Almost everyone who spends any time with Dustin Jacoby comes away with a good opinion of him. He is likable, humorous and personable. People around him talk about his good character. But none of that amiability stopped him being written off by fans, when his TKO loss in his GLORY 5 LONDON debut was followed by four more defeats in a row.
In a way, Jacoby was a victim of his own success. He found himself in GLORY after accepting a late call-up to an eight-man, one-night ‘Road to Glory’ tournament. Those tournaments were staged in GLORY’s early years in a bid to unearth new US talent. Jacoby got 48 hours notice to enter a light-heavyweight contest in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He immediately stopped eating and drinking, got in the car, turned the heat up high and drove through the night to make the weigh-ins, undergoing a mobile weight-cut along the way.
Improbably, he then stopped three opponents back-to-back, a brutal run which commenced with his elimination of tournament favorite Randy ‘Boom Boom’ Blake in the quarter-finals. Having thus impressed GLORY, who were desperate to find a US breakout fighter, he was matched with Michael Duut for GLORY 5. Duut began training at 10 years old and competed for Amsterdam institution Meijiro Gym; he stopped Jacoby in the very first round.
Jacoby bounced back with a win over fellow American Brian Collette but then found himself facing former light-heavyweight #1 Danyo Ilunga in his next outing. He lost a decision. This would be the first of a five-fight losing streak which took him from June 2013 to April 2015 and had him roundly written off by the online fanbase, despite two of the losses – Makoto Uehara at GLORY 13 TOKYO, Mike Lemaire at GLORY 17 LOS ANGELES – being highly debatable decisions.
Fans questioned why Jacoby remained on the roster. GLORY matchmaker Cor Hemmers talked about Jacoby’s performances being “spirited” and said this counted for a lot, although it was also difficult to escape the suggestion that Jacoby being American gave him added protection, with US kickboxers being thin on the ground at the time. They were hard times for Jacoby, but his focus remained strong.
“I didn’t really pay a whole lot of attention to what was being said, to be honest with you. I mean yeah, it sucks when people are saying certain things but I care about the people I love and who love me and I am not concerned about anyone else. Their opinions don’t matter to me. I know who I am and what I am capable of and that’s all that mattered to me,” he reflects.
That mental strength is a key asset of Jacoby’s and probably the main factor in his current success. Where other fighters would have been put off by a string of losses and perhaps have considered abandoning kickboxing and reverting to MMA, Jacoby set himself the task of improving to the necessary level. He worked on his game endlessly – twice-daily sessions with Marc Montoya at Factory X in Denver, training camps in Holland, whatever he felt was necessary.
The well of mental fortitude he draws from was perhaps filled in part by past adversity. Jacoby wrestled and played football in his high school years and had several college football scholarships lined up. But then in a game late in his senior year he suffered a catastrophic knee injury. He tore three of his right knee’s four ligaments – medial collateral, lateral collateral and posterior cruciate – and saw all his college sponsorship offers “stripped away”.
“I was devastated. I was 17 years old and football was my whole life, it was all I wanted to do. It was the only reason I wanted to go to college. I hurt my knee and had to stop everything I was doing. I was also playing basketball and baseball and I had to stop those too. I guess you could say I got a little depressed, yeah,” he admits.
“But you know, it was also a big life lesson. And I am a firm believer that everything happens for a reason. Because of the injury I delayed on signing with a school. I ended up going to an NAIA school (National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics), Culver-Stockton College in Missouri. Without that injury I would probably have gone to a bigger school but it was at Culver-Stockton that I met my wife Kahla, so it turned out great.”
From Culver-Stockton, Jacoby was transferred to Quincy College and quickly made his mark on the football team, being starting quarterback for the three years he spent there. It was in his final year of college, during the off-season, that his twin brother Darren introduced him to the sport of Mixed Martial Arts. Jacoby was immediately taken with it and when college finished, he took up MMA training.
“I had my first amateur fight in college. My brother signed me up for it. He did it as kind of a joke at first. I was still playing football. My college coach caught wind of it and wasn’t too happy,” he laughs.
“I KO’d the guy in 55 seconds and to this day it was one of the most brutal knockouts anyone who witnessed it has ever seen. He was out for like 5 minutes. The crowd went from erupting cheering to total dead silence and all you can hear is his wife crying. It was a little scary for a minute there but then they woke up and he was back on his feet and didn’t even have a mark on him. That was in July 2008 so I guess I knew from then I might have a future in fight sports.”
That wasn’t his first taste of organized fighting. Aside from his on-field scuffles in football, Jacoby had also operated what he calls a “backyard boxing league” when he was younger. “In high school my buddies and I went through a boxing phase, we had backyard brawls I guess,” he smiles.
“Even then, everyone I stood across from except one or two, I knocked them out, I always had that power. We didn’t actually want to hurt each other obviously but yeah, that’s how I would win, I would KO people by accident.”
That natural knockout power – eight knockouts in ten MMA wins, eight knockouts in nine kickboxing wins – has been on display in his last five wins, all of them ending inside the distance. He rides a five-fight win streak into the fight with Simon Marcus this Friday and believes his power will carry him to success and championship status.
It is also combined with a now high level of technicality. Jacoby has transformed during his tenure with GLORY from an enthusiastic but unpolished puncher into a legitimate kickboxer with a good repertoire of tricks and setups to complement his sledgehammer hands.
“I think my range and power will play a major role. I believe in my power and the things I do. People ask me how I will win? I picture them being KO, thats what I see. I think this fight is no different. I think he is a hell of a fighter and I am here to prove that I am the cream of the crop and I am one or two punches away from that,” he says.
“Am I looking forward to silencing the critics? Well, it’s nice to throw something in someone’s face, I guess, but I don’t fight for those people. I fight for the people who believed in me from day one and they are the people I will be claiming that belt for this Friday.”