Let's be honest: Boxing needs Jake Paul, or someone of his ilk. The sport needs someone who is bright, who thinks outside of the box, who takes chances and who has an intuitive sense for how to grab the public's attention.
Since its glory days ended in the 1980s, boxing until recently has been on something of a death spiral. For every significant fight that captured the public's imagination and generated massive revenue, there were 50 shows that made no sense, were severely under-promoted and lost bundles of money.
One percent of the boxers made 99.99 percent of the money, leaving the rest in a mad scramble to make their share. On the night in 2015 when Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao each earned nine-figure paydays boxing each other, there was one fighter on the undercard who was paid just $1,500, per Nevada Athletic Commission records.
Boxing is a very top-heavy sport and its successes, though big when they occur, are sporadic. Paul, though, has found a way to consistently generate interest and extract money from it, even if there are consistent complaints about the quality, or lack thereof, of his opponents.
He made his way into the sport with an exhibition bout in 2018 and then turned pro in 2020. He immediately understood how to not only reach his audience but to keep it engaged.
Paul, who used outrageous stunts in his YouTube videos to make himself a millionaire, showed the same acumen when he turned boxer. One of his earliest ideas was to torment UFC president Dana White, the biggest fish in a very small combat sports pond.
Paul tweaked White at every opportunity, and because of his massive social media following, he suddenly began to be recognized by the mainstream. At virtually every news conference White attended, he would be asked about something Paul had done or said.
It got to the point where White would drop his head and put it in his hands when he heard another Paul question. He eventually chose not to answer questions about Paul when Paul's name invariably surfaced. Paul essentially leveraged White's prominence in combat sports and the UFC's success to make himself a big name.
That's the good part of the story.
But here we are now, two days out from Paul's next fight, against long-time UFC star Nate Diaz. It comes exactly seven days after boxing's greatest week in decades ended on July 29 in Las Vegas with Terence Crawford winning the undisputed welterweight title by stopping Errol Spence Jr. in the ninth round.
And from the epic highs boxing fans felt after Naoya Inoue's incredible performance on July 25 in Tokyo in winning the unified super bantamweight title from previously unbeaten Stephen Fulton and from Crawford's jaw-dropping bout against Spence, Paul will now fight yet another man making his professional boxing debut. It's another man who is significantly smaller than Paul, another man who is close to the end of what has been an epic MMA career.
Diaz won more often than he lost in MMA, but he lost often enough. None of it mattered, though, because he was so unpredictable outside the cage and predictably great inside of it.
But he's joined the influencer boxing universe now, and while boxing needs someone with Paul's instincts and business acumen, it needs less of these boxing matches that don't have boxers in them.
DAZN, which debuted in the U.S. charging fans $99 a year and vowed to put an end to pay-per-view, has failed so badly that it's mostly about influencer boxing these days. And yeah, even though it raised its annual subscription fee to $240, it now embraces PPV shows.
DAZN is the home to Kingpyn Boxing and Misfits Boxing, organizations where non-boxers fight. At least Paul is working with quality boxing people and Diaz is a household name in MMA. But Instagram model Whitney Johns against Amber O'Donnell on a Kingpyn Boxing show won't do much to excite the fan base and make fans forget about Pryor versus Arguello, Hagler versus Hearns or Corrales versus Castillo.
The good thing that Paul has done is to generate enough interest via ticket sales and sponsorship dollars to pay himself and his opponents high purses. Paul's Most Valuable Promotions issued a news release Thursday noting that the paid gate for Paul-Diaz will be the second-highest for a combat sports event at American Airlines Center — trailing only, yep, a UFC card.
Thursday's final news conference to sell the show, which is streaming Saturday on both DAZN and ESPN+., was sophomoric at its best.
"I'm going to bend him over and f*** him like a cowboy," Paul said of Diaz in one of the lowlights of the session. Diaz used homophobic slurs, and Paul, in addition to saying he'd have sex with Diaz, also threatened to kill him.
When the crowd booed him, Paul turned full heel.
"I'm going to bully the bully," Paul said. "Yeah, boo yourselves. Boo yourselves. Boo yourselves. I'm going to bully the bully. He's going to be dead on Saturday night. I'm going to finish his career. Yeah, boo yourselves, peasants. F*** off."
It was juvenile stuff throughout, including a very questionable "brawl" between the camps when the news conference ended. It was a circus sideshow.
Paul knows how to sell. Here's wishing he'd use his skills to not grow this curse of influencer boxing but to bring the large crowds to the sweet science. He's making money as the King of the Influencers in boxing, but the real pot of gold lies out there if he can do the same thing for legitimate, world-class boxers. If he can help restore boxing's lost glory and make every Saturday night a big event again, he'll be a success.
What he's doing now is just a take-off on professional wrestling.
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