Sport or Stunt

 This week everyone appears to be deeply concerned for the wellbeing of 28-year-old YouTube celebrity Jake Paul. The announcement of his fight against Anthony Joshua next month has generated a flood of foreboding prognoses, and fair enough. Stepping into the ring with a two-time world heavyweight champion when a) you're not even a heavyweight, b) your record consists almost entirely of novices and geriatrics and c) you still fight like a marmoset trapped in an empty crisp packet...

Obviously Jake Paul will eventually lose, and there may even be some cartoon blood spat in the process. But at the end they're going to hug and Joshua is going to call Paul a warrior, a true fighter, and the pair will hoist their arms skywards, and Jake Paul will live to grift another day...

And what we essentially have here is the ultimate collision of these two worlds, these two kinds of fame and power, the pure athlete and the performance artist, the puncher and the prankster, meeting on weird middle ground. Is this sport or stunt?...

The Colosseum, Rome
Angelo Maria Costa (1670-1721)
Photo Credit: Senate House, University of London [CC BY-NC-SA]

The first thing to note is that the danger is the point. Or rather the perception of danger. The idea that Paul may get seriously hurt as a result of this fight, or even die, scandalises many lovers of the sport. Which is exactly why it must be invoked as often and as gruesomely and as gratuitously as possible. This is the stuff that turns the wheels, sells the tickets, outrages the traditionalists. A dead Jake Paul: even to read these words will feel to some of you like a thrilling incantation, awful and alluring in equal measure, one that may just persuade you to watch on Netflix...

This is a guy who, along with his older brother Logan has been chasing YouTube fame since he was a child. This is an algorithm native; a man steeped in hard numbers, dark desires, white lies and the unfailingly lucrative relationships between them...

And if big-time boxing is all about creating suitable matches, internet culture thrives on the outlandish mismatch... Ordinary bloke tries to last eight rounds with Anthony Joshua wearing regulation 10oz gloves. This is sport as elaborate viral hoax... Celebrity boxing is one of the few prototypes of modern sport articulating exactly what it wants.This is sport stripped of the niceties, the trappings and inhibitions. The only true worth here is fame and bluster, money and eyeballs. It's a grift and you will happily watch us grifting, because you want this. And even if you do not want this, we will force feed it into all the places you get your sport, your favourite websites and your social feeds and your betting apps, until you do want it...

(Jonathan Liew, The Guardian, 2025)

Who is Jake Paul and what is his claim to fame?  And why will people pay a lot of money to watch  this mismatch? A chaser of fame versus a former heavyweight champion of the world. Answer: to see if Jake Paul will get seriously injured or possibly die in a boxing ring? What is going on here? A spectacle, an entertainment disguised as boxing?