By Norm Frauenheim –
GLENDALE, Ariz. — Jake Paul jumped off the scale, flexed, screamed and then did what he does best.
He weighed in.
He’s been weighing in all week with an unvarnished rip of a business known for what it doesn’t do any more. It fails to deliver fights that matter. It stumbles, from week-to-week, from one round of exasperating news to another.
Terence Crawford won’t be fighting Errol Spence. Canelo Alvarez won’t fight David Benavidez. Anthony Joshua won’t fight Tyson Fury. Who knows about Ryan Garcia and Gervonta Davis? Never-Never Land isn’t fiction. It’s boxing.
But the oft-criticized Paul (5-0, 4 KOs), dismissed as a YouTuber, is about to do what so many others in the waiting game won’t. He’ll fight Saturday at Desert Diamond Arena, facing 47-year-old mixed-martial arts legend Anderson Silva (3-1, 2 KOs as a boxer) in a Showtime Pay-Per View bout (6 pm PT, 9 pm ET/ $59.95) that’s another easy target for old-school critics.
It’s a gimmick, they say. It’s also a fight that doesn’t matter, they say, arguing that it doesn’t belong on a decent undercard. Maybe, it doesn’t. But there aren’t many decent undercards anywhere these days.
Paul thinks he knows why. And he’s not shy about saying why. He counters the criticism with plenty of his own. His featured fight against Silva on a hybrid card that includes boxers, MMA fighters, a former NFL running back and a practicing physician is a lot of things. Mostly, it’s a forum, another platform, for Paul. He’s using it to say what a lot of frustrated fans are thinking. He has turned it into his bully pulpit.
“Get these fights done,” Paul said at a news conference before making the contracted weight Friday morning at 186.5, a fraction of a pound heavier than Silva, who came in at 186.1 “Stop shooting yourself in the foot. Stop being greedy. Give people what they want. Don’t look at every term in the contract and try to change it.
“Just effing fight. You spar every day. Why not get paid effing tens of millions of dollars to do it in front of people? They’re very scared to risk their undefeated records, but boxing needs these big fights. Don’t let your manager stop you. Don’t let your promoter stop you.
“You gotta be in control.”
Today’s state of the boxing business is the flip side of control. It’s chaos. Paul also knows that movers-and-shakers, both in boxing and the UFC, don’t like what he’s saying. In effect, he’s telling the fighters to do more than take punches. He’s telling them to take control.
“It sucks for the fans,” Paul said exactly one week after the business was pushed to another breaking point with news that Crawford-Spence would not happen in 2022.
“The fans are the ones that get hurt. And it’s bad. This is why the sport has gone to bad places before.
“It’s gone to scary moments where you think the sport’s going to wind up dying out, because big fights like this aren’t happening. Why didn’t we get Fury-Joshua? There’s so many instances where big fights could be made, and they’re just not.
“I don’t know what it is. No one will ever know, and that’s what’s frustrating.’’
The fighters staged a weigh-in for fans Friday afternoon. Here are the officlal weights from Friday morning for fighters on the PPV part of the card:
Lightweights Ashton Sylve (7-0, 7 KOs), Long Beach, California, 132.4 pounds versus Braulio Rodriguez (20-4, 17 KOs), Dominican Republic, 132.5 pounds.
Cruiserweight debuts: Uriah Hall, New York, 198.6 pounds versus former NFL running back Le’Veon Bell, Columbus, Ohio, 197.6 pounds.
Cruiserweight debut of Dr. Mike Varshavski (pro debut), New York,182.6 pounds, versus Chris Avila (1-1), Stockton, California, 183.3 pounds.
The non-televised part of the card is scheduled to begin at 3:30 pm (PT). It includes three Arizona fighters – Glendale junior featherweight Danny Barrios Flores (10-0, 2 KOs) against Edgar Ortiz Jr. (8-3-2, 4 KOs) of Phoenix and Glendale featherweight Adrian Rodriguez (2-0, 2 KOs) against Dominique Griffin (4-2-1, 2 KOs) of Irving, Texas.
