Where is Danny Jacobs really getting sparring?

It goes without saying that Jacobs wants not only the best boxers as his sparring partners for the upcoming title unification bout he has against the world's hardest hitter, pound for pound, the most feared man in the sport, Gennady "GGG" Golovkin, but the best facsimiles of his GGG, too.

Jacobs is a smart cat -- from hooking up with Oakland trainer Virgil Hunter for this particular bout (while retaining his old father figure Andre Rozier as his corner #1) to bringing on brainy b-plus-level pug Chris Algieri as a nutrionist, he has made only the right moves since day one.

Of course, some might see these moves as those of a desperate man looking for any bump in a fight in which he has been the underdog since it was even rumored.

And we've all seen examples of too many chefs in the kitchen in art and sport -- what happens when a coach and offensive coordinator have egos that cannot mesh in football or a manager and record label add so many touches to an album it scarcely recalls the raw recordings the band made.

But Jacob's maneuvers smack less of desperation than foresight, to me -- and cleverest of all, if not most obvious, is the move to bring on fighters who can emulate Golovkin's technically-adept come-forward Soviet-bloc_style in the ring.

The question, of course, is which middleweights in the world -- if any -- could even slightly mimic GGG. Enter Georgia (the Russian-bordering nation -- not the state known for peaches and Hotlanta).

One of Jacob's sparring partners is Avtandil Khurtsidze, who's 32-2-2. He's Georgian -- hence his Eastern-style fighting form -- but had a slew of bouts in my adopted boxing hometown of Philly early in his career, before returning to locales closer to home, including Kiev, Ukraine, and Minsk, Belarus. This is no chance peripatetic career.
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Way back in the early aughts, a body shop owner-turned-boxing manager, Doc Nowicki, paid for a house in Philly to house young, beastly Georgian fighters he looked after as though they were his own brood. Khurtsdize was among them -- as was Koba Gogoladze, Aslanbek Kodzoev, and Ramazan Paliani, the last of whom I interiewed on the telephone while working for my high school newspaper (our school was called "Ramaz" and that seemed connection enough to craft a Ramazan feature). 

The Georgians were all good boxers, but the vicissitudes of the fight game (politically-charged decisions against them when they fought outside Philly; failed medical exams = that didn't really show them unfit to fight; issues with green cards and visas) led them away from that Philly house in time.

Plus, Doc and his then-partner didn't quite have their managerial careers going yet. But don't discount this small cohort of Philly-Georgian hybrids out of Kutaia and Mezia in the Caucasus -- Paliani finished with a record of 14-1; Koba the Cobra ended 20-3. Khurtsidze is still the 16th-ranked middleweight despite being 37 years old.

Why the Georgians failed where the equally-Eastern Golovkin succeeeded comes down to two things. Nobody has been as powerful as Golovkin in recent memory. And our country wasn't ready yet to give the benefit of the doubt to Eastern fighters when it came to fight-judging and TV opportunities.

Still, you could argue that this earlier wave of migrant boxer-punchers laid the foundation on top of which Golovkin and Kovalev and Provodnikov have built their contemporary careers.

Danny Jacobs may not know this entire history -- but he'll certainly be its beneficiary during his gutty, possibly-career-defining training camp.
გაუმარჯოს!

Above: Avtandil Khurtsidze