In 2012, I spent the day with journeyman Johnny Greaves ahead of his 89th professional fight in Sheffield. It was a strange experience, being with a fighter expecting to lose, and quite different from all the other times I had been fortunate enough to be in a changing room with a boxer on fight night.
In this instance, the feeling inside the away changing room was not one of hope. It was something else. It was something more procedural, as though what Greaves was readying himself for was another day at work, not a key fight in his career or his development. It came as no shock, either, the feeling – or lack of one. After all, 85 defeats in, Greaves was no dreamer, nor fool. He knew ahead of time what was expected of him. He knew all he had to do was turn up, survive, and give his opponent, Sam O’Maison, a few things to think about for the four rounds they were scheduled to share. Do that and Greaves would be invited back. Avoid getting stopped and he could even find himself booked for another job the following week.
Afterwards, when he returned to the changing room, Greaves asked some of us how he had looked. He had lost the fight, of course, but he wanted confirmation that he had lost it well – lost it the way a journeyman prefers to lose fights. He wanted to know it was entertaining, not boring, and that he had offered more than just his body and head inside a defensive shell for four rounds. “Job done then,” Greaves would say once greeted with positive reviews. He appeared relieved. Happy, even. Nobody lied: he had lost well.
In the arena, opinions will have differed on the fight as a piece of entertainment. Some in Sheffield will have no doubt been bored by the lack of competitive, two-way action, while others would have been amused by Greaves’ occasional showboating, as well as impressed by the talent on display from O’Maison.
The majority, though, whether entertained or not, will have understood the language of the story being told. They would have known that the purpose of O’Maison vs. Greaves, a mere four-rounder, was to showcase O’Maison rather than thrill them with its competitive, two-way action. They would have made peace with that, just as Greaves had been able to make peace with and monetise his role in other people’s stories.
Sometimes, it’s true, you might get a journeyman who flips the script and does more than simply survive, but most of the time – 99 times out of 100, let’s say – a bout between a prospect and a journeyman goes the way you expect it to go. It is for that reason a large number of seats in an arena will be empty while these fights take place. It is for that reason, too, that a promoter will book as many of them for his prospect as he can in the formative stages of their career, hoping to give their prospect “rounds” without them losing any. Win enough of them – rounds, fights – and all of a sudden a prospect’s record looks rather handy, even if the reality is that they have yet to really be tested.
There was a time when fight cards were awash with these kinds of fights, such was the need to both “build” a prospect and entice broadcasters with unbeaten records. On a bill of 10 or 12 bouts, you could guarantee that at least seven or eight of them would follow a predictable narrative and that the boxer in the home corner would be the one with a “W” next to their name in the final analysis.
Yet nowadays that isn’t necessarily the case. Though we still see mismatches aplenty, and though journeymen remain part of the sport’s ecosystem, there has of late been a shift towards shorter fight cards and, crucially, short-term thinking. Now, rather than focus on building a boxer from scratch, the mindset of those at the top of the sport has switched to focusing on doing as much as they can with the few remaining big-name boxers the sport can offer. This means skipping the tiresome and often time-consuming practice of manufacturing a record and teaching a young fighter how to fight in favour of concentrating more on the fighters who have already been taught and whose standing in the sport is already established. Get a handful of them, drag them to the Middle East, and you have a fight card. Suddenly, who needs journeymen? Who even needs prospects? We’re here for a good time, remember, not a long time.
One of the key exponents of this mindset, or grindset, is Jake Paul, the influencer-turned-cruiserweight who will box Anthony Joshua, the former two-time world heavyweight champion, over eight rounds on December 19. Paul, for whatever reason, never really fancied the idea of fighting your typical journeymen on the way up and has instead opted to fight the following in his six-year professional career: a fellow YouTuber, a basketball player, an oil-rig worker, five mixed martial artists, a member of the Fury clan, a 58-year-old Mike Tyson and, last time out, the semi-retired son of Julio Cesar Chavez. Some of those men were boxers by trade, some used to be boxers, and some were content to moonlight as boxers for a quick buck. But never has Paul, 28, fought a boxer designed to teach him anything in the ring. Never have either him or his team figured that to be part of his process, his journey, his schtick.
Now, as he prepares to fight Joshua next month, one wonders whether Paul’s lack of experience against actual boxers will become a hindrance. In fact, “wonder” is probably the wrong term. Frankly, there is nothing to wonder about in that regard. We know already, of course, that the leap from where Paul has been to where he is now going is, at best, ridiculous, and, at worst, reckless and dangerous. We also know that just because Paul has done a wonderful job selling boxing matches does not mean he has been learning how to box in said boxing matches. He has been winning them, sure, and has shown incremental improvements along the way, but nothing he has produced so far in a boxing ring indicates that Jake Paul would be a worthwhile sparring partner for Anthony Joshua, much less an opponent.
Most who understand boxing will agree with that notion and indeed many have expressed disapproval at the prospect of Paul fighting Joshua in three weeks’ time. This includes the British Boxing Board of Control (BBBC), who licence Joshua to fight in the UK, and also once licenced Johnny Greaves to fight. They, like the rest of us, have eyes and common sense. They know that the merits of a fight involving a man who is 28-4 (Joshua) and a man who is 12-1 (Paul) cannot be judged solely on numbers: wins, clicks, followers. The same goes for its dangers.
“They’re [the BBBC] hypocrites,” argued Nakisa Bidarian, Paul’s co-promoter, on The Ariel Helwani Show this week. “They’re not focused on the real problems of boxing, which is having these journeymen and women who are effectively on a circuit of getting beat up and knocked out to give ‘W’s [wins] to up-and-coming prospects and contenders. I think in the UK there are fighters who have 50, 60 – I think I even saw one that has a hundred – losses on their record. That’s the real problem: people who are coming to lose.”
That’s an interesting counterargument, to be fair, undermined only by the fact that Bidarian’s research stretched as far as finding just one boxer in the UK with 100 losses to their name. I mean, even if Johnny Greaves managed only 96 in the end, there are 279 losses on Kristian Laight’s record, 256 on Peter Buckley’s, 180 on Ibrar Riyaz’s, and 152 on Lewis van Poetsch’s, to name but a few.
But that’s the problem with people relatively new to the sport attempting to fix aspects of it they are not qualified to fix and have yet to fully understand. There are holes, blind spots, details missed. It is good to care and make suggestions, yes, but to win at Crazy Golf is not the same as winning the Masters. Nor does winning at Crazy Golf give anyone the right to then try to correct a professional’s swing at Augusta.
Still, that’s not to say Bidarian and the MVP crew can’t influence boxing in other areas – influencing, promoting, selling, etcetera. They certainly can. It’s just that those behind and beside Jake Paul are far bigger fans of Jake Paul than they are of boxing and thus qualified only to comment on the sport of Jake Paul – a sport in which they have expertise. Besides, let’s be honest: Paul himself, for all his qualities as a salesman, has never been the standard from a boxing perspective. Never will somebody look to him to learn the technique behind a certain move, for example, and the same can be said for his development as a pro: nobody will ever go to Paul or his team for advice pertaining to the development of a pro fighter. Because Paul, you see, is not like other fighters. He is his own beast, a total anomaly. His career cannot be compared to anyone else’s in the sport’s history and therefore the sound of him or his team preaching about anything other than how to drive rubberneckers to Netflix amounts to just noise.
“I made the example of one of Joshua’s opponents,” Bidarian went on. “I think it was his tenth opponent. He got knocked out by Joshua and he then got knocked out seven more times right after Joshua. That’s a guy who shouldn’t have been sanctioned to fight Joshua to begin with. Everyone could see what was happening.
“Everyone knows what that process is. A lot of promoters do it. I guess I understand it – it’s their desire to build up records – but Jake [Paul] has a massive amount of experience being on the biggest stages. Jake has the best team around him on a 24/7 basis. Jake is coming in against Anthony Joshua to shock the world. He’s not coming in there to be a stat-padding exercise for Anthony Joshua – which is what a lot of boxing is, and which the likes of the British Boxing Board of Control obviously are aware of.”
The Joshua opponent to whom Bidarian was referring was Michael Sprott, a former British and Commonwealth heavyweight champion from England. He was stopped inside a round by Joshua in 2014 and Bidarian is right: Joshua would have gained very little from the experience.
However, just as it is true that Sprott was stopped six – not seven – more times after that Joshua loss, it is also true that Michael Sprott, even in 2014, was a more established and capable professional boxer than the three active professional boxers Jake Paul faced prior to Chavez Jnr in June: Ryan Bourland, Andre August, and Tommy Fury.
Maybe that’s to be expected when comparing the development of a YouTuber to the development of an Olympic gold medallist. But still, if we’re talking stat-padding exercises, Paul clearly has more in common with the likes of Sprott – an opponent Joshua was expected to dispatch in double-quick time – than any of the opponents who have tested and belonged in the ring with Joshua since he turned pro in 2013. In fact, as with the Sprott fight 11 years ago, it’s not about whether Joshua wins or not on December 19. It’s about how he wins. How quickly. How easily. How brutally.
Similarly, it’s not about whether Jake Paul loses or not on December 19. It’s about how he loses.
For advice on that, Paul could do a lot worse than consult someone like Johnny Greaves, a man of 100 fights. Greaves, after all, knows as well as anyone the tricks of survival and self-preservation and knows that in mismatches there are various ways to lose and that some ways are better than others. Greaves has also forgotten more about the art than Jake Paul will ever know.
