“I looked up at the Jumbotron, and that’s when I finally realized, oh no, I’m screwed.”
These were the words of Jarrell “Big Baby” Miller in February, in the aftermath of his Madison Square Garden fight against Kingsley Ibeh in which the rug was pulled out from over him.
But he was not screwed. Very much the opposite. As evidenced by the setting in which he was speaking these words: on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, to the delight of an audience that, for the most part, had never heard of Miller the week before and was now falling in love with the charismatic heavyweight.
Miller’s hairpiece popping cartoonishly off his head in the second round against Ibeh surely felt, in the moment, like a humiliating low point in a career that didn’t lack for humiliations and low points. But Big Baby fashioned it into a triumph. He turned it into a celebration of humility. He made the world laugh with him, not at him, by being willing to laugh at himself.
Miller was on his stool in the corner after that second round when he caught the replays on the Jumbotron and realized exactly why he’d been feeling a draft on his noggin after Ibeh landed punches. So he stood up. He ripped the hairpiece off. He stuck out his tongue. And he tossed the toupee into the crowd, drawing a cheer that indicated Big Baby had instantly gotten “over” as a big babyface.
Social media went wild not only with replays of the punches causing the piece to come unglued, but also with pics of other fighters playfully trying it on and of the toupee getting its own ringside seat.
A couple of days later, Kimmel was calling it “one of the funniest mishaps in the history of sports” on national TV.
Miller is 37 years old, is not considered a title contender, has officially won just one fight in the last three years and was infamous for testing positive for assorted enhancements long before he experimented with any of the follicular variety. In essence, he was as much punchline as puncher, a charming, cheating underachiever nearing the end of his career — or at least the relevant portion of it.
And now here he is, marketable again, headlining in a televised 12-rounder this Saturday night.
Did the hairpiece hilarity make Miller a contender again? Absolutely not. He’s still a guy who could barely eke out a split decision over the lightly regarded Ibeh.
But it extended his window in the sport by kicking off a new phase of the Big Baby journey: the novelty act phase.
We, as hardcore boxing fans, have history with Miller. He was that big-talking prospect who powered his way to fringe contender status in 2017 and ’18, was all set for a shot at Anthony Joshua and blew that with his PED misadventures.
But to the casual fan, Miller is none of those things. He’s just that cute and cuddly 300-plus-pounder from that viral clip.
To them, he’s a very poor man’s version of what George Foreman was at the start of his comeback: fat, old, bald (sort of) and adorable as long as you’re not the guy he’s throwing punches at.
Foreman eventually became the champion of the world again, but until he proved he belonged on that level, he was a novelty act. And that’s what Miller is. On a spectrum ranging from comebacking Big George to prime Butterbean, Big Baby stands more or less at the midpoint.
And he gets to top a DAZN card this weekend from the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas as a slight favorite against undefeated Cuban Lenier Pero.
Miller is not, however, the only aging novelty act in action this Saturday. In Reynosa, Mexico, in a 10-round cruiserweight bout atop a TV Azteca show, Julio Cesar Chavez Jnr fights again – his first time doing so as a fortysomething.
Chavez’s opponent is to be determined since Colombia’s Jhon Caicedo dropped out, but the identity of the B-side isn’t going to impact the ticket sales or the chief storyline. The attraction here is novelty act Chavez, the washed-up son of Mexico’s most beloved fighter ever, a man who hasn’t beaten a world-class opponent in a dozen years but still commands some degree of attention because of the name he inherited.
Chavez is just playing out the string. He’s making a little money while he still can – and where he still can. After being arrested and detained in California last July, accused of trafficking firearms, ammunition and explosives and of having ties to the Sinaloa cartel, Chavez was deported back to his home country.
And there, he fights on. He beat one Angel Julian Sacco in January, scoring his first stoppage win in more than five years, and now he’s looking to make it two in a row against… someone.
Chavez is not a contender anymore. He hasn’t been for more than a decade. He isn’t even a fringe contender. He isn’t even a fighter who can be trusted to handle a YouTuber or an MMA veteran.
If Miller is a novelty act enjoying a rebirth, a new chapter, an unexpected feeling of trending upward again, Chavez is on the opposite, far sadder, far more traditional end of the novelty act arc. He’s a shell of what he once was, he’s beset by legal issues and if his name was Jose Carlo Cortez, he’d have a hard time finding a promoter to give him a four-rounder.
But the son of “The Lion of Culiacan” has a standing invite. And he will as long as he’s still standing.
Gimmicky boxers come in all shapes and sizes and become gimmicky in all different ways.
Chavez was famous before he turned pro and peaked in popularity in his mid 20s. Miller is more famous and more popular now, at 37, as the toupee guy, than he ever was before.
Big Baby is doing all the right things at the moment. He was never shy about doing press, but he’s embracing it even more now, and he’s playing off the reason for his newfound fame by doing a positive-publicity good deed, teaming up with Locks of Love to raise awareness for children who have experienced medical hair loss. Miller turned the feel-good partnership into a win-win promotion, as fans who donate their hair for the cause will receive two tickets to the Miller-Pero card.
How much mileage can Miller get out of his hairpiece incident? It probably depends on how much winning he can do in his late 30s. Lose to Pero on Saturday night and, oh well, he got a fun three-month bump out of it, but he’s basically back to being a journeyman. Beat Pero and, who knows, maybe there’s a major payday awaiting him.
Pending this weekend’s result, there’s a feeling that Saturday could be the first day of the rest of Big Baby’s career.
Chavez, on the other hand, has no hope of experiencing a rebirth. He’s trading on his name like he always has, for as long as he can. And why shouldn’t he? When you get opportunities, you capitalize on them.
That’s something Chavez has known his whole career. And it’s something Miller is just learning in the late stages of his.
Novelty acts have always been a part of the boxing landscape – so Miller is not boldly going where no man has gone before. But he is baldly going where no man has gone before. And he’s not going to toss this unexpected opportunity away like he might a bad toupee.
Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.
