But there he is.
“Just finished the first nine and I’m looking to go even lower on the back,” laughs Jacoby, smoothly knocking out a few interviews while on the links after a business trip to New York City that didn’t play out exactly as planned. Sure, he was going to the Big Apple to corner his Factory X teammate Jordan Williams, but while on a hunting trip the weekend before the big card at Madison Square Garden, he was asked if he was interested in getting into a fistfight in less than a week.
He wasn’t.
“When I first found out about it Sunday night, I was like, ‘No way, man, how am I supposed to do this? I’m in an elk camp.’ But my coach (Marc Montoya) said, ‘No, I promise you, I love the matchup, I think you win this fight all day, ten times out of ten times. You need to take this.’ And I trust his judgment. I said, ‘All right, man, let’s roll with it,’ and I’m so happy I chose to do so.”
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Jacoby, who extended his current unbeaten streak to six with a first-round stoppage of Darren Stewart in August, was in, and he didn’t even have to convince his wife Kahla that it was a good idea to take his fourth fight of 2021.
“She knew before me,” he said. “I was in the middle of the woods and I didn’t have reception. So my coach called her, she called my buddy’s sister, she texted him and then he told me while I was sitting by the campfire.”
And when he got back home?
“Yeah, we’re fighting this weekend,” he told his bride.
“You’ve been training, you’ve been working, go get it done,” she responded.
“You got it.”
Jacoby laughs.
“And I went and got it done.”