Brawl for All

By Sean Nam

In our new issue, Sean Nam explains how clout chasers like Jake Paul ruined boxing—and how decrepit and corrupt regulatory bodies played blind and profited big.

SHAM PRIZEFIGHTING GOES BY many names these days—crossover boxing, celebrity boxing, influencer boxing—but it’s been around a long time. In the 1940s, a retired Jack Dempsey, folk hero of the Roaring Twenties, struck a path on the comeback trail by taking on a string of wrestlers. In 1975, George Foreman traveled to Toronto to flatten five tomato cans, one after the other, in a single night, in a bid to restore his confidence after Muhammad Ali had shattered it in Zaire. A year later, Ali went fifteen execrable rounds with the wrestler Antonio Inoki in their bewildering mixed-rules mash-up in Tokyo. The twenty-first century saw the breakout of celebrity boxing, featuring D-listers who were, according to one promoter’s pitch, on the prowl for their sixteenth minute of fame. Featuring the likes of Tonya Harding and Joey Buttafuoco, the Fox television series Celebrity Boxing was a ratings hit in 2002, some of the episodes going neck and neck with The West Wing and Fear Factor.

What has changed recently, however, is our attitude toward what can be described with the umbrella term “gimmick boxing.” When twenty-seven-year-old YouTuber-turned-boxing-agitator Jake Paul and fifty-eight-year-old boxing alpha Mike Tyson linked up last November to swap punches in their live Netflix spectacle, it was as close anything has come in our anemic, discombobulated democracy to being a come-together cultural moment; hate it or love it, people were watching. With more than seventy thousand spectators present in the stands of the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium, the fight saturated the media ecosystem and lured Wall Street and Madison Avenue, with companies like energy drink brand Celsius and credit score tracker Experian latching onto the event as sponsors—unusual developments in contemporary boxing, given its shrinking public profile and haphazard business model.

The floodgates opened in 2017. Regarded as the biggest stars of boxing and mixed martial arts, respectively, Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Conor McGregor broke pay-per-view records in an extravaganza that year, reportedly generating more than $600 million. (Only Mayweather’s long-awaited showdown with Manny Pacquiao in 2015 has performed better.) Contested under boxing rules—boxers are usually inept when kicks and grappling are involved—the fight was also held as a pro bout, meaning open betting lines and more money for “Money” Mayweather, who got to call the shots because he is inarguably the most financially successful prizefighter in history. (Mayweather, in fact, attempted to plunk down $400,000 on himself in a prop bet—KO in less than nine and a half rounds—the night before the fight but was denied.) His one fight with Robert Guerrero in 2013 netted him a minimum $32 million (not including pay-per-view upside, gate revenue, and foreign television rights), whereas McGregor, effectively an employee of the wage-gouging Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), needed nine fights across a seven-year period to earn nearly $20 million, according to court records.

“Gimmick boxing has never been more lucrative, online, and, alas, legitimate.”

The year 2017 was also a pivotal moment in the internet culture fueling gimmick boxing’s current permutation. British YouTubers Joe Weller and Theo Baker—roughly seven million subscribers between them currently—bandied punches with headgear inside an empty gym and posted it online. Like the porno set bouncer Kimbo Slice, who parlayed backyard brawls posted on the web to a pro-MMA career, Weller and Baker created an inadvertent sensation whose virality went up another notch when the YouTuber KSI called out Weller, the winner. Six months later, the two sold out an eight-thousand-seat London arena and drew a peak of 1.6 million viewers; two days later, the playback garnered twenty million views. Soon thereafter, Logan Paul, Jake’s older brother and an influencer in his own right, got in on the action by duking it out with KSI—first in 2018, then again in 2019. Suddenly Twitch streamers, TikTokers, and OnlyFans influencers with handles like FaZe Sensei, Halal Ham, and Astrid Wett were leaving their gaming chairs to duck through the ropes. KSI went so far as to establish his own boxing promotional company, Misfits Boxing, whose sole focus is to recruit from the influencer side. Mayweather, always on the lookout for ploys with low risk and high reward, immediately saw the appeal of pairing up with a heel like Logan Paul; the pair would get together in 2021 for an exhibition match that ended up generating more pay-per-views than the majority of high-level fights in recent years. To purists who accuse him of tarnishing the sport and undoing his legacy by fighting the likes of Paul and, most recently, borgata nepo baby John Gotti III, “Money” Mayweather has a simple retort: no one’s forcing you to watch. Gimmick boxing has never been more lucrative, online, and, alas, legitimate.

The rise of gimmick fights in this era has often been framed as an either-or proposition: Is it competition or entertainment? Does it bring a fresh audience to a sport that struggles to stay relevant? Or does it crowd out actually good fights from the marketplace? The answers are polarized: “The Honor of Boxing Is at Stake,” went one column in the New York Times, ahead of Mayweather-McGregor. Later, the Dallas Morning News would claim that “Tyson-Paul isn’t a gimmick fight. It’s just what boxing needs.” Others hold that the two can coexist peacefully, if separated. “We can do the two things side by side without polluting each other,” then-president of Showtime Sports Stephen Espinoza told the New York Times in 2021. “The danger is when you start mixing and matching events, and trying to present one as the other.” But it’s likely too late for such binary thinking. To the extent that the gimmick fight has permeated (polluted?) boxing at large—and it has—we’re already in a place where it can be difficult at times to tell the difference between the two.

Continue reading “Brawl for All,” an essay by Sean Nam, on our site.

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