Mike Tyson once said that he could sell out Madison Square Garden masturbating and it’s hard to say with any certainty whether the horrific prospect of that had more or less artistic merit than what Jake Paul and Anthony Joshua produced together in Miami last night, live on Netflix.
Rather than a solo act of gratification, this was a team effort between two consenting adults. It featured one man in Paul selling a show on the premise of exposing himself to the world, and then another man, Joshua, offering a reach-around should stage fright get the better of Paul in front of so many perverts with sick minds.
It was, as always, a control thing. For once Joshua, a man who relishes being in control, surrendered it in favour of getting paid and giving Paul his name, his body, and his hand. Paul, meanwhile, was in control at all times, even when he seemed out of control. “Listen to me, brother!” he yelled to nobody in particular at the pre-fight weigh-in. “When the ring bells, I’m coming in there and I’m coming on his ass. You know who I are? I are him.”
Although not grammatically correct, it was kind of clever, that speech, only because it highlighted the stupidity of the event and revealed Paul’s approach to the whole thing. It also prepared us for what was to come, with the garbled nature of the words – inspired by an ESPN video of bowler Pete Weber which went viral in 2012 – letting the world know that Paul was only joking about beating Anthony Joshua and was just having a bit of fun really. If you fall for it, in other words, you’re the idiot, not him. Hee-hee-hee.
Already, then, Paul had control. He had control of the narrative and he had control over Joshua, someone who is not only without a world title these days but wasn’t even the A-side last night. The show, for what it’s worth, was called “Jake-Joshua” and Paul ran it, so much so that he was announced by the fight-night MC as follows: “The icon… the man who brought boxing here to Netflix… the biggest promoter of women’s boxing of all time… the one you all came here to see… the creator… the record-breaker… the MVP…”
He was right, too, the MC. As with Tyson, the draw with Paul lies in the unexpected. The only difference, perhaps, is that people aren’t watching Jake Paul to see what kind of havoc he will wreak on another human being. They are instead hoping he will be matched with someone capable of putting both him and us out of our collective misery. Joshua even threatened it at the weigh-in: “On Friday, this all ends.”
Now, if Tyson could sell out MSG just masturbating, it should be pointed out that much of the appeal of watching Paul comes not from the act itself but rather from the idea that while doing it there is an element of risk and danger involved. Because he remains a novice, you see, his penis rests not only in his hand during the act but in a guillotine. We then wait to see if he leaves the ring with it still intact.
Joshua, in this instance, was the threat, the guillotine. Without him, the interest in watching Jake Paul box on Netflix would not have been the same. And yet, for all his importance in the bout, at no stage was Joshua ever the one in control of it, either beforehand or in the ring. He was certainly winning the fight, make no mistake about that, but winning, for a man like Joshua, is still not the same as being in control.
In fact, early in the fight there were signs that this was Jake Paul’s playground and there was nothing Joshua could do about it. Consider, for example, how many times Paul reached for the top rope to balance himself without any reprimand from the referee, Chris Young. Consider, too, the amount of times he flopped to the canvas whenever feeling the weight of Joshua, the pace of the fight, or any kind of duress. Each time he did so it was a reminder that this fight, although perhaps not scripted, was under the jurisdiction of Jake Paul and nobody else. If you wanted to use his ball, you played by his rules. Besides, if you knew anything about Jake Paul, you should have known. You should have known that this wasn’t boxing he was inviting you to watch. This was just an extension of our everyday habits: dumb people watching dumb people do dumb things.
As for Joshua, he is too serious a man and too bad an actor to control a narrative like the one we saw on Netflix. Powerful though he is, he can’t get loose, or style it out. Other fighters, the likes of Tyson Fury, may have met Paul’s stupidity with their own stupidity, showboated a bit, pretended it was all a bit of fun. Joshua, though, was Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun. Stuff was happening all around him and all he could was react to it. Rather than in on the joke, or a co-creator, the two-time heavyweight champion presented himself as someone increasingly frustrated and embarrassed by his inability to nail a YouTuber who started boxing during Covid as an alternative to making banana bread. He appeared concerned, not about losing – there was never any danger of that – but about going rounds with somebody whom he promised would meet his “end” at his hands.
That was always the worry for Joshua, not fulfilling the promise. It was a tricky fight in that sense. After all, the only result that really worked for the Brit was to make a mockery of the contest and end it as early as possible – ideally, in round one. Anything else and it became a case of diminishing returns. He would get paid, yes, and paid well, yet the humiliation of being taken rounds by someone as silly as Jake Paul would have no doubt hurt someone as serious as Anthony Joshua.
In round five, you could see the fear of it in Joshua’s work. He boxed now with more urgency and tried to forget the fact that he had been taken four rounds by Jake Paul. In the previous round, he had even been tagged by Paul a couple of times, once by a right uppercut inside, and the other by a right hook, which seemed to momentarily buckle Joshua’s legs. All in all, it wasn’t how Joshua had scripted this unscripted fight and by round five it was time to start rolling the dice/credits.
As we waited, the punch-counters continued to use only their hands to record the landed punches and Lennox Lewis and Andre Ward were, like everyone else involved, just thinking about the money. They all have a price, it seems, and during the first four rounds it was the two of them I often found myself thinking about – the things they had said through gritted teeth before the fight, the things they would say through gritted teeth after it. Hostages in all but name, to have Lewis and Ward on the broadcast was like digging up Stanley Kubrick and Ingmar Bergman and showing them the recent trend of AI slop in which imbeciles “pose” next to their favourite actors from their favourite movies. It would be like showing them footage of British magician Stephen Mulhern “meeting” Jimmy Stewart on the set of It’s a Wonderful Life and saying, “Look, guys, look how far we have come.”
Joshua’s involvement was no less tragic. He got paid, of course, which is all that matters, but he also looked a shadow of his former self, if only in terms of stature and presence. In a perfect world, he needed Jake Paul to play Peter McNeeley and adopt a kamikaze approach which would leave openings and facilitate the kind of see-there-you-go KO Joshua secured against Francis Ngannou in 2024. Instead, he got a man content to play Hulk Hogan and found his openings limited as a result. Now, rather than the truth-teller, and the man to “end” it all, Joshua had become the butt of the joke, oblivious to the fact a joke was even being told until everybody around him started to laugh. Suddenly, his trying for the knockout – the only win that counted – became a thankless task, particularly in a massive ring against an opponent for whom surviving one round, never mind eight, was a victory in itself.
Yet the true victory would still be Joshua’s. The victory he needed, and the one that will appear on his record, is in many respects all that matters. It will read “W KO 6” and in time people will forget the patience it took to secure that result as well as the relief Joshua will have felt when it was secured.
They will also forget that each time Jake Paul dropped to the floor, either through exhaustion or threat, he was still somehow in control of the situation that was unfolding in the ring. He was tired, yes, and on the brink of defeat, yet there remained a sense that Paul, by going down whenever he did, was still gearing up to pick his own ending. Each time he went down it was less like a boxer reacting to a punch and more like a wrestler perfecting how to respond to an open-hand slap or learning how to fall. Should it be now? he thought, dropping to the canvas for the second or third time. Or what about now?
In the end, the cleanest punch of the fight – the finishing Joshua right hand – should have wiped the smile from Paul’s face and finally wrestled back some control from the American. Only that, in truth, never happened. Even a shot as big as the last, which wrapped things up in round six, was not enough to give Joshua the kind of victory he both wanted and needed. Rather, the second the shot landed, Paul just took a knee, puffed out his cheeks, and stuck out his tongue. It was evident the punch hurt him, but that, in the grand scheme of things, was now beside the point. What mattered most was that Paul still had his wits about him and could still make light of what had happened to him, broken jaw and all. To him, it was still just a big old joke. To him, a dyed-in-the-wool prankster, the ability to laugh in the face of someone so serious is the real victory and the only one he aimed to achieve in Miami.
“The performance wasn’t the best,” said Joshua, now 29-4 (25 KOs), after the fight. “The end goal was to get Jake Paul, pin him down, and hurt him. That has been the request leading up to it and that was on my mind. It took a bit longer than expected but the right hand finally found the destination.
“Now, Jake Paul has done really well tonight. I want to give him his props. He got up time and time again. It was difficult in there for him but he kept on trying to find a way. It takes a real man to do that. We have to give Jake his respect for trying and trying. Well done. But he came up against a real fighter tonight who had had a 15-month layoff. We shook off the cobwebs and I can’t wait to roll into 2026.”
During that post-fight interview Joshua bizarrely reached out and put both his gloves on the shoulders of the interviewer, Ariel Helwani. It wasn’t an act of exhaustion; it couldn’t have been that. Nor was it an aggressive move or the move of a man who wants the interviewer in front of him to stop asking tough questions. Instead, it was control. Joshua wanted some back, that’s all. He wanted to steady himself and find his feet again. He wanted to get hold of the narrative before, like Jake Paul, it ran away from him.
