Jake Paul has been begging to get his teeth knocked in for a long time. Anthony Joshua finally did just that to the boxing gadfly in the sixth round of Friday’s fiasco of a fight from Miami.
Actually, along with breaking a jaw and ending the bout, Joshua’s massive overhand right might have saved two careers. Before it landed, both he and Paul had spent the night damaging themselves reputationally to the point that their ring runs were likely on the ropes.
Paul only occasionally took breaks from running away from Joshua and wagging his tongue to throw wild unschooled punches of the sort you’d see after hours from drunks in the TGI Friday’s parking lot, or to grab onto Joshua’s midsection as if to make his head unhittable. In other words, he fought as expected.
Joshua, however, is a former Olympic gold medalist and undisputed world heavyweight champion. He’s also impossibly handsome and an enduring British celebrity. He never should have taken the scheduled eight-round fight. Yet for all his seasoning, Joshua sank to Paul’s level. He seemed unable or unwilling to cut off the ring or otherwise rise above the amateurishness. He occasionally threw amateurish jabs into the air that were nowhere near his fleeing fantasy camp foe, as if to keep the blood circulation flowing in his arms. And Joshua rarely put any effort into getting out of the endless clinches initiated by Paul, several of which ended with Paul stumbling to the canvas and grabbing onto Joshua’s legs. It was as if Joshua was intent on literally carrying Paul across the finish line.
Near the end of the fourth round, with the crowd inside the Kaseya Center booing louder than ever, referee Christopher Young called Joshua and Paul to the center of the ring, grabbed the fighters by their gloves and ripped ‘em a new one.
“The fans didn’t pay to see this crap!” Young railed at both Paul and Joshua.
The referee’s address was the boxing equivalent of Joseph Welch’s “Have you no decency?” upbraiding of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Joshua, 36, was surely hoping to use this fight not only as a big payday (his reported purse was nearly $70 million) but also as a springboard to facing fellow over-the-hill gang member Tyson Fury, a bout that’s been teased for 2026 by moneyed Saudi matchmaker Turki Al-Sheikh. But just being attached to something this lousy and embarrassing could have meant the death knell for that, or any other meaningful future Joshua scraps. And Paul was in the middle of a farce that was even worse than realists–or, in influencer parlance, “haters”—had been insisting would ensue ever since the 6-foot-6, 243-pound Joshua was announced as the replacement for 5-foot-5, 135-pounder Gervonta “Tank” Davis, who got bounced from a scheduled November Netflix fight with Paul because of more domestic violence allegations. The future of his whole grift hung in the balance.
Then came Joshua’s huge right hand. The punch, the first and only one thrown on the night with both skill and bad intentions, landed on the side of Paul’s head. Paul fell as fast as a sack of shit can fall.
He never lost consciousness after taking Joshua’s best shot, however. Paul sat up and even appeared to be smiling as the referee counted him out. A bloody smile at that. His night was over.
In a post-fight ring interview, Paul self-diagnosed a broken jaw, which was later proven correct. So hours after saying he’s still on track to “go for the cruiserweight world title,” Paul was on the operating table having his teeth put back in proper rows. He released photos via social media of the inside of his mouth, which had suffered what looked like a war wound.
Better news for Paul: His gruesome injury, and the one punch that inflicted it, became the stories of the night, supplanting talk of all the foolishness and tedium and that bizarre referee pep talk that preceded the haymaker.
For dishing out a near-death blow, Joshua got his proposed fight with Fury put back on the front burner.
“If Tyson Fury is as serious as he thinks he is, and he wants to put down his Twitter fingers and put on some gloves and come and fight one of the realest fighters out there that will take on any challenge, step into the ring with me next if you’re a real bad boy,” Joshua said at his presser.
And going so viral just by getting brutalized meant Paul remains a viable boxing commodity, circus act.
“I know he went down heavy,” promoter Eddie Hearn said at the postfight press conference by way of pumping up Paul’s boxing bona fides, “but, you know, he was conscious on the floor.”
Hearn suggested fights against Tank Davis and Ryan Garcia could be next for Paul.
By getting knocked out for the first time ever, in other words, Paul prolonged everybody else’s misery.
