I remember Buck Smith, the legendary bully who refused to take on anyone who wasn’t a 1. bum, 2. club fighter, 3. bum club fighter, or 4. club plumb bum dum-dum fighter. Someone once called him out on this, saying that all he had was a Bum-of-the-Month Club. His indignant response? “I don’t fight one bum a month. I fight three or four.”
See, if you chose the life of a professional jerk, bum-killer, or pretender, and someone calls you out, there is precisely one correct response: own it and keep doing it. To put it another way, when the angry warrior demands that you “Get down here and fight like a MAN!”, the correct response is to continue throwing rocks at him until he either runs away or falls unconscious. You don’t respond to criticism. You don’t let yourself get goaded or taunted. You don’t seek validation, or redemption, or legitimacy. You are an irritating goober on YouTube who’s somehow manage to build an obscenely lucrative career out of making hordes of viewers desperately want to see you killed and then bitterly disappoint them again and again. That is what you are, so own it!
That’s what mystifies me about this doomed fight more than anything…Jake Paul seemed to have all this down. He understood what the formula was and the importance of never deviating from it. Nobody as repulsive as him makes it to 27 without mastering the survival skills. There was no chance an 8-rounder against a fighter at the top of his game was going to end anything but horribly for him, and even if he didn’t expect something as drastic as a double jaw fracture (oh man, that’s going to mess him up big time), he should’ve known better than to ever accept it.
Harkening back to that old internet list of “20 (or 40 or 50) mistakes I will not make when I become an evil overlord”, all of them amount to “I will not succumb to the power of my own PR & hubris; never!”
$92 million. He got that for fighting Joshua. He wasn’t getting that for fighting a bum. If it means he can’t fight again he’ll be off to his next grift.
Exactly. He’s got 92 million counterarguments for anything people say about taking the fight at all.
To the extent he did anything wrong, it was starting to believe his own hype that not only could he get through the fight largely unscathed but that, short of a fix, he actually had a chance of winning against another washed boxer. But in this case, one that was not decades retired but merely a couple years past his prime but still competitive. Now that part was execrably dumb
As the old saying goes, but at what cost? Literally thousands of men have died in the ring, and a significantly larger number have suffered serious, lifelong health problems. No amount of money can reverse Parkinson’s syndrome. There’s absolutely no way he lasts as long as he does as a boxer without being aware of this. However many sycophants he had around him, however much he wanted to believe the hype, he had to have kept some brain cells grounded in reality.
Did he intend to get disqualified? That’s the only thing that even remotely makes sense to me. Put on a passable show for as long as he can, then as soon as Joshua has had enough and turns on the heat, get all grabby and tackly, take his medicine, and walk away confident that the sports media will spew out their usual empty-headed “tainted” and “didn’t really beat him” sewage and his sycophants will give their congratulations on going toe-to-toe with a real fighter and tomorrow’s another day. Guess he didn’t count on the ref being that…lenient.
Plenty of people have done worse for less money. Ask 100 people if they would be willing to get beat up for $92 million you would probably get more than 50 takers. Paul didn’t walk off the street. By all accounts he has taken his training seriously. He sparred decent opponents. He’s in very good shape. I’m sure he felt he could at least protect himself to get through the fight.
I mean, Danny Trejo (who in his day was probably also a better boxer than Paul) was totally willing to actually get beat up in a boxing movie, rather than playact, for a couple hundred bucks and turned it into a movie career. For $92 million? Yeah, there’s a lot of people who’d take the money, despite the risks. Or rather, even if they were guaranteed to get the stuffing absolutely beat out of them.