On Friday night, this writer will be seated in front of his television tuned into Netflix.
It won’t be to binge-watch anything on the streaming platform but rather to tune in for the Jake Paul-Anthony Joshua heavyweight clash from the Kaseya Center in Miami.
Full disclosure: I do not typically watch Paul’s fights in real time. I have never covered one of his fights from ringside, and – to the best of my recollection – have watched only one of his fights, against Mike Tyson, when they occurred.
At the risk of sounding snobbish, I don’t believe that I am his target audience.
When he and his brother Logan first got into boxing, I had to ask my nieces who they were and why they were a big deal. What I’ve seen from the younger Paul in the nearly six years since his January 2020 pro debut hasn’t convinced me that I’d be missing much if I just catch the highlights after the fact.
But this matchup has me legitimately intrigued.
For all of Paul’s previous matchups, I understood why the opponents were chosen. Boxing matchmaking is about taking calculated gambles, biting off just enough to make the risk worth it while at the same time not getting in over your head.
For this fight, I don’t understand how it makes sense.
Perhaps the matchmakers are simply operating on a higher plane than I am when it comes to understanding boxing or business. I just don’t see how the matchmaking gets Paul to where he and his team are hoping to land.
The fight will be by far the most demanding task of Paul’s career. Joshua is a two-time unified heavyweight champion who has fought almost every notable heavyweight of his time outside of Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder. He is also a much larger fighter, which was made evident in their cartoonish face-off last month.
Paul, in his limited career, has cut his boxing teeth largely against personalities and athletes from other mediums.
Six fights have come against five former MMA fighters, including two with Tyron Woodley; that’s already nearly 50 per cent of his pro career. Those came only after his early knockout wins over fellow influencer AnEsonGib and former NBA star Nate Robinson.
Paul’s lone defeat came in his first fight against an actual boxer – Tommy Fury. He has since conquered inactive pros with built-up records such as Andre August and Ryan Bourland, plus a bloated Julio Cesar Chavez Jnr, who actually lost to their one common opponent – former UFC champ Anderson Silva.
Don’t get me started on his dragging 58-year-old Mike Tyson out of retirement last year, nearly 20 years after the former undisputed heavyweight champion’s previous fight.
Not surprisingly, most boxing observers are thinking the same way I am.
The expectation that most – including myself – have is that Paul will be knocked out in similar fashion to how Joshua dispatched boxing interloper Francis Ngannou. Some are saying that the only way that agreeing to this fight would make sense is if the outcome were pre-determined through fight-fixing.
Just to be clear: Fixing fights is illegal and punishable under federal law, with prison time and fines, not to mention indefinite suspensions by commissions. Anyone making such an accusation had better have solid evidence, lest they subject themselves to civil litigation.
That hasn’t stopped some from making claims, like former WBC heavyweight titleholder Deontay Wilder, who told The Daily Mail, “I think the fight is scripted. … I think his fights in general have been scripted before.”
I’ve been ringside for fixed fights, and they’re usually easy enough to spot.
For instance, I was ringside for the infamous Jorge Kahwagi vs. Ramon Olivas Echeverria farce in the Philippines back in 2015. I immediately leapt out of my seat, informed the commission that this was an obvious fix and should be investigated, and then interviewed Kahwagi for a story that I planned to report out for a Mexican newspaper (he told me Echeverria was just young and inexperienced and that’s why he fell victim to a guy with fake muscles).
These claims of fight-fixing have come up since Paul first entered the sport. The fights most often cited as fakes are the Tyron Woodley rematch in 2021, and the Mike Tyson “fight” last year. The claim surrounding the Paul-Woodley fight is that, prior to the knockout in Round 6, Woodley signaled with his hands, then dropped his left, at which point Paul landed an overhand right that sent Woodley face-down unconscious for an immediate stoppage. Analyzing the video, Woodley was reacting to a Paul feint by tensing defensively, and then, seeing Paul loading up for a right, dropped his left to parry a straight right, and, having guessed incorrectly, left himself vulnerable to a fight-ending overhand right.
Anyone who thought that a Mike Tyson closing in on 60 was going to do anything in the ring with a young fighter was simply deluding themselves. There was a reason that the videos of Tyson’s training were limited to three-second-long jump-cuts. If Tyson couldn’t be effective past the second round 20 years earlier, why would anything have been different in 2024?
Let me trot out one of my favorite sayings, which I use far more frequently than I should have to: Everything is a conspiracy when you’re a fucking idiot.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t myriad other ways to influence the outcome of a fight that have just been normalized as standard pre-fight negotiations.
A fighter can be made to move up too far in weight, or be drained by a catchweight, as Jake Paul supporters would hope is the case by making Joshua come down to 245lbs. Matchmaking and building a boxer’s record is about sleight of hand, and few have been as shrewd while moving their career as Paul has been.
Against Joshua, I struggle to see what Paul’s path to victory is. He has made legitimate criticisms of Joshua’s limitations as a fighter. “He's a very basic fighter,” Paul said at their kickoff press conference last month in Miami. “He's gotten to where he's at because of the size and the power.” The problem is that Paul isn’t the sort of high-paced chess player that Oleksandr Usyk is, and he doesn’t have the bone-crunching power as a heavyweight that Daniel Dubois did when he knocked out Joshua in his most recent fight a year ago.
Jake Paul is a serviceable enough boxer – perhaps even a fringe contender – whose skills are on par with a hard-working local attraction with a similarly limited amateur background. He has some power, understands what boxing is supposed to look like, and has the resources to bring in the best possible sparring partners, though the public has no way of knowing just how intensely those heavyweights are working with Paul in the gym.
Paul has earned the right to be viewed as more than just a YouTuber and former Disney star cosplaying in boxing; he is a legit boxer. Still, there is only so far that a fighter can go as a late starter who hasn’t had boxing reflexes instilled in their body from a young age.
So what could Paul and his brain trust see that no one else seems to see? Is it that Joshua has been completely undone as a fighter by being counted out for the first time against Dubois, and his heart is no longer in it? Or has Joshua’s surgically repaired elbow not fully recovered and he is rushing himself back into the ring for an offer he couldn’t refuse?
Or is it something else?
Perhaps Jake Paul feels he has simply become bullet-proof as a star, and wouldn’t suffer much with a defeat to a former heavyweight champion. Or maybe Paul has always viewed a dangerous fight like this as the natural end of his run as a competitor and, at age 28, is looking toward life after competition.
Or maybe, just maybe, Jake Paul has overestimated how far his skills have progressed, and believes he can really beat Anthony Joshua in an honest competition.
We saw this with Ronda Rousey, who allowed others to inflate her ego about how much her striking abilities had improved – and then got smoked trying to trade punches with Holly Holm in the UFC Octagon.
Hate him or love him, Jake Paul has to be respected for becoming can’t-miss programming in a sport in which a large percentage of the boxing community views him as a publicity stunt.
Although his brashness and attention-seeking behavior can be off-putting to some purists, he has created many opportunities for overlooked boxers – particularly women – and has found ways to get people to tune in to fights that aren’t likely to shake up pound-for-pound lists. Just the fact that Paul has agreed to this fight, when no one would have faulted him for taking far less dangerous challenges, is sure to earn him respect, win or lose.
The appeal of this fight, at least for this writer, compares to that of an Evel Knievel stunt: You don’t know how he’s going to get out of this alive and – in a macabre, worst-case scenario – you get to say you were there the day a famous guy got splattered like a Looney Tunes character.
That’s why, on Friday night, I will be in front of the television, with all the potential outcomes running through my head.
Ryan Songalia is a reporter and editor for BoxingScene.com and has written for ESPN, the New York Daily News, Rappler, The Guardian, Vice and The Ring magazine. He holds a Master’s degree in Journalism from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and is a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America. He can be reached at ryansongalia@gmail.com or on Twitter at @ryansongalia.
