Canelo vs Jacobs: Fighters highlight their professionalism during the promotion

All too often in the sport of boxing we find tensions rising during fight week (whether they’re manufactured or genuine), but that certainly hasn’t been the case for tomorrow’s big fight between Canelo Alvarez and Daniel Jacobs.

The two fighters sit atop of the middleweight heap and have had no intentions of stirring the pot in order to get viewers to tune-in. Instead, Jacobs says he sees the bigger picture and won’t let the magnitude of the event get him out of character.

“It’s never been my intention in my lead-up to any fight to sort of create this animosity to sell the fight or to bash my opponent,” Jacobs said. “Never have I ever wanted to do that. It has never been in my nature. I know that boxing is just a sport.

“Controversy sells, but that’s not who I am. That’s not where I came from. I’m not sure if that’s why I am not a household name, but I can’t concentrate on that,” he said. “I stay true to who I am and how I was raised. I’ll always keep that integrity and try to be a stand-up guy. Also, by having a son, I know he watches everything that I do, and I can’t be acting up and being goofy to get more ratings. Boxing is my job. I have to stay professional and disciplined to get the job done.”

Canelo would also echo these sentiments by saying that the media already knows that it’s not in his character to talk down his opponents. In fact, the closest we’ve ever seen Canelo engaging in trash talk was in the build-up to his rematch with Gennady Golovkin last year. But in that case Canelo says he was only reacting to Team Golovkin’s repeated offenses, whereas here there’s not that provocation.

For the promoters, they both seem perfectly fine with how the fighters have handled everything, suggesting that when you have two top-quality operators you don’t really need to create buzz around trash-talking in order to get the fans interested. But let’s give that a litmus test...

How excited are all of you for tomorrow night’s action?