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“If it’s all straight up and proper, you would worry that he takes this kid’s head off,” reckons Barry McGuigan. “Could get his jaw broke, his head smashed in, side of his head caved in, God forbid he could get a brain bleed,” says Carl Froch on his YouTube channel. “It could be the end of him. It could be his last day on Earth,” David Haye tells Sky News, with the sort of apocalyptic glare I try to give my children when they want to jump in a muddy puddle.
Yes, this week everyone appears to be deeply concerned for the wellbeing of 28-year-old YouTube celebrity Jake Paul. The announcement of his fight against Anthony Joshua next month has generated a flood of foreboding prognoses, and fair enough. Stepping into the ring with a two-time world heavyweight champion when a) you’re not even a heavyweight, b) your record consists almost entirely of novices and geriatrics and c) you still fight like a marmoset trapped in an empty crisp packet: on some level, we all know how this might go.
Here’s how it’s actually going to go, if it even happens. Jake Paul is going to be fine. Jake Paul: structurally unharmed. Jake Paul will gurn for the celebrities at ringside – maybe Lionel Messi, maybe Snoop Dogg, maybe the Hawk Tuah girl – and at one point he will almost certainly drop his arms to his sides and dare Joshua to hit him. Jake Paul will hang in there.
Obviously Jake Paul will eventually lose, and there may even be some cartoon blood spat in the process. But at the end they’re going to hug and Joshua is going to call Paul a warrior, a true fighter, and the pair will hoist their arms skywards, and most importantly Jake Paul’s name will be everywhere, and Jake Paul will live to grift another day.
Not to spoil anybody’s fun, of course. But while I do not profess to be any great analyst of boxing, I do happen to know a thing or two about the internet. And what we essentially have here is the ultimate collision of these two worlds, these two kinds of fame and power, the pure athlete and the performance artist, the puncher and the prankster, meeting on weird middle ground. Is this sport or stunt? And is it still even meaningful to distinguish the two?
The first thing to note is that the danger is the point. Or rather, the perception of danger. The idea that Paul may get seriously hurt as a result of this fight, or even die, scandalises many lovers of the sport. Which is exactly why it must be invoked as often and as gruesomely and as gratuitously as possible. This is the stuff that turns the wheels, sells the tickets, outrages the traditionalists. A dead Jake Paul: even to read these words will feel to some of you like a thrilling incantation, awful and alluring in equal measure, one that may just persuade you to tune into Netflix.
And, of course, Paul has always known this. Part of his macabre genius is his ability to intuit – on some deep and shameful level – what you really, truly want, and then to pump it into your bloodstream and keep pumping. This is a guy who, along with his older brother Logan, has been chasing YouTube fame since he was a child. This is an algorithm native: a man steeped in hard numbers, dark desires, white lies and the unfailingly lucrative relationships between them.
To revisit Paul’s YouTube feed, which goes back to 2014, is basically to witness a kind of real-time machine learning. At the start a lot of his videos have titles like “I Graduated High School” and “Fireworks In The Park!” This does OK, but soon enough he works out what does even better. And so over time the wholesome teenage stuff gives way to the confrontations, the clickbait, the madcap stunts. “Hanging From 300ft Cliff”. “Here’s How I Lost $300,000 dollars [sic] in 10 seconds”. “I Spent 24hrs BURIED IN SOLID CONCRETE”.
And if big-time boxing is all about creating suitable matches, internet culture thrives on the outlandish mismatch. A man tries to put an iPad in a blender. One Jew debates 500 Nazis. Ordinary bloke tries to last eight rounds with Anthony Joshua wearing regulation 10oz gloves. This is basically sport as elaborate viral hoax, and to harrumph about things like veracity or integrity is about as fatuous as wondering whether Derren Brown really had bullets in his Russian roulette pistol.
The headlines and thumbnails on Paul’s videos are often deliberately misleading. Many of his pranks are so blatantly staged that it’s hard not to imagine that the joke is tacitly on the audience. Even his marriage to fellow content creator Tana Mongeau in 2019 was later revealed to be a sham for content. I watched the concrete video all the way through. He doesn’t spend 24 hours buried in it. He bails after about six. Personally, I’m sceptical it was more than about 15 minutes.
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“This is America,” Paul brags on his reality TV show. “The currency isn’t being liked. It’s attention. What can you do with attention? The answer is anything.” Well, almost. Attention might earn you the Joshua fight in the first place, but it’s not going to stop a crushing straight right from rearranging your dentistry.
Or can it? Does the fight even happen in the first place? “I don’t believe a single thing until I see them in the ring,” said Tony Bellew. “Even if they come together for a presser. It won’t happen. It can’t happen.”
And even if it does, will Joshua even bother training properly? Does he decide to carry Paul for a few rounds, as Floyd Mayweather essentially did with Conor McGregor in 2017? If the killer angle opens up does he take it, or switch down to the body? Why go to the trouble of maiming the biggest payday in the sport?
One of the reasons I find celebrity boxing so interesting and alarming is that it is one of the few prototypes of modern sport articulating exactly what it wants. This is sport stripped of the niceties, the trappings and inhibitions. The only true worth here is fame and bluster, money and eyeballs. It’s a grift and you will happily watch us grifting, because you want this. And even if you don’t want this, we will force-feed it into all the places you get your sport, your favourite websites and your social feeds and your betting apps, until you do want it.
It has often been said that the death of a sport comes when the viewer can no longer believe what they are seeing. Boxing has always required its audience to accept a little incredulity as part of the bargain, and yet the runaway success of its algorithmic late-capitalist form hints at a stage beyond. Where you don’t believe what you’re seeing, and you no longer care, and you watch it anyway.
