Jake Paul has said over and over that he wants a world title, so maybe it’s time to give him a shot.
You’ve probably heard by now that the WBC and WBA have both said they will potentially rank Jake Paul as a world title-contending cruiserweight based on his performance this Saturday, when he faces Julio Cesar Chavez Jr in a DAZN pay-per-view main event.
Maybe it really is time that he gets that world title fight he says he wants.
Stick with me a moment.
The 28-year-old Paul has made quite a name for himself skirting around the fringes of professional boxing for the last five years and change, going from beating fellow social media novices to ex-basketball players to washed-up former MMA champions to club fighters to a ragged, 58-year-old version of Mike Tyson.
He has made a lot of bold claims, talked a ton of brash trash, and yes, made a lot of money. His supporters in and out of the sport say he has raised the profile for the sport as a whole, though this is pretty questionable to say the least.
As a promoter of women’s boxing, yes, Jake Paul has done a very good job, genuinely — look no further than the scheduled July 11 card at Madison Square Garden, headlined by Katie Taylor vs Amanda Serrano 3, and stacked with top-tier women’s fighters in good matchups up and down the card. For that, Jake Paul deserves the genuine respect of the actual boxing world.
For himself, and his own “boxing career” — well, that gets a little murkier. Jake Paul existing at the edges of this world hasn’t raised the sail for any other event. There isn’t a sudden rush of people buying tickets to see Berlanga vs Sheeraz or Usyk vs Dubois 2 because Jake Paul has made boxing more popular overall. Those events and the dozens of others like them will sell — or not — on their own merits.
Paul talks and talks about wanting to win a world title, enough that you can actually believe he means it, whether it comes from sincere belief in himself or delusion spurred on by the power brokers and political arms of the world’s most politics-driven professional sport. He says he sees Chavez as, possibly, a final step toward “proving” he’s of proper world-level quality.
“He’s a great fighter. I like big names, legendary names, and he’s on my path to a world championship,” Paul said at the final press conference for Saturday’s event.
“This is a tough test, a very tough test, but I’m here to challenge myself and do big things in this sport and then make a title run after I beat him.”
Purists, or at the very least the “real” boxing fans, will tell you that putting Jake Paul in with a genuine world champion in a genuine world championship fight promises to get him thrashed. We’re really quite sure of it. We’ll also tell you that nothing Jake Paul does on Saturday against a 40-year-old, washed version of Julio Cesar Chavez Jr is going to change our minds. Chavez is a career-long beneficiary of nepotism and name value who is years past his best, and wasn’t even that good when he was a middleweight world titlist — 40 lbs below where he’s fighting Paul on Saturday.
For what it’s worth, the WBA title is held by Gilberto “Zurdo” Ramirez, who also has the WBO belt, and will defend both on the same card this weekend against Yuniel Dorticos, a past-prime but still dangerous Cuban contender. The WBC title is held by Badou Jack, who comes closer to fitting Paul’s bill.
Jack is 41 years old. He’s fought just once in the last two-and-a-half years, beating Noel Mikaelyan in a good fight on May 3 in Riyadh. Jack is a good fighter, but he’s also not a natural cruiserweight, and he’s aging. “The Ripper” started his career as a super middleweight and is a bit smaller than Paul naturally. Though he has proven himself a plenty capable cruiserweight, and that is not to be discounted.
Zurdo, too, started his career at 168 lbs, though he was always meant to move up the weights, as he’s a big-bodied lad who had to be going to great pains to make 168 and even 175, something he notably struggled with during his time in those divisions. He’s 34 and right in his prime years, really, arguably better as a cruiserweight than he was at 168 or 175.
Personally, I’m convinced Jake Paul loses to either of them. I think Zurdo beats him up fairly badly, though Jack may be more tactical, which could lead to the impression that Paul is performing more competitively than is truly the case.
Maybe, though, I’m wrong, and so are thousands of others. Maybe Jake Paul really can compete at that level. Maybe, just maybe, he could actually beat Badou Jack or Zurdo Ramirez.
The only way he can actually prove it is by doing it. Paul has moaned many times that he doesn’t get enough respect from the boxing establishment or the “diehard” fans, the “haters” and doubters and skeptics. The one way — and he’s smart enough to know this — that he can really get that respect is by doing something like beating Jack or Zurdo, or at the very least sincerely competing with them in a good effort, even if it comes up short.
So does he actually want it? Or does he just want to complain that he isn’t getting it from people who can see through what his boxing career has been thus far?
He’s not going to get it from beating Chavez Jr on Saturday night. Too many people know what Chavez has been for many, many years now, lucky to have the record he does, and coming into this fight without a single truly quality victory since at least 2015, and that might be generous. You can very easily argue that it goes all the way back to his career-best performance against Andy Lee in 2012. Chavez’s last decade has been a series of flat performances and embarrassments, and he hasn’t been in a 10-round fight for three-and-a-half years.
And if your suspicion is that Chavez has been paid off to take a dive, more or less, he’s sure not making that idea sound very good in the lead-up.
“No, I don’t think he’s good,” he said of Jake Paul. “I think he tries, he trains hard, but he’s not a good fighter. He’s definitely not a good boxer. If he were a good boxer, then everyone else on this stage would be a legend. I don’t think he’s a good boxer, and everybody knows that.”
Chavez sounds like a boxing fan. Jake will want to prove him wrong. In the longer view, he’ll want to prove all of us wrong.
Or so he says, anyway.
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