The Sadness Started With the Ring Walk Again — But This Time for Jake Paul

A little over twelve months ago, the boxing world was reeling from the Mike Tyson–Jake Paul debacle. A severely diminished, 58-year-old Tyson — slowed by age, injury, and time itself — was badly beaten by the 28-year-old YouTube boxer-turned-disruptor.

Once again, my worries began with the ring walk.

But this time, it wasn’t the halting, compromised gait of an ageing and injury-afflicted Tyson that caused concern.

It was Anthony Joshua.

At 36, Joshua may be past his absolute peak, but he is far from a spent force. With a physique and presence straight out of central casting, he walked to the ring slowly and deliberately, eyes clear, posture calm — the look of an assassin about to “spark that geezer out,” to borrow a line of his British vernacular.

This was confidence forged over a career that includes an Olympic gold medal and two reigns as world heavyweight champion. Joshua is not a faded legend trading on nostalgia. He is a serious professional fighter, fully aware of what lay ahead — and fully capable of delivering it.

Indeed, what passed for a ring walk felt less like an entrance and more like a funeral march for Jake Paul — outgunned, outclassed, and outmatched in size, skill, and experience.

Rather than a legitimate contest, this was widely viewed as a simple question of survival: how long Jake Paul could last before inevitably hitting the canvas for the ten count.

Credit where it’s due. Like many others, I was genuinely incredulous that Jake Paul would even agree to step into the ring with a boxer of Joshua’s caliber.

The nature of the contest became obvious the moment the bell rang for Round One. Paul’s insistence on a larger-than-standard ring was no coincidence; it was a deliberate attempt to keep as much distance as possible between himself and Joshua. To his credit, he executed this plan reasonably well for the first two rounds.

Paul is wealthy enough to surround himself with experienced trainers, and their game plan was clear. It revolved around two simple principles: first, constant lateral movement and footwork to stay outside Joshua’s long reach; second, whenever distance collapsed, tying Joshua up in the clinch or dropping to a knee to halt momentum and buy time.

Give Jake Paul some credit here. He is a young, strong athlete, and at times he was genuinely able to hold Joshua off and smother him in the clinch. For brief moments, it worked. He even managed to throw a punch or two.

That was until Joshua grew impatient and decided to disrupt the disruptor — targeting Paul with well-placed body punches during those clinches.

To the average viewer, these shots may not have looked particularly damaging. But when delivered by a seasoned professional they are anything but random. Punches surgically placed around the ribs, hips, and kidneys are designed not to knock an opponent out immediately, but to drain them.

By the end of Round Three, the effects were visible. Paul began to hunch forward, mouth open, dragging in air. His trainers, seeing what was unfolding, urged him to keep his distance and avoid being trapped in the corners.

Educated boxing eyes could see it clearly: fatigue had set in. From that point on, it was no longer a question of if, but when.

By Round Five, the crowd was growing restless. Many boxing purists — and let’s be honest, people who simply despise Jake Paul — wanted Joshua to end the fight in the opening round. Paul surviving past one round was seen by some as an insult to Joshua rather than a credit to Paul.

What these critics conveniently forget is that Joshua himself was undergoing a transition.

For the previous six weeks, he had trained exclusively with the Ukrainian team of Oleksandr Usyk, whose approach to boxing is built around a very different rhythm, movement pattern, and sense of timing. It is a style that values patience, control, and accumulation over brute force — a marked shift from the seek-and-destroy approach many fans expect from a heavyweight with Joshua’s power.

By the end of Round Five, it was just a matter of time. Joshua was edging closer to landing the decisive shot, while Paul was visibly exhausted.

The end came in Round Six, and it unfolded in predictably brutal fashion.

Trapped in a corner, Paul absorbed a long left to the body before Joshua followed with a powerful straight right to an open-mouthed, unprotected jaw. The sequence perfectly exposed Paul’s lack of high-level boxing experience — not only his failure to adopt a tight, defensive “turtle” posture with hands protecting the temples and face, but more tellingly, his inability to keep his mouth closed under pressure.

It has since been reported that Paul suffered a fractured jaw in two places and lost seven teeth. There is a reason boxing trainers relentlessly insist fighters bite down on their mouthpiece: an open mouth dramatically increases the risk of jaw fractures when absorbing impact.

And rest assured, Paul’s jaw would not have been the only body part aching. His ribs, back, and upper body would have been extremely sore in the days that followed, with medical staff closely monitoring urine color — a standard precaution — to rule out potential kidney damage from sustained body shots.

An awful boxing match?

Post-fight, several former world champions turned expert pundits were scathing in their assessments. Fighters such as Carl Froch and Paulie Malignaggi labelled it an “awful boxing match,” while former women’s world champion Laila Ali felt Joshua should have ended proceedings earlier by cutting off the ring more effectively as Paul circled away.

All valid points — but realistically, did anyone ever consider this a legitimate contest?

At its core, the event was a voyeuristic exercise: a collective experiment in seeing how long Jake Paul could last, with a sizeable portion of the audience hoping to witness the YouTube disruptor finally receive his comeuppance.

Credit must again go to Paul for his ability to draw eyeballs to boxing and promote an event that reportedly saw both combatants walk away with more than $50 million apiece. As a social-media marketer and self-promoter, Jake Paul is undoubtedly elite — arguably the GOAT in that space.

The true test, however, lies in the months ahead.

Paul staggered away with his jaw broken in two places and, on the surface, his health intact — though that is always difficult to assess given the unseen damage that heavy body punches can inflict. Despite surviving five rounds with Anthony Joshua, Jake Paul is still far from a competent professional boxer. His post-fight comments, which included ambitions of challenging for a cruiserweight world title, only reinforced that disconnect.

At the conclusion of the Tyson–Paul fight, I wrote that I hoped Mike Tyson could live out the rest of his days in peace — healthy in mind and body, with no need to throw another punch.

This time, the wheel has turned.

I wish the same for Jake Paul. He understands that boxing has been good to him, financially and culturally. But if he chooses to pursue fights with truly fearsome cruiserweights — fighters like Jai Opetaia — the outcome will not be entertaining, provocative, or profitable.

It will simply not end well.
Not well at all.