Jake Paul is to boxing what Eddie the Eagle was to ski jumping, an enthusiast with balls. Paul might be loosely described as a fighter having indulged his fancy for combat in the blue-collar space.
Professional boxing is something else entirely and were Paul to pursue it through the conventional channels, he would barely get past York Hall on a Friday night taking home a couple of quid and a black eye.
As a YouTube celebrity, however, he is in a class of his own, his capacity to monetise attention making him richer than all but the most accomplished boxers. His thing is to mine the insatiable appetite of 21st century sapiens for inane entertainment centred on the reality genre. The more outlandish the better.
Combat of one form of another, whether it be neighbourhood squabbles between rival gangs, outraged motorists duelling savagely at the lights, or women pulling each other across roads by the hair, is wildly popular, 30-second adrenalin hits recorded through the video camera on a mobile phone. Instawham you might call it.
Professional boxing finds itself at a curious historical moment where elite fighters engage in fewer and fewer bouts. When Mike Tyson, a prior opponent of Paul’s, began his career 40 years ago, he fought 19 times in his first 12 months. He was aiming at something other than fame and fortune. Tyson was seeking the validation, power and respect conferred by high achievement.
Paul, 28, is a boxing novice who generates huge interest on social media (Photo: Getty)The vast wealth and notoriety that Paul seeks was a necessary consequence for Tyson but not the goal it is for the king of content creation in the social media epoch. Anthony Joshua finds himself at the intersection of sport and Paulist entertainment at a point in his career when entering the circus is as lucrative as taking real blows.
It took Joshua, Paul’s “opponent” on 19 December, 11 years to compile the 34 fights he has on his record, a figure Tyson reached in two years and seven months. Joshua has not fought in the 14 months since his pitiless dismantling by Daniel Dubois, the fourth loss of his career and essentially the defeat that had the dollar signs ringing in Paul’s imagination.
That Joshua is willing to engage in an event from which he derives only professional derision demonstrates how far he has fallen as a serious boxer and how much boxing has lost a sense of itself as an authentic sport worth preserving.
Last weekend in London it served up a catchweight contest that had no legitimacy in terms of ranking and tradition. It relied entirely on the notoriety of the family names, the sons of famous fathers milking reputations they themselves had not created.
Chris Eubank Junior handicapped himself for a second time against an opponent, Conor Benn, who is not big enough to compete with him on level terms. Eubank Junior ended up in hospital after edging the first encounter and could barely stand after a one-sided beating in the second. For that he banked a reported £10m.
Though Eubank Junior and Benn are serious boxers the contest shared the same premise as Paul versus Joshua, namely a confected piece of car crash theatre rooted in curiosity rather than sport in any meaningful sense of the enterprise.
The concerns of the purist do not land on the conscience of Paul who delights in raiding the brains of his audience and draining their pockets. Joshua is similarly sanguine about prostituting his reputation for a few dollars more. Moola is manna to him.
And that’s okay if profit is the point of it all. Eight three-minute rounds against an underpowered novice in Miami is £50m for old rope.
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“Whether you like it or not, I’m here to do massive numbers, have big fights and break every record whilst keeping cool, calm and collected,” Joshua said.
“Mark my words, you’ll see a lot more fighters take these opportunities in the future. I’m about to break the internet over Jake Paul’s face.”
Yes, he is, but the fights we’ll remember are those against Dubois and Oleksandr Usyk, opponents who broke Joshua’s face all over the internet.
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