Bad news for those of us hoping that Jake Paul’s fighting grift was at an end after Anthony Joshua broke his jaw back in December: “The Problem Child” plans to return, and it sounds like he’s going to do it in MMA instead of boxing.
Paul has made an extremely lucrative career for himself beating up on old and over-the-hill fighters. For years he fought former mixed martial arts champions in boxing. Ben Askren was the first, then Tyron Woodley, then 47-year-old Anderson Silva. His lone fight against a young boxer in Tommy Fury resulted in a loss, so he went and fought 58-year-old Mike Tyson.
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His last fight was supposed to be another freakshow against Gervonta Davis, who weighed in at 133.8 pounds in his last fight. But when footage of Davis assaulting a woman surfaced, Paul was forced to pivot fast to save a multi-million dollar broadcast deal with Netflix. He agreed to fight former unified heavyweight boxing champion Anthony Joshua, who chased him down over several rounds before breaking his jaw in the 6th.
There was some talk that perhaps Paul’s boxing career was over. You break your jaw once and it’s never the same. Could Paul survive taking more punches to the face in boxing? The answer still may be no, which could be why he’s ready to finally make his long-teasted jump into MMA.
“I’m going to get cleared officially to spar in the next couple of weeks so we’re going to get back to it and keep on fighting,” Paul said on that Pat McAfee Show. “Maybe I’ll do some MMA, we’ve got a lot of stuff with MVP coming soon, big promotions getting more into the whole MMA world.”
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Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions held their first mixed martial arts event in May featuring Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano. It was a huge event on Netflix that generated more views than the UFC’s much hyped White House card, but there’s been questions on what fight MVP could book for a sequel that would match Ronda Rousey’s numbers.
“The feud between MVP MMA and UFC continues,” Paul said. “I’d fight Brock [Lesnar], I wrestled division I in Ohio, it doesn’t get more legit than that. I want to do MMA, we’ve been trying to make the Nate Diaz MMA fight happen for a long time and I think it’s still on the table so we’ll see what happens.”
As gross as it would be for Jake Paul to infect the mixed martial arts world, we can take solace in the fact that he’ll probably get his butt kicked if he steps inside the cage. Paul is a decent boxer. He’s trained hard for years and carefully plotted his career to avoid real challenges up to now. Six years in, and he’s developed some skills. But in MMA? He’s missing several key ingredients.
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“I’ve never practiced MMA, but I’ve wrestled and boxed,” Paul admitted. “So I just need to learn the kicks and jiu-jitsu … I’m part Jewish, so I feel like I’d be good at ‘jew’ jitsu! See what I did there?”
It doesn’t really work like that. But damn, we’d probably tune in to watch him find out.
