Jake Paul got into the ring with Anthony Joshua last night, losing via sixth round knockout in an absurdly bad fight, one where Paul was running from the opening bell and never stopped until he got too tired, at which point he started trying to tackle Joshua.
At no point did Paul, 28, seem like he really wanted to engage with Joshua. Even when he wagged his tongue about and did his faces from a safe enough distance, he had no desire to actually get in the trenches with AJ.
It’s a fair enough approach,
really, from a logical standpoint. Anthony Joshua is a real professional boxer and a big, powerful man. Jake Paul is a strong and not small dude, unless you’re comparing him to AJ, which was the matchup. And he’s not a good professional boxer. So the smart idea was for Jake Paul, if he was going to get in there at all, to stay away from Joshua as much as possible, try to land a shot or two and keep AJ from doing much, and maybe steal rounds, survive eight of them, and hope five “went his way.” We talked about this in the preview, it wasn’t a surprise that this would be his game plan.
Basically, Jake Paul had to turn the fight into absolutely no fight at all. He had to win rounds where you said, “Well, he landed two punches, I guess that’s the better side of it.” The Netflix commentary team “got the assignment,” as it were, as Mauro Ranallo and his colleagues feverishly tried to sell you on the idea that Paul had definitely and clearly won the first round by landing 2 of 10 punches while Joshua compared with a meager 2 of 11.
Paul managed the plan for a bit, and then he got tired. This was also predictable. His cardio has never been a strong suit of his in-ring exploits. Jake was on his bike last night against Anthony Joshua. That wasn’t “footwork,” he was running and avoiding contact in that Astrodome-sized ring, designed to give him all the room he could need.
It was inevitably going to tire Paul out, and it obviously did, but he was never going to win any other way. What he did didn’t give him a good chance, but it gave him the best and really only chance he had.
His performance last night was ridiculous and borderline unwatchable, and he shouldn’t be given some extra special credit for a fight where he got so tired from avoiding contact that he wound up attempting about as many takedowns as he landed punches:
Jakes wants to be taken as a professional boxer and given credit on that level. If we do that with what we saw last night, it is very simple: No boxer who fought the way he did would get praise and respect from fans. The fight would have been called awful and his performance harshly criticized. Boxing’s history is not short on lousy fights, go look up the reaction to some of them if you need. Robert Easter Jr vs Rances Barthelemy from some years back leaps to mind, if you need a starter.
And no fight so obviously a mismatch, then so brutally ugly as a viewing experience, would be treated well by fans or critics, either.
Jake Paul won’t have to deal with that, of course. He’ll always draw attention when he fights. It will diminish over time — it has, in fact, diminished over time. He noted last night that it’s been six solid years of him doing this, and he’s right, and the truth is, there hasn’t been a lot of real progress in his game. But the people who make Paul’s boxing career viable don’t care that he’s “bad to watch,” because they don’t notice. To them, most boxing would be bad to watch, because they aren’t interested in it, and his celebrity has not driven some spike in the general interest in the actual sport of boxing, no matter what he says.
Jake Paul just isn’t owed any special extra credit for what happened last night. You can and should respect that he got in there, you can rightly say he’s a tough man because he is — he got his jaw broken and he was out of gas but the guy kept getting up.
But that was a terrible performance last night. The fight was horrible to watch. So much of Jake’s marketing is that he’s “entertaining,” but that pretty much always ends once the bell rings and the press conferences are over. You should feel as comfortable saying it about Jake Paul’s efforts against Anthony Joshua or in most of his other fights as you have been when Guillermo Rigondeaux does laps around the ring, and for the exact same reasons. It sucks to watch. That’s the Real Boxing analysis of it all.
