Jake Paul’s finally doing what boxing fans have spent years clamoring for: fighting somebody who should beat his ass.
Tonight Paul gets in the ring with Anthony Joshua in Miami. On paper, like all Paul matchups, this fight shouldn’t even happen. Their faceoffs to hype the event have only made the bout seem as nonsensical as any of Paul’s other fights. Only this time, Paul’s playing the bug to be squashed.
Joshua, who stands 6-foot-6 and weighed in at just over 243 pounds Thursday, is a former heavyweight champ who shocked the world by KO’ing Wladimir Klitschko inside Wembley Stadium in 2017. He’s 36 years old now and surely past his prime, but by god he’s a real boxer, and in his last bout, in September 2024, he faced Daniel Dubois for an actual heavyweight title in front of another packed Wembley crowd. Earlier last year, Joshua knocked former MMA champ but boxing neophyte Francis Ngannou completely unconscious with a downright scary right hand. From the looks of things at the weigh-in, he’s in incredible shape. He remains among the most popular athletes in Europe.
There’s nothing good Joshua can get from this fight besides a payday. If the scheduled eight-rounder goes much past the introductions without Joshua putting Paul in the same state he did Ngannou, he’ll be mocked by his peers.
Paul’s potential positive takeaways aren’t obvious either, other than that this latest Paul circus has people still talking about him, his apparent goal ever since introducing himself and his brother to the world on Vine in the fall of 2013, a month before Joshua made his professional fighting debut against Emanuele Leo. Paul's the most talked-about boxer of this era; his match against Mike Tyson, snoozefest that it was, attracted 100 million viewers as announced by Netflix, though the actual number was surely fewer.
Paul weighed in yesterday a bit under 217 pounds and flabby. Should he somehow win by a flash knockout or decision over the first non-washed fighter he’s faced, nobody will believe it’s legit. Conventional wisdom is that Paul’s more likely to be murdered by Joshua than beat him. Paul’s best-case scenario seems to be that if/when he gets KO’d, he leaves the ring under his own power, and with boxing fans respecting him, if only in the same way Jackass viewers respected Steve-O after taking a sledgehammer to the testicles. He could definitely die, if the fight’s on the up and up.
Which nobody assumes. This fight is sanctioned by the Florida State Athletic Commission, and all gambling houses are taking bets. So it’s a real sporting event. Federal law clearly prohibits fixing sporting events for gambling purposes. But if performers drum up an outcome with no outside influencers or wagering and strictly for business, such as extending Paul’s lucrative career as a boxing grifter while lining Joshua’s pockets, the law seems murky. Paul stopped throwing punches early in the Tyson fight, seemingly determined to carry his legendary but feeble foe till the final bell. Was that an agreed-upon denouement or an act of mercy? Either way, nobody made a federal case out of it. It's the grift that keeps on giving.
Eddie Hearn, Joshua’s promoter and one of boxing’s great carnival barkers, said in interviews this week that no fix of any sort is in for tonight’s fight, and asserted that his guy’s going to obliterate Paul.
“Let me tell you the ‘script’ for AJ against Jake Paul,” Hearn said. “The bell’s going to go, A.J.’s going to go out and take the middle of the ring, and he’s going to unload the heaviest artillery on Jake Paul’s chin he can, as quickly as possible, and he’s going to knock him stark out.”
From Hearn’s lips to God’s ears. I’m going to watch.
