First Things First

Jake Paul is boxing this weekend. Whenever I see him or any other influencer step in the ring, I can’t help but wonder, why?

You’re already wealthy. Why are you getting punched in the face for cash?

If you want to go on a deep dive through combat sports, influencer fighting, and learn why Jake understands the fight game better than most, keep reading.

Why So Many Successful People Want To Get Punched In The Face

Watch enough combat sports and you’ll start to lose track of who’s who. The stories all start to sound the same, “Broke boy breaks other boys’ faces for gold and glory. Now he’s found a new life.”

It doesn’t exactly matter where they come from. The point is, people only fall into fighting when things aren’t going well.

I fell in love with the sport because I was between houses. I was a homeless high schooler who needed a place to go. The training was fun, the community was supportive, and I was happy to do something that had a tangible reward; being able to defend myself.

I became passionate, addicted. Now I’m better for it.

So, when I see influencers, models, and celebrities trading their money-making mouths and faces for dollars, I can’t help but wonder, why are so many rich and successful people signing up to get punched in the face?

It’s not always a comment on their skills. Often it’s a confusion over their goals.

You have money, and you have safer ways to make more of it, why are you choosing this?

While “influencer” boxing seems like it suddenly appeared out of nowhere, it isn’t anything new.

Celebrity Boxing Isn’t New

In 1976 the most famous athlete in the world decided to take on a competitor from outside of his sport. Muhammad Ali “fought” Japanese professional wrestling star, Antonio Inoki.

I put fought in quotation marks because the event never really got going.

The weird rules of the match allowed for Inoki to sit down and kick Ali’s legs. Confused by this strategy, Ali never stepped into the line of fire. He ate about a hundred leg kicks but the fans in attendance weren’t impressed. As soon as the fight ended, boos erupted and they threw trash into the ring.

That doesn’t mean the spectacle wasn’t successful.

The arena sold all 14,500 tickets, with prices ranging from $17 to $3000. The fight sold at least 2 million or more pay-per-view buys on closed-circuit theater TV, to gross more than an inflation-adjusted $110 million from closed-circuit theater TV revenue in the United States alone. Final estimations put the fight at over 1 billion worldwide viewers and the event is now remembered as a forerunner to modern MMA.

Different TV executives have tried to package different versions of celebrity fighting to different viewers over the decades.

In 2002 FOX broadcast the show celebrity boxing. Stars like Vanilla Ice, Tonya Harding, and Dustin Diamond all fought on the show before it was canned after two episodes. Even Kim Kardashian did a charity boxing event in 2009 for her show Keeping Up With The Kardashians.

So, what do Ali and Kardashian have in common that would compel them to box? A name, and a timely need for a spectacle to sell that name.

In ‘76, Ali was nearing the end of his career. He needed big opportunities to cash in on his name while he still could. A relatively low risk celebrity fight gave him just that opportunity for outsized returns.

Kardashian, on the other hand, was in the midst of building her name. And nothing captures attention better than a fight. It’s the human embodiment of a car crash and cameras can’t turn away from them.

Fighting is the perfect event for anyone to advance a brand, personal or product. No other sport provides such a raw spectacle while having so few barriers to entry.

Just this weekend, Spanish influencer Ibai Llanos promoted his own influencer boxing card. He got 3.85 million concurrent viewers on his account alone. This event contributed to Twitch’s new site wide record of 6.74 million concurrent viewers. The event even sold out Real Madrid’s stadium, moving 85,000 tickets.

Clearly people are willing to turn into all types of weird fights. The problem with celebrity fighting is that, generally, it’s just not that interesting.

Once you’ve seen one non-athlete get hurt trying to fight, you’ve seen enough. The more compelling events pair celebrity and crossover athlete fights with other real fights.

Freak Show Fighting Works

Various organizations have promoted matches where athletes from other events crossover to a different sport and give it the old college try. We lovingly call these matches “freak show fights”.

To be frank, it makes the most sense in mixed martial arts. The sport is built off of asking big what-ifs.

What if Muhammad Ali fights the professional wrestler Antonio Inoki?

What if a sumo star fought a karate master?

Is boxing the best form of self-defense?

Boxing hall of famer James Toney took on Randy Couture in the UFC. He was subsequently smashed inside of a round. His presence did help generate more than 500,000 pay-per-view buys for the event though.

Professional wrestler Brock Lesnar was signed to the UFC after one professional MMA fight. Before the WWE, Lesnar was a college wrestler, nearly made the NFL, and an all-around freak athlete.

Lesnar was able to win a UFC championship in just a handful of fights. He also remains one of the largest draws in pay-per-view history.

Lesnar’s fights account for five of the UFC’s top 20 best-selling pay-per-views events. Every single one of those cards got more than a million buys.

So, clearly the model of freak show fighting can work. It’s just not really sustainable. And the problem is twofold; desperation and promotion.

A public figure has to be desperate enough to be willing to commit to the bit. They need to get beat up to appease people that like the freak show. But then they also need to take it serious so fans will begrudgingly give them their dues. At some point they need to get good at fighting like Lesnar did.

More importantly, the promotion has to be willing to eat whatever costs can come when a fight flops. Therein lies the problem.

Promoting a fight is expensive. You need to pay millions to even get the right to reserve a building large enough to sell tickets that could possibly pay for the talent. This doesn’t even touch on production and marketing costs for the event. But this begs the question, if celebrity fighting can work, what’s stopping desperate people from taking up the burden of marketing and promotion themselves to sell the fight to their audience? What happens when a billboard personified decides to take fighting seriously?

Fighting Is Really Jake Paul’s Only Option

I’m somewhat of a combat sports purist. I’ll watch the stupid spectacles. After all, who doesn’t like a car crash? But that’s not why I like fighting.

I’m attracted to the art and the science. I appreciate the knockouts as much as I like the technical outfighting and smooth grappling.

Did I say purist? Maybe I meant pretentious. Either way, when I heard former Disney star Jake Paul was going to fight, my first question was, who is that?

When I saw Jake sloppily box I couldn’t believe people cared, let alone paid to watch him fight. Then an editor I know asked me, “why are so many influencers trying to fight?” and that sparked my interest in the phenomenon Jake is on the forefront of.

So, why did he start boxing? From the looks of things, he hardly had a choice.

Jake’s fighting career started in 2018. He was on the undercard of a boxing event headlined by his brother, Logan. This came at an interesting point in his life.

Jake had become infamous for a series of troubles he brought upon himself. He was using his rented mansion in Los Angeles to create content, much of which centered around him being a public nuisance.

Jake was sued in 2017 for allegedly damaging a man’s hearing during a car horn prank. Then in 2018 he was sued by his landlord for $2.5 million for destroying the rental home. This was the same home that he repeatedly annoyed his neighbors in by setting furniture on fire and attracting fans to regularly show up at his house.

It is around this time that Jake and Disney agreed to part ways midway through his stint on the show Bizaardvark. You can’t help but assume they asked the boy stuck in legal trouble to leave their network so they weren’t subject to what would become worse and worse press.

Facing a cash crunch and without employment, Jake decided to box. Technically, the fight itself was nothing to write home about. Jake did use the media from the fight as an opportunity to announce that he was launching his own clothing line, Rise n’ Be Original (RNBO).

As Vlad Savov put it in his article The Logan Paul vs. KSI fight exposed an ugliness that’s older than YouTube, “This fight proved one thing: when it comes to making money, there’s no difference between fame and infamy.”

This is really where the rubber meets the road. Jake claims he genuinely enjoys boxing and wants to progress through the ranks. He says it’s not about the money. But it just isn’t that black and white.

Jake Paul’s life is money.

Jake has monetized every aspect of his public existence for his entire adult life. He used to generate ad revenue against his videos and get paid for acting. Now he uses his public persona to sell clothing and lifestyle products while earning millions per minute to box, according to these reports.

I mean, the guy made a fake marriage for content. Do we really think he’s above getting punched in the face to advance a brand or product?

Now he’s saying he wants to be a champion. Why? A championship belt affords him a larger platform to sell perfumes from. If you look at the sponsors for his next fight on the poster below, you’ll see Paul’s newest venture, W.

W is a personal care brand that Paul spun up with UFC star Sean O’Malley. This entrepreneurial endeavor mirrors exactly what his brother Logan Paul did by teaming up with his own rival KSI to launch the hydration beverage Prime.

But, in some respects, you can’t help but applaud the Paul brothers. You might even say they understand the fight game better than most.

Influencer Boxing Is Just Our Next Natural Step

I probably use this quote too much. I can’t help it. It gets more and more relevant the deeper you go into combat sports.

Before Gervonta Davis fought Ryan Garcia, Garcia claimed that boxing is not really about the money. Davis, wisely, quipped, “It’s prizefighting, stupid!”

Professional fighting is only about the money. 

How little can the promoters pay athletes so their business can keep rolling?

How much can they charge fans to see larger-than-life competitors clash?

How well can a fighter generate wealth so they aren’t destitute after their career?

In that respect, you have to admire Paul. He is using the business of boxing to create revenue streams when he had no other options immediately available. Like the Kriegel quote I used to open this article, “The business of boxing is business”, whether you want to admit it or not.

Few other businesses balance a lack of oversight, reduced barriers to entry, and raw spectacle quite like fighting. When you understand this you can see that influencer boxing might just be the natural next state of combat sports.

Influencers will continue to try fighting to create content and generate monetizable events. At the same time, more and more fighters will act like influencers. They’ll start media companies, launch generic CPG brands, and search for novel ways to profit off of their lifestyle.

Fighters and influencers are largely becoming indistinguishable. As Guy DeBord predicted in Society of The Specacle, being is getting replaced by having and having is degrading into appearing.

In that same Kriegel article I quoted above, he goes on to say, “Remember that fighters are typically owned in ‘pieces’, as if investors can buy the piece of their choosing: heart or hands or balls.”

Say what you will about Paul, but you can’t say that. He owns 100% of himself.

You simply can’t uncouple finances from fighting if you want to understand the game. As Gerald Early wrote

Influencer boxing is just the next logical step in that psychotic vision. Why not use the minutes you’re in front of millions to sell whatever bullshit you’re sponsored by? Why not use the event to create content so you can sell ad space against it on your Youtube channel?

Paul understands this better than most. He knows that the prize is the only point of fighting.

That makes him a real fighter, whether you want to admit it or not.

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