their previous one from 2015, which Jacobs won by a 2nd round injury stoppage. It was just a wrong-headed decision to have Jacobs fight Mora twice. If the idea is to try and turn Jacobs into a star, then you don’t keep putting him in with an old timer like Mora. That’s going in the wrong direction. Mora is a good basic fighter that would be nice for some of the young lions in the contender ranks to sharpen their claws on by throwing him out there for them to practice on, but you don’t have Mora getting back to back title shots. That was a strange move on Jacobs’ management’s part.
First off, Mora didn’t deserve a title shot against Jacobs last year. He had done nothing other than beating C level fighters like Grzegorz Proksa, Dashon Johnson, Abraham Han, Milton Nunez and Samuel Rogers. Those wins for Mora came about after he was beaten twice by journeyman Brian Vera. The two losses to Vera should have been enough for Jacobs’ management to realize that he didn’t belong inside the ring fighting for a world title.
“I didn’t expect to knock him down as much, but I did see the fight ending in a knockout. It took a while because he’s so tricky,” said Jacobs.
The knockdowns came due to Mora bending over so much to avoid getting hit. He made it easy for Jacobs to drop him because he was able to chop down on him with his power shots.