CARVILL'S NOTES: Should boxing purists give Jake Paul a chance?

Independent

4 hours ago

It is easy to dislike Jake Paul. As a congenitally lazy person, it is something that I have been doing for some time.
Paul makes no attempt to come across as likeable. A lot of it must be theatre, the act of drawing eyeballs and attention, but his public image is that of the 'Problem Child', Steve Stifler in boxing gloves.
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There are a lot of marks against Paul, who fights this weekend on DAZN. Perhaps the most damaging when it comes to his dealings in the boxing world is that he said, four years ago, that he had early signs of CTE.
'I've gone and gotten brain scans,' he said at a press conference to promote his fight against Ben Askren in 2021, 'and have early signs of CTE.'
No one knows exactly why Paul made those remarks. It may be that he thought he had shown symptoms resulting from concussions. Maybe a doctor had even told him that. He may have thought it was a good way to market the fight and to bolster his credibility.
But there is no way to test for CTE pre-mortem and it is not something that should be taken lightly.
A few years ago, I spent a few times with Alan Blyweiss, a former standout amateur who, after a disastrous start to his professional career (stopped in both fights), became one of Lennox Lewis's regular sparring partners for over a decade.
In his mid-fifties, Alan suffers every day from the impact of his career. He struggles with balance, memory, cognition. His heart sometimes stops beating, and the pacemaker in his chest has to shock him back into life. He drinks copious amounts of water because his brain finds it difficult to regulate his body's temperature.
He told me, honestly, when I was sat with him late one night. 'This CTE is going to kill me. I'm doing what I can to hold it back, but it is going to take my life.'
So I feel like I have some kind of stake in this.
I wanna retract my comments made about CTE as it relates to me and my medical history.
It's a very serious condition that I should not have misspoken about.
— Jake Paul (@jakepaul) April 16, 2021
There was a later suggestion of self-awareness as Paul walked back his 'diagnosis'. Posting to X/Twitter, he said: 'I wanna retract my comments made about CTE as it relates to me and my medical history. It's a very serious condition that I should not have misspoken about.'
So let us give him the benefit of the doubt on that one.
I am also tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his commitment. Training in Puerto Rico, Paul seems to genuinely be making efforts – as my colleague Harry Bullmore wrote earlier this week.
Perhaps Paul is dedicated. Perhaps it is just a work.
But here is an idea. Paul, rightly or wrongly, is one of the biggest names in the sport right now. That is why so many names are looking to him for a big payday.
No one ever questioned the numbers when Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao fought ten years ago. But I saw some of the filings with the Nevada State Athletic Commission (NSAC), which detailed how much all of the fighters on that card were paid. Let us just say that there was a steep drop-off after the headliners.
So it would be a measure of character, for someone who earns so well outside of the ring, to spread some of that love within the four ropes that make up the workplace of his fellow boxers.
We know the measure of Paul's character within the ring. Despite his 'Problem Child' persona, he has always fought graciously and cleanly. It would also prove to be a measure of the man for him to let some of that money spread around him.
And on that note:
When I was younger and making those decisions a young man makes that sets the course of his life, one of my big influences was the 1996 documentary When We Were Kings by Leon Gast. The film, which tells the story of the 1974 bout in Zaire between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, won the Oscar for best documentary feature that year. And around 2001 and 2002, I watched it obsessively and, through it, saw the lives of Norman Mailer (overrated) and George Plimpton (underrated) as they jetted around the world, covering big-time boxing, writing books, and generally being scoundrels. That, I thought, is the life for me. So it was a delight when friend Carolyn introduced me to a friend of hers a few years ago, saying, 'Hey, you should meet my friend Pete. He writes on boxing.' We were sitting on the terrace of the Brufani Hotel in Perugia, Italy, while at the International Journalism Festival. This friend, Caroyln told me, had an uncle that had made a film about boxing. It turned out to be the niece of Leon Gast, who was beyond pleased that she had met someone who had been so influenced by her uncle's work. It seemed to make her night. It definitely made mine.
Fighters fall out with one another all the time, and do so because it seems to make for decent ticket sales. Afterwards, as I wrote last week, they all admit that it was a pretence, they actually respect and like each other, and become friends. It is a cycle as dispiriting as it is boring. But there is one fallout that both seems genuine and shows no sign of resolution. I am talking, of course, about that between BoxRec and the WBA. The pair, it seems, fell out some time ago when it seems the WBA scraped a ton of data from BoxRec, then passed it on to Fight Fax. Being boxing, this is all kinds of murkiness about it, like stamping into the silt that sits at the bottom of a lake. As a consequence, BoxRec removed all mentions of the WBA from its rankings, meaning that many fighters are no longer considered by the recordkeeper to have been world champions. While it would be nice to have just one recognised champion per division – and fewer divisions at that – this seems to be the wrong way to go about it. Right now, the exclusion of the WBA from BoxRec weakens both entities.
A few weeks ago, former cruiserweight champion Marco Huck was ringside in Hamburg to watched Labinot Xhoxhaj defend his EBU heavyweight title against Mourad Aliev (I was commentating that night, in the interests of disclosure). Huck told German newspaper BILD that he fancied a shot at Xhoxhaj, probably at some point in September in Berlin. This would mark yet another 'comeback' fight for Huck. He was scheduled to fight Joe Joyce in Hannover, Germany, in 2020 but pulled out at the last minute. His next fight was ten rounds against a Butterbean-like Dennis Lewandowski in front of a few hundred people in the small town of Braunlage. He was then set to fight Evgenios Lazaridis in the same town, but pulled out before the fight was later restaged in Berlin. I had organised travel to both Hannover and Braunlage for the cancelled fights, so I am a little sceptical that anything Huck arranges will actually happen. That said, if the fight is arranged for Berlin but then called off, at least this time I will not be stuck with train tickets or a hotel reservation that cannot be cancelled.
Senior writer/editor Pete Carvill is the author of Death of a Boxer (a Daily Mail and Irish Times 'Sports Book of the Year') and A Duel of Bulls: Hemingway and Welles in Love and War. He is also a frequent blow-by-blow commentator on DAZN for boxing from Germany.
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