He was known as "The Miracle Man" during a career in which he won 37 of his 42 professional fights, scored 30 knockouts and held a version of the middleweight title twice.
Daniel Jacobs' nickname came about, though, because of his remarkable recovery from cancer, though it could have been for the way he overcome a poor upbringing to become not only a champion and a successful businessman but a classy adult and role model.
As he wrote in announcing his retirement Saturday on Instagram, the odds were stacked against Jacobs almost from the moment he was born. He was a black child born to poor black parents in one of the country's most notorious ghettos. Not many ever made it out.
"... When boxing found me, I was a poor kid growing up in Brownsville Brooklyn with not much to look forward to," Jacobs wrote. "As a young black kid, I was being forced fed an identity that I wasn’t important or wouldn’t [amount] to anything substantial in life. I was told the ghetto that I grew up in was full of criminals with no future and I would be a statistic just like my peers and the ones that came B4 me dead or in jail with no potential to make it out or to make a success of myself. I am now proud to say I’m the Rose that grew from concrete in Brooklyn ..."
You could have called him Miracle Man years before he became a world champion after surviving a bout with cancer for overcoming the circumstances of his birth. Jacobs had a gift for boxing, but so many others did whom the world never heard about. They didn't have his constitution or his moral fiber and, yes, to be sure, his luck. It takes luck to overcome the circumstances of his birth.
And it takes luck to overcome a cancer diagnosis at 24.
"You have to understand, I was on my death bed," Jacobs said to me in 2012 for a story I did on his diagnosis and return to boxing for Yahoo Sports. "The doctor said that the tumor was growing so fast that if I had waited four more days, it would have grown so large it would have slowed my heart down. I was literally on my deathbed. I escaped death."
Jacobs knocked out Josh Luteran on Oct. 20, 2012, in the Barclays Center in his hometown of Brooklyn, needing only 73 seconds to finish the bout and, more importantly, show in the most emphatic way possible that he'd not only survived cancer, he'd beaten it.
Just five fights later, on Aug. 9, 2014, in the Barclays Center, Jacobs made his dream a reality. He dropped Jarrod Fletcher in the first and fifth rounds and scored a TKO in the fifth to win the WBA middleweight championship.
Jacobs wasn't just one and done, either. He successfully defended the belt four times, then lost in a unification fight to Gennadiy Golovkin at Madison Square Garden in New York on March 18, 2017, a time when Golovkin was at the peak of his formidable powers. Jacobs fought smartly and bravely in losing a very close decision.
He became a two-time champion 19 months later when he defeated Sergiy Derevyanchenko by split decision to claim the IBF middleweight belt, but by that time, he was playing with house money. He'd proven his mettle, and his class, years earlier.
He made one last shot at it but it was clear from the moment the bell sounded on July 6 to begin his bout with Shane Mosley Jr. in Anaheim, Calif., that he'd reached the end of the line. He didn't have what it took any more to compete at the sport's highest level. Time had caught up with him.
Jacobs' life, though, has been exemplary and he's influenced and helped so many with his very public battle with cancer, which is the second-leading cause of death in the world.
He walks away from the sport with the class he exhibited throughout his career, a reminder that it's not always necessary to talk trash, to be the bad guy, to spew hate and vitriol and be successful.
Jacobs no longer holds a boxing belt, but as he leaves the sport that made him rich and famous, he holds a more important title:
Champion in life.