But his career had mysteriously collapsed when, beginning in , he lost four fights in a row, sometimes looking rather listless. The Paul fight was a chance for him to earn a measure of redemption. It was also a chance for him to earn some money: according to disclosure documents, his pay was at least two million dollars. This is a venerable boxing tradition, meant to insure that no one sneaks a weapon into his glove, besides his fist.
Friendly trash talk escalated into something slightly less friendly. The exchange sparked mockery online: many viewers noted the gulf between Woodley, who seems destined for the U. Hall of Fame, and Paul, whom one commenter compared to a young Justin Bieber.
And by challenging Woodley to a fight he was also proposing a limited partnership: for a few months, Woodley could join the lucrative Jake Paul business. When he was offered his first M. It is a familiar story, and a familiar defense of combat sports, which provide many athletes with a path out of poverty and away from violence—some forms of violence, anyhow. He and his brother had rather normal boyhoods in a Cleveland suburb: their mother worked as a nurse, and their father was a real-estate agent and a commercial roofer.
Late one night in Puerto Rico, Paul recalled that his father pushed him to win at whatever he did. With this encouragement, Paul turned out to be a pretty good wrestler and a very good content creator: in high school, he started posting skits to Vine, which imposed a six-second limit and therefore rewarded quick punch lines and goofy stunts. On Vine, the Pauls often found themselves shirtless or dancing or both: they were essentially a non-singing boy band, attracting an audience that was evidently huge and seemingly hugely female.
Vine effectively shut down in , which obliged Paul to focus his considerable energy on YouTube, where his videos were often twenty minutes long, with a new one posted every day. One day, he covered the floor with vegetable oil and then challenged his friends to a race, promising the winner a hundred dollars; footage of the resulting bumps and scrapes formed the basis of one of his more popular videos. He provided running updates on various romances and rivalries, and a good look at his increasingly glamorous life, which seemed to revolve around swimming pools and expensive vehicles.
But Paul told me that he paid less attention to likes and dislikes than to total view counts—in this case, about two hundred and eighty-seven million. To leverage his popularity, he founded Team 10, a crew of young content creators who stayed together in a rented house.
Inevitably, the segment went viral on YouTube. The group disbanded not long after, and a number of the members have described Paul as an immature bully, constantly pressuring them to perform dangerous or degrading stunts; Paul denies all of it. The world of YouTubers thrives on endless reaction—a dizzying cascade of claims and counterclaims. But the accusations of sexual assault raise the possibility that Paul was not just a jerk but a predator. She said that she was friendly with Paul and that one night he took her to his bedroom, where they danced and then began kissing.
Afterward, he brusquely told her that he wanted to rejoin his friends elsewhere in the house. Paul has called both of these allegations false. He knows, though, that many people will not believe him, partly because plenty of other observers are on record saying that Paul could be boorish and cruel, especially in those days.
The fact that he has been accused of sexual violence does not make him particularly unusual in the boxing world. Mike Tyson, after all, served three years in prison for rape, then resumed fighting, more or less as popular as ever. Mayweather, an ostentatious character who is probably the highest-paid fighter of all time he reportedly made something like two hundred million dollars for his match against Manny Pacquiao , has faced a number of accusations of violence against women; in , he spent two months in jail after a vicious altercation with the mother of three of his children.
But, as long as he was not incarcerated, Mayweather was allowed to fight, and indeed was well incentivized to do so. While virtually all of the top American boxers are Black or Hispanic, Paul is a white guy from a middle-class neighborhood; for him, boxing was an escape not from poverty but from the seemingly luxurious world of social-media stardom.
As Love was rising to prominence, his older brother was shot and killed in Inkster, leaving behind a wife and children. Watching the workout in Puerto Rico, Love considered the unusual path that Paul had chosen. He has started a foundation, Boxing Bullies, on behalf of which he delivers frequent testimonials. Somehow Woodley, a hardworking athlete but a less flamboyant and marketable figure, was cast as the enemy of progress.
Late one night, Paul grew philosophical. Every boxer with dreams of glory seems to cite the same two antecedents: Muhammad Ali , the epitome of grace and courage, and Mike Tyson, the epitome of ferocity. Paul names both as inspirations.
Like Paul, Gastineau was a famous white guy, strong but untutored, and, like Paul, he seemed sure that hard work and determination could make up for missed decades of training. His success, if he achieved it, would debunk the old-fashioned idea that champions are formed through years of patient gym work, but it would also affirm the idea that every boxing match is a test of wills, and that an unusually willful man might therefore triumph against the odds.
Gastineau denied cheating, but by then the fantasy that he was a boxing savant had already been dispelled, by a journeyman named Tim Doc Anderson, who beat him easily in a five-round decision. Years later, during a confrontation over the alleged poisoning, Anderson shot and killed Parker. But in boxing, as on social media, the Pauls are part of a cultural shift. When Tyson was lured back into the ring last year, he faced another legendary former boxer, Roy Jones, Jr.
A series of matches have featured social-media stars—most of whom do not appear to have spent years or in some cases even weeks in training. Afterward, Paul celebrated with exaggerated bravado. His co-host, Mike Majlak, roared with laughter, and reminded him that he had never actually beaten anyone.
Lou DiBella is a promoter known for strong opinions and an inability to keep them to himself. And when it comes to boxing, he shows more respect for the sport and its potential than most others in it. Woodley: Amanda Serrano, a Puerto Rican champion who is widely viewed as one of the best boxers in the world, and who was hoping that an association with Paul might provide a mutually advantageous exchange of credibility and visibility.
As a YouTube star, Paul earned between one and four dollars for every thousand times his videos were streamed.
As a professional fighter, he aims to earn more money from fewer viewers: his fight against Woodley, which was distributed on pay-per-view by Showtime, was priced at sixty dollars.
By the weigh-in, he was growing notably more reserved. Jake Paul emerged from his dressing room, and the collection of friends and media members nearby suddenly hushed; a fighter preparing for battle, even this fighter, has a certain gravitas.
He predicted a knockout in the second or third round. Paul often frames his foray into boxing as a quest for respect, although he does not always act as if that is his top priority.
To create more of a spectacle, Paul had hired a tattoo artist to attend the fight, so that the bet could be settled immediately. It was striking, on fight night, to see how many people would come out to watch Jake Paul fight, and how relatively few of them would root for him, even in his home town. Whenever his picture came onscreen, there seemed to be more boos than cheers. The arena was full of fans, including more teen-agers and preteens, and more women and girls, than typically attend boxing matches.
One Ohio celebrity, Dave Chappelle, was a conspicuous presence near the ring, waving and hollering. Should have flew back to the crib. Jimmy Lennon, Jr. He may also have become the first to compete while wearing trunks with embedded digital screens, which were flashing his name when the bell finally sounded.
It is harder to hate a person when you have watched him get hurt. It happened near the end of the fourth round: Paul ducked his head, and Woodley hit him with an overhand right, sending him back with such force that he had to grab the ropes to stay on his feet.
A different referee might have ruled this an official knockdown. The Ohio crowd was cheering for a Missouri guy, and Woodley waved his right fist triumphantly even as he kept pressing forward, hunting Paul. What followed was both anticlimactic and impressive: Paul refused to fade, and in fact looked somewhat revived in the later rounds, while Woodley let himself be outpunched.
When the scores were read, Paul won a split decision, which most observers agreed he deserved; he had survived, and kept his undefeated record intact. Before the fight, Paul had talked about his eagerness to return immediately to Puerto Rico and continue his training. But in the ring after the fight he took a more ambivalent tone. Woodley was in no mood to talk about time off—he wanted a rematch. By then, Paul had moved on. The Woodley fight made Paul seem less like a phenomenon or a fraud, and more like an ordinary boxer, albeit one with plenty of work to do on his footwork and punch mechanics.
A Web site called BoxRec uses a mathematical formula to rank every active professional, and it recently listed Paul as the five-hundred-and-eighty-third-best cruiserweight in the world, out of nine hundred and twenty-eight. Maybe some of the viewers were inspired to buy the recent heavyweight-championship fight between Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder, who fought at the highest level, trading punches and knockdowns until Wilder collapsed onto the ropes and slumped to the canvas. Already adept at leveraging his celebrity to get fans hanging on his every statement, Paul spent the last 24 hours pretending to step away from the sport following his biggest victory yet.
After tweeting that he was retiring Monday, Paul updated his status to say he's coming out of retirement Tuesday night:.
This may serve as a solid warning to those new to Paul. It's hard taking him at his word without any supporting evidence. It's also worth noting every boxer who doesn't have a contract for their next fight might as well be retired. Immediately after his split-decision victory over Tyron Woodley on Sunday, Woodley confronted Paul in the ring and demanded a rematch, to which the YouTuber seemed open on a very specific condition. Woodley would have to get a tattoo that reads "I love Jake Paul" before Paul is willing to give the former MMA star another shot at him.
Round 2 anyone?
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