I have given Jake Paul – the combat sport identity – credit numerous times.
To me, he deserves credit from three angles.
Firstly, for his promotion of Amanda Serrano and women’s boxing generally. The combination of Paul and Eddie Hearn working with genuine stars like Katie Taylor and Serrano made them both million-dollar athletes.
While woke is now dead, though potentially making a comeback, this is not about inclusivity. This is about dollars and cents.
High-level women’s boxing is full of absolute slobberknockers. If you can build some stars around the ageing Taylor and Serrano, there’s real money to be made in what are often highly watchable scraps. Paul is ahead of that curve.
Secondly, for the way that he has looked after fighters under his Most Valuable Promotions banner. The best thing they’ve done in this regard is, after being forced to cancel a scheduled bout between Paul and Hasim Rahman Jr 2022, they paid smaller ticket undercard fighters half of their purse and released them from any contractual obligations.
There’s not a single other fighting promotion in combat sports that does that. That’s a unicorn event, like a house being sold within the advertised range in Australia.
Thirdly, for the way that he has dragged boxing into places it has never been. Namely, onto Netflix. With Paul v Mike Tyson, then Serrano v Taylor 3, Jake Paul has been involved in both of boxing’s forays onto the largest streaming platform on earth.
Netflix is unlikely to become a major boxing broadcaster, showing fights every Saturday but they are clearly into making themselves a live event centre as we’ve seen with their acquisition of the WWE and their attempts to broadcast comedy. Paul clearly saw that Netflix was heading toward big events, and has dragged boxing with him. Not just for his own fights, but for the stars he’s trying to build.
You’ll note that none of the credit I am willing to give him has anything to do with what he does in the ring. Jake Paul is a boxer like Martin Scorsese is an actor. It’s just something he does. It isn’t what he’s great at.
As a fighter, there’s not much to him other than a big right hand. He jabs like he’s Rocky Balboa (derogatory), has stiff footwork, no clear ability to find and maintain his range, and no discernible defensive plan.
Put simply, he’s a guy that started boxing in his 20s.
His resume, such as it is, indicates to me that this is a man who knows he’s more marketer than anything else. It’s full of guys that are much smaller than him, much older than him, that aren’t and never have been boxers, and then also 58-year-old Mike Tyson post a medical emergency.
But now things have changed.
Paul’s next fight was originally slated to be against Gervonta Davis.
Davis is a Mario Balotelli level waste of talent. He’s a gifted counterpuncher with crazy power who does everything except volume well.
However, heading into the Paul fight, he was clearly uniniterested in boxing professionally any longer. A fact that he himself underscored time and again both with his words and in the ring during his atrocious fight with Lamont Roach, which he clearly lost.
Even heading into the Paul fight, you could feel how sincerely uninterested he was in the fight and the promotion. He looked like he’d taken benzos on the way into press conferences, and on the off chance you woke him up the only thing he’d talk about was retiring.
So, you have a 135 pound guy that is sick of boxing? Sounds like a perfect Jake Paul opponent.
However, Davis committed yet another crime outside the ring. Paul, given his status as a pioneer in women’s boxing, wisely got rid of him and started looking for another opponent.
I cannot believe he found Anthony Joshua.
Joshua is bigger than Paul, still relatively close to his athletic prime. He is also, crucially, a no doubt about it boxer. AJ is a two time heavyweight champion who gave Oleksandr Usyk probably the second toughest fight of his heavyweight career only three years ago.
Even if AJ has never been my favourite heavyweight, he is a legitimate boxer with truly ferocious power. The last time AJ fought a non-boxer, it was Francis Ngannou. It didn’t end well for Francis.
And Jake Paul has agreed to fight him, on a Netflix broadcast, on December 19.
With this fight, Paul has melded his marketing brain with a fight that genuinely carries a level of danger for him in a way that no other fight has, or potentially could. If Joshua throws his punches in anger, there is the chance for life-altering damage to be done to Jake Paul.
Even if he’s a bit annoying, surely nobody wants to see that.
But exactly that danger element is why Paul deserves significant credit.
Paul made himself one of the biggest names in the hurt business without exposing himself to any hurt.
Now that’s changed.
The British media is all over Anthony Joshua for debasing himself like this, and I understand it. But what they’re missing is that boxing has always had these freak fights and for AJ, this is the lowest risk money he’s ever going to make.
This is investing in an ETF for him ahead of the Fury fight.
AJ isn’t the story here.
The story is Jake Paul taking a risk that I truly never thought he’d take. He deserves credit for that, even if he likely ends up drinking his Christmas dinner.