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It's amazing to me that Jake Paul, a person I've only been peripherally aware of, has managed to reinvent professional wrestling from first principles, and make absurd money doing so.
For those blissfully unaware, Paul is a former disney channel actor and youtube personality who started setting up tomato-can pro boxing matches some years back, and slowly worked his way up through a series of has-beens to grandpa Mike Tyson. Whether those fights were on the level and he just won against bad opponents, or if they were works, is a matter of debate. Last night he organized a fight with a real contender, former heavyweight champ and olympic medalist Anthony Joshua, a fight that Paul was in no way qualified for, and in which he would certainly be murdered if Joshua chose. But, a fight for which each fighter stands to make around $90,000,000.
I feel like a crazy person seeing twitter fill with people gloating that Paul lost. As though that hasn't been the goal of building him up as a heel for years now, to set up a huge cash in when he faced a real boxer and people tuned in to watch him lose. That's always been the way of professional wrestling, build up a heel, make him win so that people hate him and tune in to watch him lose, until it's time for the big moment.
And people BET ON IT. This is like betting on the outcome of a TV show. How are gambling commissions allowing that to happen?
The phrase is overused, but generational wealth was produced in this spectacle. And I feel like I understand the past better. It was a classic "dumb guy" trait in TV and movies when I was a kid, especially older stuff, that stupid people believed that professional wrestling was real. And now I'm seeing people, many of them otherwise intelligent fight sport observers I follow, act like Paul's rejiggered version of professional wrestling is real. And they think they're the clever ones.
I think the trend in influencer boxing is kind of a good thing insofar as it inspires otherwise directionless young men to gain some martial prowess.
But end of the day I'm bored of the pointless spectacle of this type of exhibition. Nobody's earning any real glory here, and we're definitely not getting to see the pinnacle of the sport, with the best competitors squaring off under a 'fair' ruleset and neutral officiants. Even if they're fighting 'for real' we're not really getting a definitive measure of who the better competitor is.
Oh, and you can just add in that the other Paul brother literally performs in the WWE.
So diversifying out to a different combat sport is probably part of the strategy.
Sometimes feels like we're hitting the purest distillation of sports as a moneymaking enterprise. The Athletic performance and outcome of the contests becoming fully secondary to the amount of money that can be earned from the spectacle. Get enough people to watch and to bet on the outcome (on both sides) and it no longer matters so much if you win or lose.
Which Jake Paul seems to have realized.
Where every single sports league is 100% commodified and there's no remaining connection between the team as an entity and their geographic location. You might as well play all the games in the same place at a certain point, why bother making the teams travel all around to play the games anymore? Make the fans fly to you! And it'll make it easier for players to swap to new teams too.
Hell, they should make it so that teams can trade players with each other during the games, that would add some interesting chaos! Its not like there's much loyalty left in the system, too much money to be made.
When all it means to be a 'fan' of a team is to throw money at them and let your emotional state be dictated by their performance. Its not like you can say you grew up in the same town as them, went to the same school, or share any genetic lineage with them. These are top talents scouted from around the country, often around the world, and you get to pay to watch them play, what does it matter whether they're wearing the same logo that you are?
I'm sure its been this way for a while, but yeah, even when its not blatantly scripted like pro wrestling, feels like the fix is always in, the game is designed to profit the players (and coaches, and owners, and advertisers...) and the fans, spectators and bettors are just there to provide the liquidity.
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