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Jake Paul’s mouth opened wide, and his eyes became huge glazed saucers, as he sank to the canvas in shock and awe after a pulverising right hand from Anthony Joshua finally ended the circus in Miami late on Friday night. It looked as if Paul was trying to say “Wow!” as the severity of impact registered in his scrambled brain.
Pinned in a corner of the ring midway through the sixth round, Paul could no longer run or cling to Joshua’s legs like a forlorn little boy as the gravity of boxing enveloped him. Instead, as he tried to absorb the punch that broke his jaw in two separate places, Paul was lost in his utterly stunned moment.
So this is how it feels, and looks, to be hit hard by a real boxer, an Olympic gold medallist and former world heavyweight champion. Wow is the word.
It was the fourth time that the former YouTuber had been knocked down but the consequences of a proper punch meant Paul would not be able to rise to his feet and waggle his tongue defiantly at Joshua before the referee waved the charade over. As blood began to leak from his mouth, and a numbing throb spread through his jawbone, Paul finally understood how hard, exhausting and dangerous boxing is at a decent level of professionalism.
Joshua, it should be stressed, was not impressive amid the bedlam. After his hollow victory he made a throat-slitting gesture that hinted at a clinical and deadly execution when, in reality, Joshua had cut a frustrated figure for most of the contest. Rather than glowering with menace, or exhibiting an iron certainty, Joshua had seemed tentative and crude for nearly five rounds. He struggled to catch Paul and landed under a third of his blows – missing 98 of the 146 punches he threw.
Paul’s lack of conditioning, which is a basic essential in elite boxing, shaped the outcome. Without the gas to flee any longer, and reduced to slipping to the canvas as often as he could for a breather, Paul was rendered helpless by fatigue. Joshua applied the brutal finish but, until then, he had seemed a mournful shadow of the fighter he had been in 2017 when, in a great fight, he withstood the ferocity of Wladimir Klitschko to force a memorable stoppage.
“It wasn’t the best performance,” Joshua admitted on Friday night. “The end goal was to get Jake Paul, pin him down and hurt him. That has been the request, and that’s what was on my mind. It took a bit longer than expected, but the right hand finally found the destination.”
Joshua praised Paul’s courage but he added an excuse for his own stilted showing. “He came up against a real fighter tonight that’s had a 15-month layoff,” Joshua said as he referenced how he had been crushed by Daniel Dubois in his previous fight, in September 2024. “We shook off the cobwebs, and I can’t wait to roll into 2026.”
In the press conference afterwards a jovial Joshua tried out a woeful imitation of Tyson Fury as he called for a scrap against his currently retired domestic rival. Joshua will get his wish and he and Fury will share the ring next year; but that bout comes far too late in their careers. Both Joshua and Fury are on the far side of the hill and, in contrast, the most interesting heavyweights in the world are Oleksandr Usyk and Moses Itauma.
Usyk remains the undoubted king of the division, having beaten both Joshua and Fury twice, while Itauma is a rising force. The young British heavyweight, who turns 21 later this month, would probably have needed fewer than half the number of rounds that Joshua required to knock Paul into a suitably wowed stupor.
The sorry spectacle was summed up far more effectively by the man closest to the farce. Christopher Young, the referee, brought Joshua and Paul together near the end of an abject fourth round. “The fans didn’t pay to see this crap,” Young snapped at both men.
But the public gets what the public wants and that certainly means more pitiful celebrity contests. Paul seemed genuinely proud and cocky to have had his jaw broken by a sledgehammer right. In the early hours of Saturday morning he posted an X-ray, with the two fractures highlighted in red, and wrote: “Double broken jaw. Give me Canelo in 10 days.”
That jokey reference to Saúl “Canelo” Álvarez, a far greater fighter than Joshua but a similarly faded force, showed that Paul’s comic chutzpah remains undented. It might not be Canelo but Paul will soon find someone else with whom he can make north of $50m, as he and Joshua both did in Miami.
While he was being interviewed in the ring, before leaving for hospital, Paul spat a tracer of blood on to the canvas. It was another bleak summary of the night as Paul mangled blunt truth with blood-flecked bullshit and said: “I think my jaw is broken. It’s definitely broke. A nice little ass-whipping from one of the best to ever do it. I love this shit and I’m going to come back and keep on winning.”
