By Norm Frauenhenim-
The dream is still alive.
So, too, is Jacobs.
He’s back as a cancer survivor.
By now, the Jacobs story is familiar, yet has lost none of its resonance, perhaps more so now than ever as he waits on his May 4 date with Canelo Alvarez at T-Mobile Arena for the unified 160-pound title.
Fighters come back from virtually everything. Adversity provides the drama. There are losses, gun shots, arrests, street brawls, auto accidents and the messy collection of concussions and busted appendages.
Jacobs was ready for all of that. Any prospect is, and Jacobs was as talented and ambitious as anyone in 2010. But he wasn’t ready to fight cancer, not at 23 years old or any other age for that matter.
But there it was in May 2011, 10 months after losing a fifth-round TKO to Dimitry Pirog at Vegas’ Mandalay Bay in July 2010. Just as he was launching a comeback from his first defeat, he got the feared news that has a sense of finality about it.
A cancer diagnosis sounds like a declaration of the end to any career, no matter how promising. There’s no bigger foe, not in the ring anyway. It’s a desperate fight, a lifetime-long fight to stay alive. But how?
After surgery and chemo, Jacobs’ answer was a surprise, at least to everybody at ringside who couldn’t foresee an improbable journey from cancer to contender to champion. It’s a path not often traveled. But Jacobs, the International Boxing Federation’s middleweight champ, has done it, done it all. Some road work would have been seen as a huge victory after he was diagnosed with a rare bone cancer. But there was no way to envision a road that would take him all the way to a reasonable chance at springing a huge upset in what might be Fight of the Year.
Jacobs said he returned to the gym and ultimately the ring – for the first time in October 2012 — because of one of the game’s enduring commandments. To wit: Don’t quit. He used that to fight and beat cancer. There’s an old line: You can’t play boxing. Jacobs is the living personification of that.
With potential stakes as stark as life or death, Jacobs now sounds as if he emerged from the struggle with that no-quit ethic forged into something even stronger.
“I’m a completely different fighter,’’ Jacobs said this week during a conference call when asked what he thought about returning to the city where he sustained his first loss. “I’m also a completely different person, with a mature mind, with a lot more skills, with a lot more mental strength. So, there’s no fear. There’s not a worry whatsoever when it comes to that.
“But it definitely will be sweet — not to avenge a loss that I’ve had before – (but) just to capitalize and be victorious in the fights where people predict it’s either 50/50 or against one of the best fighters in the world.
“For that reason, and for that reason alone, I’m just excited for it.’’
He’s not back in Vegas, he said, to correct — “patch-up anything that happened in the past.’’
The past, he went on to say, “makes you who you are today.”
An Undisputed Survivor.
