DMITRY PIROG KO5 DANNY JACOBS

The big surprise on Saturday night’s PPV show wasn’t so much that Dmitry Pirog defeated Danny Jacobs but the way that he did it. Most people— me included — thought that if Pirog won it would be by outworking and outlasting the New York boxer. A one-punch knockout win by Pirog definitely wasn’t expected.
 
Pre-fight opinion was split on the title bout between unbeaten middleweights. Jacobs was generally seen as being the puncher in the fight. Instead, it was Jacobs who always looked in danger of getting knocked out.
 
The fifth-round finish was startling and puts a question mark over Jacobs’s chin. Pirog has worn down and overwhelmed a number of opponents but never to my knowledge has he scored a one-punch win. In this fight, Pirog was made to look like the second coming of Carlos Monzon, who was probably one of the middleweight division’s great right-hand hitters.
 
Jacobs was dropped by Shawn Porter in the amateurs but got up to win. Ishe Smith rocked him with a right hand, but Jacobs boxed his way to the decision.
 
When an up-and-coming fighter has been down and hurt we can look at it one of two ways. We can consider him to be fragile or we can commend him for having the character to come back from adversity.
 
Jacobs, sad to say, just didn’t have a sturdy look about him in this fight. His expression was anxious once Pirog came at him. Jacobs, to me, seemed to be in peril from the off. He did well to box his way back into the fight after a Pirog right hand almost had him down in the second round but, even though he picked up points and was leading on all three judges’ cards after four rounds, I had the uneasy feeling that disaster was a heartbeat away. Jacobs moved this way, and that, he switched to a southpaw stance, he put punches together, but he was merely delaying the inevitable. He couldn’t hurt Pirog, who made a mocking: “Is that all you’ve got?” gesture. As Pirog said afterwards, he knew he had hurt Jacobs in the second round and he knew would catch him again.
 
This was a confidence-denting type of defeat. Jacobs will come back, win fights and probably get another championship chance, but from now on I think we will look at him differently, as a boxer who is not comfortable when under pressure and who might not be able to take a punch terribly well.
 
Jacobs is an intelligent, personable young man who was being built up by Golden Boy Promotions as the new face of American boxing. It might be unfair and unwise to write him off on the basis of one fight — but there is no doubt that things have gone badly wrong and one wonders if they can ever be the same.