Jake Paul has a fight coming with former UFC champ Tyron Woodley sometime in August on Showtime PPV, but the YouTube celebrity-turned-novelty boxer has ideas about what could come in his future, and is ready to troll everyone about all of it, like usual.
“I just want to continue to be the most disruptive boxer in the history of the sport. I think it’s taking it on a fight-by-fight basis, and continuing to build these fights and make them even bigger, even bigger, take on more serious opponents,” Paul told TMZ.
“Look, if you asked me if I was gonna be where I’m at three years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you. I don’t even wanna think about or cap myself with the possibilities. I’m open-minded, and I think anything is possible. I think I could be fighting against Canelo Alvarez for the WBC or WBO championship belt. Really, the sky is the limit. It’s just about how serious I’m gonna take it, and I do take it seriously. More seriously than 99.9 percent of these ‘professional boxers’ that are out there.”
That last part ruffled some feathers, obviously, and was designed to do so.
On an ESPN Ringside post about the Paul interview on Instagram, Ishe Smith replied, “Canelo would fucking kill you, and it’s disrespectful to say you take the sport more serious than 99 percent of the boxers! Well fight a real fucking fighter then and stop with the MMA bullshit.”
In reality, Paul probably does take his approach more seriously than a lot more professional boxers than professional boxers will admit. I mean, there are a lot of people out there with active pro boxing licenses. The vast majority of them are not very good and don’t have access to the level of training Paul does.
I mean, you know, devil’s advocate or whatever, and I doubt Jake Paul was intending to speak on the guys called in on nine days’ notice to lose to a prospect on a Facebook prelim or a CES Boxing card or whatever. Again, he obviously meant to troll and get people riled up. Also not saying this makes Paul particularly good at boxing on a professional level, mind you. Most of us can take a sport as seriously as humanly possible and still not come close to being good enough at it to be considered world class.
As far as someday fighting Canelo, you know, never say never — I think if you haven’t learned by now how stupid this can all get, you’re not paying attention — but Alvarez is particularly annoyed with the Paul brothers’ existence in or around the boxing world. There’s also the issue of Canelo probably absolutely maxing out as a 175 lb fighter, while Paul has been around 190 for all three of his pro fights against Other YouTube Guy, Basketball Man, and Washed MMA Grappler.