LAS COLINAS, Texas — Even Jake Paul knows he’s way ahead of where he should be in his boxing career.
Paul (10-1, 7 KOs), who is set to fight Mike Tyson in an officially sanctioned heavyweight fight Friday night at AT&T Stadium, is already a main-event fighter, drawing immense audiences to see his boxing exploits despite having just 11 professional fights.
Much of that interest in his career stems from his following outside the ring – from YouTube, social media and the businesses he owns.
He’s already receiving paydays the vast majority of professional boxers could only dream of or which would take most of their careers working towards.
But forget about his proven abilities as an influencer and a promoter to market himself. Inside the ring, how legitimate of a boxer is he?
“You can call it a hybrid event, you can call it a newly created form, whatever you want to use for a term to establish that it’s not what I was experienced in,” iconic broadcaster Jim Lampley, who called boxing on HBO for 30 years, told The Post. “There’s a definite gulf, there’s a divide between this and what I did.
“I have been told that he’s athletic and has done a reasonable job of learning boxing in his adult years. That’s something that is not always easy to do, because many of the best competitors of the sport, like Tyson, began when they were 11 or 12 years old.”
Paul, 27, has fought just three actual, professional boxers and owns a 2-1 record in those bouts – he beat Andre August and Ryan Bourland and lost to Tommy Fury.
The rest have come against fellow influencers, MMA fighters who took on boxing or professional athletes from other sports.
Tyson has called Paul’s career “manufactured.”
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When asked, given his stated goals to be taken seriously as a boxer, when he’s going to start fighting more accomplished contenders, Paul grew incensed.
“You’re sitting here disrespecting Mike Tyson to his face,” Paul said during the final news conference on Wednesday. “Do you not think he’s a serious boxer?”
Tyson, who officially weighed in at 228.4 pounds, is 58 years old, has not fought a professional bout since 2005 and had to postpone this fight after suffering an inflamed ulcer. It’s hard to view Friday’s bout as a serious test of Paul’s abilities.
One thing that is hard to argue against, though, is that Paul, who officially weighed in at 227.2 pounds, has legitimate power. He’s knocked out multiple former MMA fighters, and while they don’t have polished boxing skills, they certainly should know how to take a punch.
If he can connect, Paul is fully capable of doing damage.
“I look at him as a young, inexperienced boxer that is doing what he is supposed to do against who he goes against,” Shawn Porter, a former two-time welterweight champion who now works as a boxing analyst, told The Post. “The thing that I feel a lot of fighters, the smart fighters, understand is the business – he’s in a position that most young boxers are never in. He has hundreds of thousands to millions of people watching him, where most even Olympians, when we have our first five-to-ten fights, there’s nobody in the stadium, we don’t have the same sort of audience. I think that’s the main thing – he’s a rookie who is getting true professional exposure.”
While Porter respects Paul as a real boxer, he’s not a fan of the rules for this fight – there will be eight rounds, instead of the standard 10 for non-title fights.
Each round will be two minutes rather than the standard three. Both fighters will wear bigger 14-ounce gloves rather than the standard 10-ounce gloves.
“You want to legitimize yourself and you’re legit, but when you say this is a two-minute round fight instead of a three-minute round fight, now you’re depreciating your value, in my personal opinion,” Porter said. “I’ve always considered him a legit boxer, it’s just for me the level that you’re trying to do it at and then the rules that you come up with, it depreciates the substance.”
With the power he possesses, Paul has a clear path to victory. He’s also a heavy betting favorite.
“If Jake Paul wants to beat Mike Tyson, he should look back and observe that the style that gave Tyson the most trouble is that of the aggressive counter-puncher,” Lampley, who now co-hosts live chats on PPV.com, said. “Aggressive counter-punchers who could take advantage of Mike’s natural urge to aggression and fire back with something meaningful, those were the fighters he had the most trouble beating.”
