If there is anything conventional about the cartoonish character fighting Mike Tyson this week it is that Jake Paul started out on Disney.
We are rewinding a few years to reach that stage, to 2016, and a show called Bizaardvark targeted at the 8-14 age range. Paul, 19 at the time, had certain qualification for his role.
This was a good while before he tapped into boxing’s willingness to embrace the absurd, which has made him one of the world’s highest paid athletes in the absence of any elite skill.
Indeed, when he enters the ring at the 80,000-seater AT&T stadium in Texas on Friday, facing a 58-year-old Tyson, he is expected to earn in the region of £30million, so more than what Anthony Joshua is understood to have received (£25m) for his most recent bout against Daniel Dubois.
But back when he signed with Disney, he was merely a novice actor from Ohio, the son of a real estate agent and nurse. What he lacked in traditional acting credits was compensated by his vast fame on social media.
Twenty-seven-year-old Jake Paul (right) will fight Mike Tyson (left) in Arlington, Texas on Friday
Paul pictured in 2016 when he was starring as Dirk in Bizaardvark on the Disney Channel
Musician Olivia Rodrigo (second right) was one of Paul’s co-stars on the children’s sitcom
Pulling pranks and filming them had been his calling card since his father bought him a camcorder aged 10, and by the time he stepped on the set of Bizaardvark, taking the role of Dirk Mann, a fictional influencer chasing eyeballs through a series of dumb stunts, he had more than seven million followers across various platforms. His life and his work mimicked one another.
It would take little over a year and less than two seasons before he was sacked by the corporation in 2017 for the extremities of his behaviour in the real world. The act that snapped Disney’s patience, and therefore nudged him towards his date with Tyson, was fairly routine by Paul’s standards.
The story goes that he and a few friends one day decided to start a bonfire in the drained pool of the house they shared in Los Angeles. Having set fire to a wardrobe, they added a can of petrol and the blaze grew higher than the property. We know this because they filmed most of it – content for their admirers.
The neighbours, whose tolerance had already been tested by Paul repeatedly posting his address on the internet, thus drawing droves of fans to their upmarket street night after night, were incandescent.
That’s how a news crew from the local KTLA station were tipped off and when they arrived, bedlam followed. At various points in the three minutes of footage, Paul stole the camera, climbed on the roof of their van, taunted the newsman’s shoes and was told some of the neighbours had complained about him turning the road into a ‘war zone and circus’.
Paul’s response into the microphone: ‘Everyone likes going to the circus, right?’
It was in keeping with his image but not Disney’s, so he was quickly fired, and yet Paul’s comment that day would seem to chime with how boxing promoters view his involvement in their sport.
Obnoxiousness and wealth have often shared a linear relationship in the ring and both Paul and his elder brother Logan, also an influencer and boxer, have profited enormously from that dynamic.
Actor, YouTuber and social media influencer Paul left Disney back in 2018 after he was fired
Jake is the younger brother of 29-year-old Logan Paul (right), who also found fame via YouTube
The younger sibling’s step into the squared money pit started a year after he was sacked by Disney, when he had his first white-collar bout against a fellow influencer, and in 2020 he made his professional debut against another.
In the years since he has fought ex-baseball players, YouTubers, former UFC fighters and three boxers of no decent standing, with a record of 10 wins and a solitary defeat against the younger brother of Tyson Fury, Tommy, who was better known for appearing on the reality TV show Love Island.
Paul is not a particularly good boxer, nor is he outright dreadful, but that has rarely been the point.
What has rankled boxing’s hardcore fans so greatly, and bemused so many with a passing interest, is that these appearances have been an immense commercial success and triggered justification for more. They have created the impression of a sport becoming a freakshow.
At a point when many legitimate fighters are taking risks and scratching a living, Paul has generated a combined 2.7m buys from seven pay-per-view events, worth an estimated £120m in revenue to those involved – it is astonishing and also a sign of consumer trends among younger audiences that many of us might struggle to comprehend.
With 50m followers these days, Paul has proven capable of drawing his crowd to any of his peculiar antics, be it in his core pursuits – shooting bullets at a propane cannister brought him 7m views on YouTube and punching a mascot at a basketball match was good for a further 31m views – or boxing, where he once snatched Floyd Mayweather’s baseball cap and got a black eye from his security detail (4m views).
Curiously, his popularity never seems to have been dented by the more serious noises around him, which have included two allegations of sexual assault (both denied by Paul, and no charges were filed) and the FBI raid on his California home in 2020 after he was filmed at a mall that was being looted (those charges were dropped).
In sport, to much face-scrunching, he has been adopted as the goose that laid the golden egg. In 2022, for instance, he earned more than £35m from boxing and was listed by Forbes as the world’s 46th highest earning athlete.
In 2022 Paul was listed by Forbes as the world’s 46th highest earning athlete, making £35m
Paul pictured in October 2022 during a fight in Arizona against Brazil’s Anderson Silva (left)
‘It doesn’t make any sense, but hey, it is what it is, right?’ he told the publication that year. The profile was aptly titled: ‘Hate Him A Little Or Hate Him A Lot, Jake Paul Is Making Millions In The Boxing Ring’.
That is the road which has led him to Tyson, the former undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, who is 19 years on from his last professional contest and has had a number of health scares of late.
This fight, pitting Tyson against a man 31 years his junior, was initially slated for July but was postponed when he threw up blood because of a stomach ulcer. Some assume Tyson will hurt Paul; others think the sanctioning of the bout by the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulations has recklessly endangered the older fighter.
Frank Warren, one of the sport’s longest-running promoters, has been as mystified as anyone by the prosperity of the YouTuber-fighter generation. But like Eddie Hearn, Warren has benefited from the Jake Paul business, promoting the fight between Paul and Tommy Fury. Paul is understood to have earned £10m that night.
Warren doesn’t like this latest venture, telling Mail Sport: ‘Jake and his team have found a niche in the market. I have done business with them and they are smart people. For me, I don’t get a lot of the YouTube stuff, but these YouTubers have got followers who want to watch them fight and they monetise it. I can’t knock them for that.
‘Good luck to them, as long as it’s not endangering somebody. But should a 58-year-old guy be fighting? No, I can’t agree on that. Look, it is their choice and if a state licenses them, then they take the full responsibility for any consequences. This isn’t a seniors’ golf tournament, it is punching each other in the head.’
Hearn, who promoted Paul’s debut in 2020, took a similar view, saying: ‘As someone who cares deeply about the sport, this fight is not for me. I understand that in the world we live in today there will be a lot of people who tune in to watch, and I am not saying it is a disgrace. But I don’t like it – Tyson was one of my all-time favourite boxers.
‘He was a shot fighter when he stopped 19 years ago so what do we think all these years on? He is 58. He is fighting a 27-year-old who isn’t much of a fighter but is a strong guy. Mike Tyson is his own man but this is a point where a fighter should be protected.’
Paul has beaten 10 of his first 11 opponents as a boxer, including Mike Perry (right) in July
Tyson, pictured (centre) back in 1987, is a former undisputed world heavyweight champion
Both promoters describe Paul as quieter in person than you might think. ‘A bit introverted,’ as Hearn put it, and that would possibly surprise anyone who has been on YouTube.
They also agree he has found a lucrative gap in their market but it should not extend to fighting an old man.
It is a common opinion that has possibly bled into the forecasts for the attendance figures – sources say the ticket sales at the stadium have been hugely underwhelming and prices have been cut to avoid a half-empty venue.
And yet Paul has always achieved his dubious presence via the screen. Given the bout is on Netflix, and therefore free to its 200m subscribers, it could break a variety of records for a televised fight. That would throw up a stink for many boxing fans, but Paul has rarely seemed to be kind of man who would notice.
