MIAMI – “On paper, the cards are stacked against me,” said Jake Paul ahead of the gargantuan task of facing Anthony Joshua this Friday at Miami’s Kaseya Center.
The cards are indeed stacked against Paul, a man who was appearing on the Disney Channel while Joshua was claiming world championships. Nearly a decade later, however, here we are: Jake Paul versus Anthony Joshua. It remains a strange concept – one many are still struggling to get their heads around – but it is a licensed professional contest, and one Paul genuinely believes he can win.
“In terms of boxing, I'm a better boxer than AJ, which is hilarious to say,” Paul admitted, without laughing. “He's got two left feet. He's stiff. If I was his coach, I'd put him in a dance class first before trying to box. [I’m confident from] really just bringing in the right sparring partners to help me prepare so that I can get looks that are similar to him. And that's really just been the strategy. But I'm just going to go in there and display all my skills.”
Paul was serious, confident, and seemingly convinced that he is operating on a level above his former two-time heavyweight champion and Olympic gold medalist opponent.
“When I win, my Instagram caption the day after is going to be heavyweight champion of the world,” he said. “Like, if this fight was a couple months ago, I'd be the heavyweight champion of the world, you know, before [Daniel] Dubois or whatever. But I'm just getting warmed up. So we'll see. I'll become the heavyweight champ, cruiserweight champ, whatever.”
Joshua, for his part, has appeared quietly confident that he will dispose of Paul in brutal fashion, as he has done with far more accomplished opponents in the past. Paul, however, believes that confidence is little more than a front, insisting he sees something far more fragile beneath the surface.
“I honestly see a man in him who is insecure actually, and not sure of himself fully, and kind of has a wounded heart of some sort,” Paul said. “I feel nothing when I'm in the room with him. I mean, look at everything in my career, from business, content, all the things that I do. I'm a strategist. I've got him exactly where I want him. I've got him at the perfect moment. Everything I do is calculated. And he's going to be exposed on Friday.”
There is little doubt that Paul has played his role carefully throughout his boxing career, selecting names at precisely the right moment to add them to his résumé. That approach has often angered fans, but it has undeniably worked. Which makes it all the more curious that he has chosen Joshua as his next opponent. Earlier in the week, Joshua warned Paul that while he may feel confident now, the fight would break him down both physically and mentally as the rounds wore on.
“What's funny is in that interview he was actually describing what happens to him in fights,” said Paul of Joshua’s comments. “Because that's never happened to me. I've never lost my soul in a fight, but it happens to him all the time. So what's funny is he was projecting his own emotions of what happens to him onto me by saying, ‘Oh, you're going to crumble and your soul is going to leave your body.’ He was just describing his own internal feelings of what happens to him in fights, which I find funny. So, yeah, it's going to be mentally very difficult for him when I start to win rounds and he can't hit me. It's going to be very entertaining to watch and to see him be frustrated.”
But did Paul not see what Joshua did to former UFC heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou last year?
“I just sort of look at, like, how bad of a boxer Francis is, stuck in mud, and just sitting there to get hit,” he said of the brutal finish last March. “I’m just a completely different fighter. It does nothing. Like, I've experienced it myself with fighting smaller guys. You can't load up all your power because you don't know where they're going to be to hit them. So it's all these, again, boxing geniuses on Twitter who have never stepped foot in a boxing ring.”
Paul is also acutely aware of the accusations that have followed him throughout his boxing career, with critics frequently dismissing his success as manufactured or scripted. Rather than bristle at those claims, he insists he takes them as validation.
"I take it as the deepest compliment that they chalk up what I'm doing to being rigged, fake fights,” Paul said. “That's how incredible and the level I'm on and the amazing things that I'm doing is. That they can only chalk it up to this fake storyline and he's paying them millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, to take a dive. I take that as a compliment."
Friday night will reveal whether boxing’s self-proclaimed “Problem Child” can continue bending the rules of expectation, or whether Anthony Joshua is the one tasked with disciplining him.
