Can Jake Paul Fight His Way Out of Trouble?

Like many executives, Jake Paul pays close attention to the fluctuating prospects of the business he runs, which in his case is the business of being Jake Paul. One hot afternoon in Sun Valley, California, he had some encouraging news to report. “I think the narrative is changing from ‘Fuck Jake Paul’ to ‘We love Jake Paul,’ ” he said. As evidence, he adduced some recent data collected from American sports arenas. In April, Paul had travelled to Jacksonville, Florida, for a night of fights sponsored by the U.F.C., the preëminent organization in mixed martial arts. As he made his way to his seat, the attendees did, indeed, chant, “Fuck Jake Paul!” (Daniel Cormier, an M.M.A. champion turned commentator, also took note of Paul’s arrival, and explained his reaction to viewers at home: “I pointed at him and I said, ‘Don’t play with me,’ because I’ll smack him in the face.”) At a subsequent U.F.C. event, held in July in Las Vegas, the television producers did not put Paul on camera. But, Paul observed, the fans were not quite as unremittingly hostile. “It was actually a sophisticated crowd,” he said, by which he appeared to mean that it was a crowd sophisticated enough to tolerate his presence.

Paul is twenty-four and blond, with a confident smirk that is softened, slightly, by feathery eyelashes. He is a lifelong athlete, although until quite recently he seemed unlikely to become a professional one. Instead, since he was fifteen, he had been working alongside his big brother, Logan Paul, to earn the enmity of a significant chunk of the global population, as a prankster and instigator on Vine, the short-lived video-sharing network, and on YouTube, its long-lived rival. Connoisseurs can easily tell the brothers apart—Logan is taller, shaggier, and perhaps more in tune with the absurdity of the lives they have built for themselves. But everyone else tends to lump them together, conflating both their occasional triumphs and their frequent debacles, such as the time, in 2017, when Logan Paul visited a Japanese forest, reputed to be a place people went to commit suicide, and filmed his encounter with a corpse, sparking outrage that threatened to end his YouTube career. So when the brothers announced, a few months later, that they would be facing two of their fellow social-media stars in a boxing match, it looked like merely their latest misadventure, bound to be supplanted by whatever came next.

And yet the Paul brothers ended up devoting far more time to boxing than anyone might have predicted. Logan Paul somehow wound up in the ring with Floyd Mayweather, Jr., and Jake Paul reeled off a string of victories, fighting increasingly credible opponents as he grew increasingly intent on training. Now Jake Paul was preparing to face Tyron Woodley, a muscular and rather solemn collegiate wrestler and former U.F.C. champion. Paul and Woodley had come to Sun Valley to produce a television ad for their fight—Woodley’s first professional boxing match, and Paul’s first match against a guy who could punch. They were filming their parts separately, to eliminate the possibility of unremunerated violence. The setting, a soundstage, was large enough to keep the two men well apart, but Paul was visited in his dressing room by Woodley’s mother, Deborah, an expressive and charismatic woman widely known as Mama Woodley.

“We’re out here doing business,” Paul told her, almost apologetically. “Selling pay-per-views.”

She beamed. “You and Tyron gon’ get out there and beat each other’s ass,” she said.

She departed, and Paul was left alone with his entourage, which included at least two videographers and his girlfriend, Julia Rose, a social-media star with a similarly prankish sensibility. (During the 2019 World Series, Rose positioned herself near home plate and flashed the television camera; earlier this year, she claimed to have helped change the Hollywood sign to read, briefly, “HOLLYBOOB.”) Paul was explaining his plan to knock Woodley unconscious. “It’s a bit bittersweet now, with Tyron’s mom,” he said, his bravado fading for a moment. “I’m going to try and forget that we talked.”

Paul’s bad reputation is not hard to understand if you have seen the videos on his YouTube channel, which have drawn more than seven billion views; that figure, which approaches the population of this planet, does not account for the innumerable videos that summarize or criticize the ones that Paul has posted. His body of work is filled with dubious stunts, such as the time he covered half of his brother’s room in duct tape, and with mind-numbing repetition of the word “bro.” He has also faced some serious allegations. In May, 2020, during the disorder that followed the murder of George Floyd, he filmed himself trespassing in an Arizona mall, alongside looters; at one point, he seemed to be holding a bottle of vodka. “These fuckin’ idiots teargassed me—I ain’t doing shit,” Paul explained on Instagram, gesturing to a row of officers. (The F.B.I. searched his home but has not pursued a federal case; he is facing misdemeanor charges of trespassing and unlawful assembly.) Earlier this year, he was accused of sexual assault by two women. One of them filmed a disturbing YouTube video, describing a night with Paul in 2019 during which he forced her to perform oral sex on him; she recently told the Times that she planned to file charges. The other told the Times that Paul had groped her during an encounter in 2017. Paul denied both accusations, and suggested that his accusers had fabricated them.

By the time the assault allegations were made public, this past April, Paul was so widely disliked that it seemed impossible for his reputation to get much worse. In any case, he had already embarked on his new career in professional boxing, a world in which good behavior tends not to be a job requirement. “One thing that is great about being a fighter is, like, you can’t get cancelled,” Paul told me. In fact, boxing can be a way to monetize a bad reputation: people who would never dream of buying a Jake Paul T-shirt might nevertheless pay to watch someone try to punch him in the face. Paul is not a great boxer, and it is by no means obvious that he will ever become one. But he is already one of the top-grossing fighters in the world.

In general, the public tends to respect boxers for the same reason it tends not to respect social-media influencers: the boxers seem to be toiling and suffering, and the influencers do not. Paul’s strange journey from one world to the other reflects his hunger for attention. It also reflects the hunger of the boxing industry, which has lately been invaded by celebrities and old-timers, who often get big checks for novelty fights that sometimes scarcely seem like fights at all; Mike Tyson, who fought a high-profile exhibition match last year at the age of fifty-four, remains vastly more popular than most of his successors. Boxing has spent decades trying, and generally failing, to transform its top athletes into big celebrities. Now comes a mediagenic villain with a quixotic plan: to achieve that transformation in reverse.

Jake and Logan Paul became boxers on a whim. In 2018, a British YouTuber and rapper named KSI challenged them to fight, and they agreed, without knowing quite what they were signing up for. The next day, they hired trainers, and soon they were running, jumping rope, and pounding away at a heavy bag. Jake Paul remembers thinking, “Bro, this is the hardest thing we’ve ever fuckin’ done.”

Logan Paul earned a draw in his fight against KSI, and then lost a rematch, but he kept talking about his boxing prowess. Eventually, Mayweather—a boxing virtuoso who had retired a few years earlier, but remained a shrewd analyst of risk and reward—agreed to an exhibition fight, which reportedly inspired something like a million people to pay fifty dollars to watch it. Jake Paul has taken a different path. He won his first fight, against KSI’s younger brother, Deji, and then he kept winning.

As Jake Paul became more obsessed with boxing, he moved to Big Bear Lake, a town in the San Bernardino Mountains known as a high-altitude training destination, and then to Las Vegas, a city lousy with trainers and sparring partners, and finally to Puerto Rico—far away, he says, from the Los Angeles night life in which he was once immersed. One day in August, he was sitting on a low couch in a house in a lush gated community in Dorado, where the residents’ golf carts are expected to obey signs that say, in English, “Keep it slow.” Paul liked the fact that, except for himself and his brother, who lives across the road, the area seemed to be free of social-media stars. “Everyone here, they’re all crypto people,” he said.

It was less than three weeks until the fight with Woodley, and Paul was gazing at a wall covered with exhortatory handwritten placards, one for each week of preparation. (The current week’s slogans included “EXECUTE,” “KILL MODE,” and “THE MOST IMPORTANT 20 DAYS OF MY LIFE.”) The “Moneyball” revolution has not yet come to boxing: the sport, largely untouched by advances in statistics and science, relies instead on folk wisdom. Hard work is valued almost for its own sake, and there is an abhorrence of anything deemed distracting. Paul claims to like the simplicity of a fighter’s life, especially compared with the chaos of social-media stardom. As he and some members of his team climbed into a jeep to head to a training session, he explained that one of his coaches had recently prevailed upon him to send his girlfriend back to the mainland—a traditional boxing tactic, although not one that has been substantiated by any double-blind studies. “He wants me to be mad,” Paul said.

The Paul brothers had leased a local warehouse, which they were converting into a gym and a production studio. On this day, it was still mainly empty, an expanse of concrete floor and corrugated roofing with a boxing ring set up on one side and televisions showing fight highlights along a wall. As Paul began a complicated stretching routine, a handful of boxing veterans assumed positions near the ring. There was B. J. Flores, Paul’s head coach, a soft-spoken scholar of the sport who, at forty-two, is only three years removed from his own fairly successful career as a cruiserweight. (Flores is well preserved, but he told me that he’ll never fight again. “I don’t even think about it anymore,” he said, as if he were trying not to recall a bad habit.) His advice to Paul tended to be simple and precise—for instance, he wanted Paul to fluster Woodley by jabbing twice instead of once. “He’s gonna block the first one, but the second one’s gonna hit him every time,” Flores said. “And it’ll make him think.”

Flores has been hanging around boxing gyms since he was four—his father was a trainer. Paul was a wrestler in high school, but he didn’t take up boxing until the age of twenty-one, which means he is trying to compress decades of experience into a few years. In the ring, he went two rounds with Denis Grachev, a Russian journeyman who has lost fourteen of his last twenty-two fights. Paul tried to jab enough to keep Grachev at a distance, and when Grachev pushed him against the ropes he ducked away, pivoting out of danger. He was thinking, which is better than not thinking, though not as good as not having to think.

Football fans don’t have to worry that a bunch of pranksters will put on pads, rent a stadium, and declare themselves Super Bowl contenders. But boxing is an entrepreneurial sport, governed, to the extent that it is governed at all, by an interlocking network of promoters, managers, broadcasters, local government officials, and so-called sanctioning bodies, which crown male and female champions in seventeen weight classes. Despite this proliferation of championship belts, the idea that Paul would win any of them seemed ludicrous back in 2018, when he spent five rounds staggering around a ring with Deji, who looked even less prepared for a prizefight than Paul was. But in his next fights he beat another YouTuber, and then an athlete: Nate Robinson, a former N.B.A. player who was known for his toughness, until Paul sent him crashing to the canvas in the second round. It was time for Paul to face a real fighter—though not necessarily a real boxer.

Paul has been guided in his new career by Nakisa Bidarian, a former chief financial officer of the U.F.C. To a mixed-martial-arts fan, boxing might seem dull: an ancient sport in which two people merely stand and hit each other, following rules that haven’t much changed since they were set down in nineteenth-century London. And to a boxing fan M.M.A. might seem inelegant: a mishmash that occasionally resembles a bar fight, with combatants trading haymakers and then collapsing onto the mat to roll around. In M.M.A., Paul and Bidarian found a supply of fighters who were not necessarily any more skilled at boxing than Paul was, combined with an army of fans who might be willing to pay for the opportunity to see their sport vindicated. Who says M.M.A. fighters can’t punch?

Paul’s first M.M.A. opponent, Ben Askren, was a laid-back wrestling specialist; he strolled to the ring and, less than two minutes later, found that he had been knocked out by a YouTuber. Dana White, the voluble president of the U.F.C., was one of many people who was surprised. Beforehand, he had said, of Paul, “I’ll bet a million dollars that he loses this fuckin’ fight”; afterward, he hastened to explain that he had made no such bet. (When Paul was booed at the U.F.C. event in Jacksonville, he was wearing a T-shirt that said “WHERE IS MY MONEY DANA?”) The Askren knockout popularized the idea that Paul might be a natural: an Internet loudmouth who just happened to be blessed with professional-grade punching power. And so Paul and Bidarian chose to take a calculated risk by selecting Woodley as the next opponent.

Woodley was known as a much better striker than Askren, having won the U.F.C. welterweight championship by knockout in 2016. But his career had mysteriously collapsed when, beginning in 2019, he lost four fights in a row, sometimes looking rather listless. The Paul fight was a chance for him to earn a measure of redemption. It was also a chance for him to earn some money: according to disclosure documents, his pay was at least two million dollars.

The match had been set in motion by an encounter in Paul’s locker room before the Askren fight; Woodley, who had trained with Askren for years, was there to watch as Paul’s hands were wrapped. (This is a venerable boxing tradition, meant to insure that no one sneaks a weapon into his glove, besides his fist.) Friendly trash talk escalated into something slightly less friendly. “I know he gon’ win,” Woodley said, referring to Askren.

“Let’s make a bet,” Paul replied. “We’ll match whatever number you want to put up.”

“I don’t play games,” Woodley said, looking down at Paul, who was sitting backward on a folding chair.

“Sounds like you playing right now,” Paul said, and his lips began to curl mischievously. “You just said your boy’s gonna win, but you won’t bet on it.”

The exchange sparked mockery online: many viewers noted the gulf between Woodley, who seems destined for the U.F.C. Hall of Fame, and Paul, whom one commenter compared to a young Justin Bieber. Then again, Paul’s pop-star-like fan base is what makes him a force in boxing. And by challenging Woodley to a fight he was also proposing a limited partnership: for a few months, Woodley could join the lucrative Jake Paul business.

Woodley comes from Ferguson, Missouri, the eleventh of thirteen children, and recalls growing up as a gang member and a habitual scrapper: “fighting in the streets, fighting in the house for the remote control, fighting because my friends were fighting.” Wrestling helped him escape the neighborhood for the University of Missouri, where he earned a bachelor’s degree and a pair of All-American distinctions. When he was offered his first M.M.A. contract, in 2009, he nearly cried. “I was sleeping on my mom’s couch,” he told me. “I was thirty, forty thousand dollars in debt.” Within a decade, he was being flown around the country, accompanied by a gleaming U.F.C. championship belt. It is a familiar story, and a familiar defense of combat sports, which provide many athletes with a path out of poverty and away from violence—some forms of violence, anyhow.

Paul’s story is less inspiring and maybe more puzzling. He and his brother had rather normal boyhoods in a Cleveland suburb: their mother worked as a nurse, and their father was a real-estate agent and a commercial roofer. Late one night in Puerto Rico, Paul recalled that his father pushed him to win at whatever he did. With this encouragement, Paul turned out to be a pretty good wrestler and a very good content creator: in high school, he started posting skits to Vine, which imposed a six-second limit and therefore rewarded quick punch lines and goofy stunts. (In one video, a guy wearing a wig says, in a motherly voice, “Are you telling me if Jake jumped off a cliff you’d jump off, too?” Cut to the brothers jumping off a cliff, screaming.) On Vine, the Pauls often found themselves shirtless or dancing or both: they were essentially a non-singing boy band, attracting an audience that was evidently huge and seemingly hugely female. The brothers moved from Ohio to Los Angeles in their late teens, and Jake Paul was soon cast on a Disney Channel series called “Bizaardvark,” alongside the future pop star Olivia Rodrigo, playing a good-natured, dim-witted showoff who would do anything on a dare.

Vine effectively shut down in 2016, which obliged Paul to focus his considerable energy on YouTube, where his videos were often twenty minutes long, with a new one posted every day. “Being an influencer was almost harder than being a boxer,” he says now. “You wake up in the morning and you’re, like, Damn, I have to create fifteen minutes of amazing content, and I have twelve hours of sunlight.” Needless to say, “amazing” is a subjective term, but Paul was fluent in the language of YouTube, where he came across as a familiar type: the high-school jock, popular and gregarious, with a propensity for jokes that remind people of their place in the social hierarchy. (One day, he covered the floor with vegetable oil and then challenged his friends to a race, promising the winner a hundred dollars; footage of the resulting bumps and scrapes formed the basis of one of his more popular videos.) He provided running updates on various romances and rivalries, and a good look at his increasingly glamorous life, which seemed to revolve around swimming pools and expensive vehicles.

“I’m not a saint,” Paul told me one night. “I’m also not a bad guy, but I can very easily play the role.” In 2017, he released a charmless hip-hop track, “It’s Everyday Bro,” accompanied by a charmless video, which earned more than three million thumbs-up votes and more than five million thumbs-downs. But Paul told me that he paid less attention to likes and dislikes than to total view counts—in this case, about two hundred and eighty-seven million.

To leverage his popularity, he founded Team 10, a crew of young content creators who stayed together in a rented house. “It was a nightmare,” he says now. “I wanted to be cool and everyone’s friend, but I really was doing it to create a business.” If anything, Paul seems to understate just how bad an idea it was: some of the participants were minors, and the atmosphere evoked an out-of-control freshman dorm. (A report on “Inside Edition” described his neighbors’ anger at the chaos, and showed him roasting marshmallows over a burning mattress and driving a dirt bike into the swimming pool. Inevitably, the segment went viral on YouTube.) The group disbanded not long after, and a number of the members have described Paul as an immature bully, constantly pressuring them to perform dangerous or degrading stunts; Paul denies all of it.

The world of YouTubers thrives on endless reaction—a dizzying cascade of claims and counterclaims. But the accusations of sexual assault raise the possibility that Paul was not just a jerk but a predator. Earlier this year, a performer named Railey Lollie told the Times that she had begun working with Paul when she was seventeen, and that he often referred to her as “jailbait.” She also said that he had once groped her; in the paper’s account, “She forcefully told him to stop, and he ran out of the room.” Justine Paradise, a social-media personality, told a more detailed story in a video posted to YouTube. She said that she was friendly with Paul and that one night he took her to his bedroom, where they danced and then began kissing. In her account, Paul “tried to put his hands places that I didn’t want,” and she moved them away, but Paul ignored this rejection. “He undid his pants and grabbed my face and started fucking my face,” she said. Afterward, he brusquely told her that he wanted to rejoin his friends elsewhere in the house.

Paul has called both of these allegations false. He told me he never would have called Lollie “jailbait” or groped her. And he said, of Paradise, “I didn’t even have any sort of a run-in with this girl.” More than once, he characterized the women’s accounts as “a cry for attention,” which might sound mean-spirited even to people who are inclined to believe his side of the story. He knows, though, that many people will not believe him, partly because plenty of other observers are on record saying that Paul could be boorish and cruel, especially in those days.

Given his line of work, Paul doesn’t necessarily need people to believe him. The fact that he has been accused of sexual violence does not make him particularly unusual in the boxing world. Mike Tyson, after all, served three years in prison for rape, then resumed fighting, more or less as popular as ever. Mayweather, an ostentatious character who is probably the highest-paid fighter of all time (he reportedly made something like two hundred million dollars for his 2015 match against Manny Pacquiao), has faced a number of accusations of violence against women; in 2012, he spent two months in jail after a vicious altercation with the mother of three of his children. But, as long as he was not incarcerated, Mayweather was allowed to fight, and indeed was well incentivized to do so.

One difference, of course, is Paul’s background. While virtually all of the top American boxers are Black or Hispanic, Paul is a white guy from a middle-class neighborhood; for him, boxing was an escape not from poverty but from the seemingly luxurious world of social-media stardom. One of his training partners is J’Leon Love, a boxing veteran from Inkster, Michigan. As Love was rising to prominence, his older brother was shot and killed in Inkster, leaving behind a wife and children. Watching the workout in Puerto Rico, Love considered the unusual path that Paul had chosen. “He could be on a yacht, he could be on a jet, all kinds of women,” he said, admiringly. “But he’s here.” And he offered Paul some measured but seemingly earnest praise: “Kid can fight.”

When Paul talks about what he’s up to, he often sounds, as many popular and polarizing people do, by turns self-pitying and self-aggrandizing. He has started a foundation, Boxing Bullies, on behalf of which he delivers frequent testimonials. “I’ve been a bully when I was a kid, and it was because I was insecure,” he said one afternoon, adding that he shared Tupac Shakur’s ambition to “spark the brain that will change the world.” During the run-up to the fight, Woodley mocked Paul as a troll and a wannabe, a suburban kid who had watched too many “rap videos.” Paul scoffed that Woodley was not passionate about boxing, and was fighting “mostly for a paycheck.” Sometimes Paul tried to frame their encounter as a cosmic struggle for justice: he said that he was on a mission to reform boxing, advocating for higher pay and better medical care. Somehow Woodley, a hardworking athlete but a less flamboyant and marketable figure, was cast as the enemy of progress.

Late one night, Paul grew philosophical. “What I will do with this platform, this following, this attention is far more impactful than what Tyron Woodley would do if he would win,” he told me, as rain-forest sounds burbled from his iPhone. (He had been sitting in an ice bath earlier, and hadn’t bothered to turn off the meditative music he likes to listen to.) “I think the higher powers, or God, or whatever you want to call it or whatever it is—maybe there’s nothing there, maybe it’s just, like, a placebo, and just thinking there’s something that is guiding me, which then gives me the ultimate confidence to go and win, so I don’t even question it—but I do think that the earth would rather me win than him.”

Every boxer with dreams of glory seems to cite the same two antecedents: Muhammad Ali, the epitome of grace and courage, and Mike Tyson, the epitome of ferocity. This is a reflection of the extraordinary impression that these men made; it is also a reflection of the sport’s failure, in the post-Tyson years, to produce figures who made a similar claim on the public imagination. Paul names both as inspirations. (Tyson recently praised Paul as a “white boy with balls,” although he added that he could still knock him out.) But, to gauge Paul’s place in the sport, it may be helpful to consider a different precursor: Mark Gastineau, the former football player, who in 1991 began a new career in professional boxing—“fighting for respect,” as the Los Angeles Times put it. Like Paul, Gastineau was a famous white guy, strong but untutored, and, like Paul, he seemed sure that hard work and determination could make up for missed decades of training. His success, if he achieved it, would debunk the old-fashioned idea that champions are formed through years of patient gym work, but it would also affirm the idea that every boxing match is a test of wills, and that an unusually willful man might therefore triumph against the odds. He won his début bout, against a fighter named Derrick Dukes, by knockout.

Gastineau’s boxing story was complicated by the broadcast, in 1994, of a “60 Minutes” investigation in which Dukes revealed that the fight had been “totally fixed.” Dukes, a former pro wrestler, gave a demonstration: he asked Steve Kroft to throw an imaginary punch, and dropped at once to the ground, imaginarily knocked out. Gastineau denied cheating, but by then the fantasy that he was a boxing savant had already been dispelled, by a journeyman named Tim (Doc) Anderson, who beat him easily in a five-round decision. There was a rematch, which Gastineau won, although apparently not without some help: Anderson later said that the fight’s promoter, Rick (Elvis) Parker, offered him half a million dollars to throw the first fight and, on the night of the second fight, secretly poisoned him. Years later, during a confrontation over the alleged poisoning, Anderson shot and killed Parker.

Boxing has always been a bit of a carnival, and sometimes a bit of a con, which explains why so many boxing fans and professionals have been disinclined to celebrate the arrival of the Paul brothers; in the sport’s endless quest for legitimacy, the Pauls are unreliable allies. But in boxing, as on social media, the Pauls are part of a cultural shift. Just as YouTubers once encroached on boy bands’ traditional turf, celebrity boxing matches have recently threatened to upstage championship fights; at least during the pandemic, viewers who typically ignore professional boxing have seemed to enjoy the novelty of watching famous people punch each other. When Tyson was lured back into the ring last year, he faced another legendary former boxer, Roy Jones, Jr., in a spirited but friendly eight-round exhibition that was one of the year’s highest-profile fights. A series of matches have featured social-media stars—most of whom do not appear to have spent years (or in some cases even weeks) in training.

Logan Paul’s fight against Mayweather, earlier this year, seemed at first like a fiasco. At a press conference, Jake Paul grabbed Mayweather’s hat and was subsequently chased and roughed up by Mayweather and his team, an event that Paul commemorated by getting his leg tattooed with a picture of a hat and the phrase “gotcha hat.” The fight itself, officially an exhibition, was less absurd: Logan Paul lasted eight unscored rounds, though many thought that Mayweather was taking it easy. Afterward, Paul celebrated with exaggerated bravado. On his podcast, “Impaulsive,” he declared, “I’m the best boxer on the planet.”

His co-host, Mike Majlak, roared with laughter, and reminded him that he had never actually beaten anyone. “Zero fuckin’ wins!” he said.

Although Jake Paul takes boxing more seriously, that doesn’t mean boxing is obliged to take him seriously. Lou DiBella is a promoter known for strong opinions and an inability to keep them to himself. Last year, when Paul was gearing up to fight Nate Robinson, DiBella told an interviewer, “The idea that I gotta watch Jake Paul or some of these other numbnuts fighting ex-professional football players and shit like that—who the fuck wants to see that?” This year, on Twitter, he was less dismissive. “There’s a reason @jakepaul has star power,” he wrote. “He’s smart and he’s a master button pusher. And when it comes to #boxing, he shows more respect for the sport (and its potential) than most others in it.” By then, DiBella and Paul were doing business together. One of DiBella’s boxers was fighting on the same card as Paul vs. Woodley: Amanda Serrano, a Puerto Rican champion who is widely viewed as one of the best boxers in the world, and who was hoping that an association with Paul might provide a mutually advantageous exchange of credibility and visibility.

As a YouTube star, Paul earned between one and four dollars for every thousand times his videos were streamed. Those dollars added up, but only as long as YouTube didn’t find his content too objectionable to include in its advertising program. As a professional fighter, he aims to earn more money from fewer viewers: his fight against Woodley, which was distributed on pay-per-view by Showtime, was priced at sixty dollars. The venue was the Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse, in Cleveland, where the Cavaliers play, and the event was billed as a homecoming for Paul, who had grown up watching LeBron James there. He spent the week of the fight at his mother’s house in the suburbs, heading into the city for promotional appearances. By the weigh-in, he was growing notably more reserved. “Jake’s definitely way more serious, bro,” Logan Paul told me, backstage. “Before Floyd, bro, we were, like, making TikToks and shit,” he said. “He’s not like that. He’s big on mental visualization.”

Jake Paul emerged from his dressing room, and the collection of friends and media members nearby suddenly hushed; a fighter preparing for battle, even this fighter, has a certain gravitas. He predicted a knockout in the second or third round. But he had also been spending some time in the woods behind his mother’s house, and he had some non-fight-related questions on his mind. “What do the mosquitoes do when there’s no humans?” he said. “Like, what do they suck blood out of?” He sounded a lot like a guy who once made his living by generating talky content on YouTube—which is to say, a guy who has learned how to convince viewers, often against their better judgment, that they want to see whatever will happen next.

Paul often frames his foray into boxing as a quest for respect, although he does not always act as if that is his top priority. The previous month, he had proposed that the loser get a tattoo saying “I LOVE [the winner],” a bet that Woodley had warily accepted. To create more of a spectacle, Paul had hired a tattoo artist to attend the fight, so that the bet could be settled immediately.

It was striking, on fight night, to see how many people would come out to watch Jake Paul fight, and how relatively few of them would root for him, even in his home town. Whenever his picture came onscreen, there seemed to be more boos than cheers. The arena was full of fans, including more teen-agers and preteens, and more women and girls, than typically attend boxing matches. One Ohio celebrity, Dave Chappelle, was a conspicuous presence near the ring, waving and hollering. Another Ohio celebrity, LeBron James, sent his regrets via Twitter: “CLEVELAND IS JUMPING!! Should have flew back to the crib.” Boxing crowds often ignore or skip the opening fights, but these fans seemed unaware of that convention, and they gave Amanda Serrano one of the biggest ovations of her career, as she spent ten rounds taking apart a Mexican champion named Yamileth Mercado. Serrano said later that she was “surprised” by the applause, and a few weeks after that she announced that she was leaving DiBella to work exclusively with Paul, who had launched a boxing-promotion company.

The most surreal part of Paul’s fight was his introduction. Jimmy Lennon, Jr., the announcer, called him “the popular media sensation, the acclaimed content creator, and undefeated fighter known as the Problem Child,” which must make Paul the first fighter to have his boxing credentials listed third in his biography. He may also have become the first to compete while wearing trunks with embedded digital screens, which were flashing his name when the bell finally sounded. As he and Woodley stalked and pawed each other, the veteran boxing broadcaster Al Bernstein described Paul as “a pretty good combination puncher,” and then added a caveat: “You know, you temper that with the fact that he hasn’t yet fought a pro boxer.” Paul had won his previous fights while taking very little punishment, but the ability—and the willingness—to withstand punches is essential to boxing, to the sport’s mystique. It is harder to hate a person when you have watched him get hurt.

It happened near the end of the fourth round: Paul ducked his head, and Woodley hit him with an overhand right, sending him back with such force that he had to grab the ropes to stay on his feet. (A different referee might have ruled this an official knockdown.) The Ohio crowd was cheering for a Missouri guy, and Woodley waved his right fist triumphantly even as he kept pressing forward, hunting Paul. What followed was both anticlimactic and impressive: Paul refused to fade, and in fact looked somewhat revived in the later rounds, while Woodley let himself be outpunched. When the scores were read, Paul won a split decision, which most observers agreed he deserved; he had survived, and kept his undefeated record intact.

Before the fight, Paul had talked about his eagerness to return immediately to Puerto Rico and continue his training. But in the ring after the fight he took a more ambivalent tone. “I’ve barely got my hair cut in, like, two years, my teeth are all crooked, my nose is crooked, I’ve dedicated my past eighteen months to this,” he said. “I think I might need to chill out for a second, figure out who I am. I’m only twenty-four.”

Woodley was in no mood to talk about time off—he wanted a rematch. “Me and Jake need to run that back,” he said, and then he addressed Paul not as an opponent but as a business partner. “Nobody gon’ sell a pay-per-view like we did.” (Exact figures are kept secret, but reports indicate that about half a million people bought the fight.) Paul suggested that he would grant a rematch if Woodley got the tattoo he had agreed to, and a month later Woodley posted proof on Instagram: the words “i LOVE Jake Paul” inscribed, seemingly permanently, on the inside of his middle finger. By then, Paul had moved on. “I’m leaving Tyron in the past,” he said—thinking, perhaps, of that perilous fourth round.

The Woodley fight made Paul seem less like a phenomenon or a fraud, and more like an ordinary boxer, albeit one with plenty of work to do on his footwork and punch mechanics. A Web site called BoxRec uses a mathematical formula to rank every active professional, and it recently listed Paul as the five-hundred-and-eighty-third-best cruiserweight in the world, out of nine hundred and twenty-eight. That doesn’t seem wrong. But boxing is entertainment, and so far Paul’s fights have entertained. Maybe some of the viewers were inspired to buy the recent heavyweight-championship fight between Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder, who fought at the highest level, trading punches and knockdowns until Wilder collapsed onto the ropes and slumped to the canvas. It was a thrilling fight, and also a terrifying one—a historic encounter from which neither man may ever fully recover.

Paul says that he plans to keep boxing for three or four more years, working to build a new business and to shed, or partially shed, an old reputation. Having succeeded in the chaotic new world of social media, he seems happy, for now, to retreat into the chaotic old world of boxing, adopting a business model—pay-per-view—that was state of the art when Muhammad Ali fought Joe Frazier on HBO, in 1975. Paul will probably never give us anything like Fury-Wilder III, although he recently announced that in December he will fight Fury’s little brother, Tommy Fury, a nominally professional boxer who is still learning on the job. If Paul is defeated, he may suddenly become much less marketable, because his career is less suspenseful: the thing everyone is waiting for will have happened. In the meantime, he can keep doing what boxers are expected to do: risk his body and mind to thrill paying customers—including the many who are rooting against him. The appeal of boxing, for fans and fighters alike, is inseparable from the extraordinary toll it takes. Each fight is transformative. You don’t come out exactly the way you went in. ♦