Danny Jacobs wasn't ready.

He thought he was, convinced himself he was, and spoke with plenty of swagger about what was expected of him.

"When you're from Brooklyn, you've got to rep, and you've got to perform, like it's your last fight on earth," he said two days before his July 2010 showdown with Dmitry Pirog.

He even spoke of the added motivation provided by the death only days previously of his grandmother, Cordelia, who had helped raise him as her own son. He dedicated his fight to her, and entered the ring with her nickname -- "Lady Bird" -- stitched into his trunks.

And then he lost.

"Emotionally, I just wasn't ready," he admits now. "Emotionally, I wasn't steady."

The tough talk, the promises, the assertion of motivation all disappeared in the dressing room at the very time he needed them the most:

Danny Jacobs, right, won his first 20 professional fights and fought for a middleweight title by the time he had turned 23. Al Bello/Getty Images

"I remember even crying before the fight, and I remember before the fifth round came, I was praying to God, 'I just don't want to be here, I want to be home with my family,'" Jacobs said. "And the next round, that's when it happened."

That's when Pirog landed the right hand that dropped Jacobs on his back. That's when the first world title attempt of the "Golden Child" came to an end and brought his undefeated record down with it. And, inevitably, that's when the naysayers came out of the shadows.

"I got criticized after that fight for being exposed," Jacobs said, "but what people don't understand is, when you have an emotional attachment to someone you've been with for years -- I mean, my grandmother, she was like my mom -- and then you're fighting the hardest fight you could possibly fight and at the hardest possible time in your life "

With time, Jacobs began to get his feet under him. In the ring, he put together back-to-back wins designed to build his confidence. Out of the ring, his promoter, Oscar De La Hoya, maintained faith in him, keeping him in the spotlight and taking him on a USO tour to Iraq. It was upon returning from Iraq, however, that Jacobs was unexpectedly forced to confront the specter of mortality again. This time, however, it was not that of a close relative.

It was his own.

Jacobs returned from Iraq in mid-March 2011. The very next day, he was cycling to the gym when he noticed that his feet kept missing the pedals. A small thing, enough to elicit a furrowed brow, a realization that something was amiss, but not enough to cause any great consternation.

"I was a little nonchalant about it, thinking it was from not training," he said.

But the symptoms worsened rapidly enough that within weeks he was walking with a cane, yet steadily enough that no single escalation sounded any alarm bells. The initial medical opinion, in fact, encouraged the nonchalance.

"Doctors told me I had a pinched nerve, and they gave me some meds for it," Jacobs said. "So I was believing their word and believing that the pills they gave me would heal me, and even though it was getting worse and worse, in my mind I knew that it would get better eventually."