WBA World middleweight champion Daniel Jacobs (29-1, 26 KO’s will defend his title against No. 11 ranked WBA contender Sergio Mora (28-3-3, 9 KO’s) at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York on August 1st.
Jacobs is coming off a 12th round TKO of Caleb Truax in a mostly languid fight.
After feeling each other out for a majority of the fight, and a couple moments of Jacobs displaying his power, he finally closed the show in the 12th.
After the bout, Jacobs claimed he would fight “whoever Al [Haymon] and PBC put in front of me.”
This seems to be the case.
Some will say that this gives the fans a chance to see Jacobs in action. While that’s true, we still have to consider that Jacobs is a world champion, he’s not a regular fighter.
Mora briefly held the WBC light-middleweight title in 2008 after beating Vernon Forrest, who admitted after the fight that he didn’t train properly, and took Mora lightly. In the rematch, he knocked Mora down and white-washed him in a unanimous decision victory.
Since, Mora hasn’t done much.
His most recent fight was for the USBA middleweight title against Abraham Han. I scored the bout 116-111 for Han, who dropped Mora in the 10th. Somehow, Mora escaped with a split decision win.
Although there weren’t many other choices, there were still better choices than Mora.
For example, Chris Eubank Jr. fought this past February and stopped Dmitry Chudinov inside the 12th, a solid performance after coming off a close defeat by split decision against Billy Joe Saunders.
Tureano Johnson has won four consecutive following a controversial stoppage against Curtis Stevens in April 2014. Those two I just mentioned are ranked No. 1 and No. 3, respectively.
When I asked Johnson on Twitter if Jacobs or his team had approached him for a fight, he had this to say.
“No. Never. If he did, I would have accepted,” Johnson said.
Daniel Jacobs is a great fighter; there’s no doubt about it, but we can’t expect him to get better as a boxer, or popular with the fans if he’s fighting guys ranked outside the top 10, let alone the top five.
I mean no disrespect to Sergio Mora, but he’s not a title contender anymore; he hasn’t been for years.
This is what Jacobs had to say about WBA Super World middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin while promoting the Truax fight in March.
“We’ve seen the flaws, but like I said before, it’s just a matter of getting in there and doing it, A lot of people can say what they are going to do; a lot of people can say that. But, it’s only going to take a couple special guys to get the job done, and I believe I’m one of those guys,” said Jacobs.
If he’s so confident he’ll get the job done, why isn’t he fighting Golovkin?
I have Jacobs stopping Mora inside the 10th round.
