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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHY INFLUENCERS LIKE JAKE PAUL ARE TAKING OVER BOXING  
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Jack Bedrosian
November 18, 2024
Jacobin
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_ Influencers like Jake Paul have risen to prominence by fighting
athletes who want an alternative to exploitative bodies like the UFC.
His pro-Trumpism and call for a union to protect the rights of
fighters represent the contradictions within combat _

Jake Paul and Mike Tyson fight at AT&T Stadium on November 15, 2024,
in Arlington, Texas. , (Al Bello / Getty Images for Netflix © 2024)

 

In what was undoubtedly the most-watched combat sports event of all
time, the streaming numbers of which are estimated
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be roughly half of the Super Bowl’s, Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson failed
to deliver much of a fight.

Paul won in boring but decisive fashion, tepidly outstriking his
retirement-age opponent to a unanimous-decision win. The influencer,
still a relative novice to the sport, appeared unwilling to
meaningfully engage the all-time great, presumably for fear of risking
a knockout to a man twice his age. The final seconds of the fight
ended with Paul and Tyson meeting in the center of the ring to
mercifully embrace one another in a show of respect. While it was
about what you’d expect pairing a twenty-seven-year-old
influencer-turned-fighter with a fifty-eight-year-old boxing legend
— knee brace and all — it was a fine enough ending to an event
where everyone left more or less healthy, and $20 to $40 million
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The influencer era is clearly here with us to stay and has already
come to shape our national politics
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our pastimes. Old heads will certainly pearl-clutch over the sanctity
of the sport. They have a point — fights that feature influencers,
retired MMA fighters, and boxing legends that qualify for Social
Security are closer to circus events than representations of combat
sports at their best. As for the fights themselves, they tend
generally to lack excitement, and the level of skill displayed is
usually unimpressive. However, what consistently impresses is the
sheer spectacle and, more importantly, the number of viewers drawn to
this spectacle.

Friday night’s event is, so far, the culmination of crossover boxing
— a version of the sport whose modern iteration took hold back in
2017 when an online beef between influencers KSI and Joe Weller was
settled in the ring. Since then, this subset of the sport has blown
up, with its biggest events being on par with and even exceeding some
of the most successful in boxing to date. For example, in the last
decade, the second most pay-per-views (PPVs) for a fight was for
another crossover boxing event, Conor McGregor vs. Floyd Mayweather.

Paul, currently the biggest star in the crossover boxing space, has
been somewhat of an unlikely voice for fighter welfare.

That bout cleared an astounding four million
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second only to the traditional boxing event Mayweather vs. Manny
Pacquiao. Others — including Logan Paul’s (Jake’s brother)
exhibition match with Mayweather as well as both of his fights with
KSI — were all huge PPV boons that well outperformed your average
boxing card, bringing in roughly one million PPVs
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spawning sizable payouts for the athletes.

 

One reason boxing in particular offers a natural home for these events
is its business model, which, in contrast to other combat sports,
offers athletes the opportunity to make enormous sums of money.
Despite the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) being the biggest
combat sports entity in the world, the organization regularly kneecaps
its fighters with long-term contracts and sponsorship exclusivity
clauses, as well as holding onto nearly 90 percent of the market
share in the sport. Boxing, on the other hand, is not beholden to a
single promotion and sanctioning body and therefore allows its star
fighters to function in a freer market, steering their own careers
according to their own values and interests.

Paul, currently the biggest star in the crossover boxing space, has
been somewhat of an unlikely voice for fighter welfare. He has
antagonized UFC promoter Dana White by pointing out the
organization’s appalling pay practices. Paul’s callouts of former
UFC stars far past their prime — many never formidable fighters to
begin with and some almost as old as Tyson — have become a staple of
crossover boxing. One of the reasons these fighters have agreed to
these bouts with Paul, despite the risks of brain damage, is the
potential payouts they stand to make boxing him, which often far
exceed anything they’ve been able to earn inside the Octagon. For
Paul, the level of pure boxing talent he’d have to contend with is
generally very low in the sport of MMA — given the fighters have to
train a number of other disciplines like muay thai, Brazilian
jiu-jitsu, and wrestling — yet the name value of the fighters is
fairly high. It’s a match made in heaven where the fighters get
their paydays and Paul gets more combat sport cache.

Given the cynicism of this career trajectory, Paul’s rhetoric on
labor efforts within the fighting world has been surprising but also
impressive. At the start of 2022, he tweeted
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UFC president White referencing his “mission to bring awareness &
change to the sport’s pay & benefits” and gave White an ultimatum
that he would retire from boxing and switch to UFC if his demands of
an increased minimum fighter pay, 50 percent revenue split, and
long-term health care provisions were not met. An offer, to be clear,
White was never going to take. As it stands now, UFC minimum fighter
pay sits at $12,500 a contest, the share of the revenue split between
the promoter and athletes is less than 20 percent, and fighters are
only covered for injuries sustained in training or competition and not
once they leave the promotion, thanks to their much-disputed status as
independent contractors

Paul has led by example, securing paydays for fighters on his
undercards that would not have existed otherwise. For example, the
co-main event on Friday, which featured Katie Taylor vs. Amanda
Serrano — a much-disputed decision win for Taylor and arguably the
best event on the card — saw both fighters earn the biggest purses
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their careers, and put women’s boxing on the map in a big way.

 

In addition, he has claimed that his “ultimate goal is to create a
fighter’s union,” betting opponent and former UFC great Anderson
Silva that if he won their fight, Silva would join him in the creation
of a UFC fighter’s union
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Silva serving as interim president. He has also called on the ten
highest-paid athletes in boxing and MMA to donate money to make this
happen, even stating that fighters should strike in order to get their
demands met from the UFC:

It needs to be done. And it seems impossible and maybe it will be.
People say “Jake, how are you going to create a fighter union?
They’ll just shelf all the fighters in the fighter’s union.” No,
everyone comes together and we’re not fighting. We’re not
fighting. That’s how they do it. There are writers guilds, directors
guilds. . . . Why can’t you donate $200,000 to the union to help pay
these fighters for these six months? Are you that selfish? Floyd
Mayweather, Canelo [Álvarez], who make $50 million for a fight.
Canelo, you can’t donate $200,000 to this union?

Paul’s calling attention to fighter welfare has coincided with
another pro-fighter movement in the sport of submission grappling
I’ve covered previously
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Craig Jones, a world-class competitor whose trajectory has been the
polar opposite of Paul’s — leaving high-level competition for more
of an influencer lifestyle himself — put on the Craig Jones
Invitational tournament last year, calling attention to fighter pay in
the jiu-jitsu community to astounding success. It was the most-watched
event in jiu-jitsu history, some say dethroning the opposition Abu
Dhabi Combat Club (ADCC) tournament for primacy of the sport’s
competition future.

While combat sports and the manosphere continue to be spaces dominated
by reactionary politics, they have also been the site of an awakening
in labor activity in sports that for decades has had very little.

While this attention to the state of fighter treatment has been a net
positive for labor, it is unclear how things may change as Paul
himself further confronts the reality of organization within these
sports as well as his own official transition to the promotional side
of things. While his Most Valuable Promotions launched in 2021, well
before his most recent efforts, it stands to reason Paul’s
fighter-centric perspective may begin to shift as he adopts more of a
promoter role within the sport.

The flipside is that Paul embodies a type of reactionary politics that
seems to have grown particularly popular at this moment among young
men
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This kind of antiestablishment outsiderism allows Paul to earnestly
valorize teachers and firefighters in his post-fight speech, while
only days earlier endorsing Donald Trump and his nakedly pro-business
agenda for president. It’s a stance shared by many of his popular
post-ideological peers (e.g., Joe Rogan, et al.). While these figures
have made noise about the Democratic Party’s failure to center
labor, they have been unable to draw a straight line from a Trump
presidency to a toothless
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Labor Relations Board.

While combat sports and the manosphere continue to be spaces dominated
by reactionary politics, they have also been the site of an awakening
in labor activity in sports that for decades has had very little.
Meaningful strides in unionization efforts will require more than a
few influencers throwing their money and access around as they see
fit, though for the moment, our collective cultural fixation on big
names over big institutions, may just provide enough daylight to make
real inroads in previously opaque spaces.

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Contributors

Jack Bedrosian is a writer and performer based in Los Angeles. He has
an MA in global politics from Loyola University Chicago.

 

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