A Champion of Something New

Some Thoughts on Boxing, Jake Paul, and Asking Why We Fight

For Black History Month this year, I decided I would do some reading on a childhood hero of mine, Muhammad Ali. I decided to read The King of The World by David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, which I had grabbed after the journalist Bomani Jones held a book club on his podcast discussing the book. I found the book to be genuinely engrossing, insightful, and at the end deeply moving, nearly bringing me to tears on a few occasions. The book painted a detailed a moving picture of Ali in his early years as he ascended to the world heavyweight title and eventually was stripped of his prime by his religious refusal to be drafted to fight in Vietnam. But beyond Ali, the book did a phenomenal job at painting a picture of not only the people in Ali’s camp like his trainers or his close friend Malcolm X, but also the two other major Black heavyweight champs of Ali’s early years: Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston. The portrait that emerged is one of three men all navigating the strictures and pressures of being Black and gifted in a country that felt anywhere between expectant and petulant to outright disdainful of the talents they possessed. It’s a phenomenal book anyone who loves sports ought to read.

            Muhammad Ali always represented a sort of superhero-like figure to me as a younger man. He was the Greatest of All Time, the powerful man who could not be punched, the man who talked the best trash. (I maintain that “I’m so mean I make medicine sick” is to this day perhaps the single greatest quip ever uttered by an athlete) He conquered the greatest fighters in the ring, but still decided his principles were worth sacrificing for, saying he’d rather sit in jail than to fight in a war he thought was unjust. Even as the sport of boxing has waned in our culture, boxers have a certain magical quality to them I have always admired. I never boxed, although my paternal grandfather did. I enjoy seeing the sport when it’s on, but can’t recall ever splurging on a pay per view fight. But still, boxers represented something electric to me as a youth: a sharp mind, pure reaction, unflinching strength and toughness as you express your own style to do whatever it takes to conquer your opponent. They are in many ways (good and bad) a traditional ideation of masculinity fully realized, and Ali did this for the people. To borrow from Ossie Davis’s eulogy of Ali’s onetime friend Malcolm X, he was “our manhood, our living, Black manhood.” Ali as a cultural icon stands not only above the likes of Jack Johnson and Joe Louis in terms of embodying the mass impact of the Black athlete, but arguably tops even the likes of Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson.

Yet, strangely, the end of the book kept bringing one man to mind repeatedly: Jake Paul. For those unfamiliar with Jake Paul, his biography may seem to be a sort of chaotic whirlwind, not least because of the sheer amount of gigs it involves. Jake “The Problem Child” Paul is a social media personality turned boxer who recently sustained the first loss of his career over the past weekend to Tommy Fury, a reality TV star and half-brother of world heavyweight champion Tyson Fury. Paul was raised in the Cleveland suburb of Westlake, Ohio, and eventually became a social media star with his brother Logan by putting videos of themselves on Vine and YouTube, followed by a stint on the Disney Channel before returning to full time internet content creation. His time in internet stardom has involved rap music, video content such as a fake wedding placed on pay per view, and controversies ranging from deliberately creating massive noise and nuisances with fans at his home to allegations of scamming and sexual assault. While he started off his boxing career fighting other YouTube stars, he eventually shifted into fighting retired UFC fighters to boost his image, before taking the most recent leap to Fury, a man with some boxing experience.

Prior to the fight, Bomani Jones’s HBO show Game Theory ran a segment on Jake Paul’s latest venture, a sports gambling app which features “micro betting”, a feature some are concerned will prove particularly addictive, especially considering Paul’s fanbase is by his own admission disproportionately young. This was followed by a notably contentious interview, featuring a clip of a contemptuous Paul going viral by saying losing the fight was out of the question and that he didn’t “know who the f***” Jones was. To be certain, people had a bit of fun online recalling the exchange after Paul lost his bout. But regardless of whether or not Paul continues his fight career, a constant nagging thought for me has been that it’s a shame we culturally allowed such a show to go on this long. This mournful feeling has persisted as I finished King of the World around this time so much discussion of Paul was going on, in a way that felt worth writing about.

It’s no secret that boxing is not generally considered a sport for those with means: most of the boxers you’ve heard of almost certainly come from crushing poverty or are direct descendants of great boxers (or sometimes, unfortunately, both).  Floyd Patterson was one of eleven children who experienced such self -loathing as a result of his poverty that he scratched an X over his own face on a family portrait at age nine, and spent his days before being sent to reform school locking himself into confined and dark spaces to get out of his own head. Sonny Liston was born into a sharecropping family as the second youngest of 12 children (25 if you count half-siblings) and regularly sustained physical abuse so severe that it left scars that could be seen when Liston was a grown man. It is particularly telling that of the main heavyweight champions in King of The World, Muhammad Ali had the “best” childhood: one in which he grew up the son of laborers in Jim Crow Louisville with a father who was an alcoholic.

It’s not hard to imagine why people with means don’t allow themselves or their children to participate in boxing. The sport is absolutely brutal on the body, in a manner that is universal, unflinching, and unforgiving. The sport is centered around taking repeated and devastating blows to the head and body, combining mass exertion with a demand that you receive the punishment you try and dole out. The violence in a sport like football is central to the sport, but is also  ostensibly ancillary to the final goal of scoring points or preventing the scoring of points. On the contrary, violence is the totality of boxing. There are no trick plays, no strategies, that do not involve beating your opponent in a manner that would literally be criminal in any other context of civilian life. It’s not a coincidence that the disease threatening football’s longevity, CTE, was originally known as dementia pugilistica. (“fist-fighter’s dementia”, a.k.a Punch Drunk Syndrome) Dozens of boxers have died in the ring over the years. In 1983, editorials for the Journal of the American Medical Association called for an outright ban on the sport, a sentiment echoed by similar organizations in England, Canada, and Australia.

In this sense, Paul’s participation in the sport is not exactly problematic. He is willing to take the blows, and to put his body on the line in the ring. Physical trauma recognizes no class boundaries in the ring. However, in another sense, Paul’s decision to wade into boxing on a seeming whim does paint a sharp contrast with most of the fighters who enter the sport. While not much has authoritatively been written on Paul’s childhood, his father was a realtor, and the Cleveland suburb where he grew up has a median household income of around $92,000, and this video of his childhood home provides an idea of what kind of comfortable existence he had growing up. Boxing is not made better as a sport by having a fighter base full of those from society’s margins deciding they have no choice but to beat each other senseless for money. But when the privileged wade in and take up massive space in a sport with dwindling social capital, how else are we to feel but a bit disgusted?

But frankly, this issue is not so much about how Paul sees himself as a boxer as much as it is that he uses boxing as a means to an end. At any time, Paul could (and in my opinion likely will) drop boxing and be on to his next venture. His litany of get-money-quick schemes has proven to be incessantly lucrative thus far, and his foray into gambling apps seems only natural in our current culture obsessed with finding new ways to flip attention into money quickly. In this sense, the boxer is still our avatar in shorts and gloves. Like Joe Louis being “a credit to his race- the human race,” Paul has settled on using bloodsport as the latest in a line of quick one-off outings in content creation that churn money from maintaining the attention of people online. Like Louis being America’s champion, Paul is a champion for a new group working new ways to find cash: the multi-level marketer, the crypto trader, the social media influencer. Boxing may not have ever been noble. In fact, so many have found its existence to be nothing short of odious. But even fighters caught up with the mob made honest trades once they stepped into that ring, and Lord knows the road in and out of the ring was almost always one of immense suffering and pain, neither of which Paul seems to be interested in.

The point in King of the World I felt most moved by was the description of the end of Sonny Liston’s life. Described by some as “the champ nobody wanted,” he had learned boxing in the state penitentiary before the mob became the main bankrollers of his career, as was the norm for all major fighters at the time. Still, his criminal past and alleged side work as an enforcer for the mob in labor disputes led the press to unanimously refer to Liston as everything from a “thug” to outright comparing him to an ape. After winning the belt from Floyd Patterson, Liston initially wanted to be an upright moral champion like Joe Louis, but the public would have none of it. When he came back to his home city of Philadelphia hoping for an official celebration of his victory of the world championship, he found the tarmac completely empty and the newspapers full of articles calling him a worthless disgrace and national shame. His life was filled with people who thought he was no good but still used him, and people close to him said he was constantly worried that essentially everyone but his wife Geraldine had purely transactional relationships with him. After losing to Ali a second time, Liston fought a few more bouts and retired, drinking and doing his best imitation of relaxing in his final days, all before dying in 1970. Friends and the police think he was killed with a “hot shot” (a purposefully lethal dose) of heroin by a crooked police officer, but nothing was ever proven. Nobody even actually knew how old Liston was, as documentation of his early life was so scant, but at the oldest, he was 40 years old. His tombstone in a Las Vegas graveyard reads “Charles ‘Sonny’ Liston: A Man.”

Not everyone agreed. An employee of the Las Vegas Sherriff’s office later said this about Liston: “A bad nigger. He got what was coming to him.” The boxing promoter Harold Conrad was quoted as saying “I think he died the day he was born.”  But I couldn’t help but mourn Sonny Liston, and mourn the fact that the only thing that brought him recognition and any sort of positive attention in life was boxing. As soon as he wasn’t able to do that, the world threw him away, like it does to nearly all of the fighters who were once great champions, save of course for Ali. Here are men who batter their bodies, bottle their broken pasts, and endure torment of their psyche in and after the combat for a sport they quite literally are willing to die for. In some ways, boxing has always been this: men willing to trade brokenness to be recognized in some way. It takes a man as big as Muhammad Ali to be recognized for even more than beating other men in the ring. So many fighters speak of the isolation after they finish fighting, their desire to be known in some way or understood. Mike Tyson, our last great polarizing heavyweight champion in this country, said he identified deeply with Liston: “That may sound morbid and grim, but I pretty much identify with that life. He wanted people to respect him or love him, but it never happened… everybody respected Sonny Liston’s ability. The point is respecting him as a man.” It’s hard to say if Mike has ever fully received his respect as a man, but for the Baddest Man on the Planet to be so vulnerable about it speaks to what a boxer craves.

But not Jake Paul. He just wants your attention long enough to sell you something. I hope he understands exactly why I find that so unseemly.