Jake Paul Is Sorta Brilliant And Showtime’s Paul Play Isn’t Looking Stupid

I was driving the other day, on Long Island. It took 2 hours 15 minutes to get from my neighborhood in Brooklyn to Manorville, where my younger daughter is liking taking horse-riding lessons. The lesson went pretty well, this was Saturday afternoon, and on the drive back, me and Jules stopped and ate from a nearby Chipotle. We did a grab ‘n go in-the-car picnic. Then after a search for dumb stuff in a Dollar Tree, we headed back to BK.  We passed by a McDonalds, and under the Golden Arches it read “Billions and Billions Served.”

I started a boring dad unasked-for explanatory monologue to Jules, about what that signage used to say back when I was her age. I was going to tell her that I lived in Wellesley, Mass., and maybe once a month, my dad would drive the kids—I’m one of 5—to McDonalds. We had to drive like 15 minutes, toward Framingham, into Natick, because stuffy Wellesley didn’t allow that business riff-raff in their territory. I don’t recall the pattern of when we’d go. Possibly more when my mom was in a  funk, and the mood and familial organization functionality suffered. I wouldn’t tell Jules the last part… Before I launched into that, I digressed in my head, thinking to myself wouldn’t it be minor-league cool if McDonalds asked an intern to tabulate a fairly-close-to-the-real number of beings served.

From Over How Many Billion Served dotcom.

But, I didn’t bore Jules at that moment because I didn’t recall what the McDonalds on Route 9 boasted as far as numeric prominence back in 1978. Didn’t they maybe insult my sister Suzanne with a cop-out guesstimate of “millions and millions served” after keeping up with a hard-ish tally?

That was many decades ago, but I can ask her, she might remember. Anyway,  Jules would have yawned, or, because she’s vegan, might have let out an “ewwww” at the mention of the planet’s number source of cow killing. 

Digressing again, now…

The talk of McDonalds is actually relevant to this column, I will say why in a bit.

On Saturday night, provoco-trepeneur  Jake Paul fought in Tampa and showed, again, that his technique is crazily refined for someone who had no un-pro bouts and just a few professional ones. At 5-0, with 4 KOs, having not yet fought a professional boxer, is still raw… but his right hand is legit.

That young man could, I’m guessing, crack in kindergarten, on the set of whatever Disney show he was on, and keep askin Askren and now Tyron Woodley to describe just how hard.

This “content creator” is shifting content in foes’ heads, and is the most clever self marketer the sport has seen since Floyd Mayweather.

The Ohioan…oh, and that right there is box he can check, Ohio doesn’t traditionally turn out that many interesting people. There’s Don King.

Also, Jim Backus, Dave Chappelle, Nora Kuzma and George Steinbrenner. Plus, Erma Bombeck, and oh yeahhh Randy Savage and a small band of sad sacks would say Jamie Farr should be on the list.

This kid Jake’s aesthetic is a mix of Cali surf/crypto douche and Midwestern inoffensiveness/humble charm. That look–which, by the way, is paired with mannerisms fine-tuned while in the Disney studio mix of shows for precocious and wish they were precocious preteens–is well suited for this experimental age, in which life for many/most kids the world over is being experienced through the lens of social media accounts.

That means that every day, a shitload of times, people are making judgements based off severely limited information. It’s fucking people up, those who consume, and those who place content on the platforms. Whether you scroll IG to gawk at rando and anonymous body wonderlands, or you go to the gym, and post during that 90 minutes an average of three pics of you showing off your physique to your following, it’s fucking people up.

But, hello, so is going to school, nervous about that algebra test after awaking two hours before from a nightmare that some demented fuckface wanted notoriety fame using a shortcut, the guns his dipshit parents purchased him. They got the latest addition to the arsenal for his sweet 16 which he spent locked in his room crafting his cowardly bid at immortality in a spiral notebook from a humanities class and also whacking it. He interacted with his parents most minimally that night,  probably only when he yelled a”Yes Ma!” lie when his mother asked him if he took his calming meds today.

The scroller gets a dopamine hit as they fantasize about doing a mix of erotic yoga and filthy Twister with that IG super vixen, or the other one, or wait, maybe this one. The proud poster gets a surge of good feelings when their latest snap of self draws an immediate surge of feedback. It’s not nourishing, overly, but at least it encourages a certain level of fitness, right? Jake Paul is high on a short list of people who are mastering this age, but not in a egregiously dreadfully craven way. He pushes buttons, plays cards, mixes it up all the time so he leaves you wondering what he’s going to say or do twice a minute. At this moment, and this has been the case for a year or more, there is no better marketer of self in boxing. And he’s rivaling and surpassing persons in the wrestling space.

And here it is–the guy deserves it. I mean, as much as anyone does in this wickedly warped time frame (isn’t the Earth as fucked physically and its inhabitants mentally and emotionally as maybe ever)

His instincts are sharp as fuck. Like this– most everyone is too cheap to understand that giving away Rolexes costs Jake Paul $5,000 or whatever, and he receives  X amount of publicity as a return on his drop in the bucket investment.

He gets people talking, and paying attention, because he isn’t boring. The content creator is freak show popular, because he’s doing all this button-pushing in a strange age. Sensitivity to the possibility that one is stepping in shit with an errant joke, or an unintended slight, or what have you, means quippy public figure people are treading extra carefully, and not risking a blowback by saying or doing something that might risk mass censure. Paul acts like he doesn’t worry much if at all that he might over step a line, and so he gets into a DNGAF flow when he’s in front of an audience or camera.

Dig this minor brilliance— Jake Paul announced he’d pay $500,000 to Tyron Woodley if Tyron kayoed him on Dec. 18.

Oh, you noticed I wrote he “announced” that contract rider, yes? Yeah, I’ve got one eyebrow raised as I type, because did it look to you like Woodley believed he’d get an extra half million bucks if he knocked out Little Paul? That’s part of the “charm,” part of what draws all the casuals who see Paul being embraced by ESPN, and who clicked the IG, TikTok, Twitter and Snapchat replays of Paul using his concussion causing right on Woodley in Tampa like ten million times. I’ve noticed Stephen Espinoza, sagely, referring more to gaudy viral video when speaking to the success of the Jake Paul Showtime gamble. Wise move; content overload has hurt boxing, and of course boxing has hurt boxing by setting up leagues that don’t often enough do inter-league play, and ratings sometimes look depressingly low.

No twisting it, I was mostly bored watching Paul and squared up Woodley huff and clinch excessively for 5 plus rounds… But Jake knows that as long as the fireworks go off at 9:33 pm it doesn’t matter that it rained all day until 8 pm.

It was not the Thrilla in Manila, but yep, viewers got their pound of flash, their “oh shit” moment, and Paul did it again, he manufactured another viral highlight. Pic by Amanda Westcott

Yes, yes, his foe picking filter is narrow: he sets his possibles net to “35 and over Must be on losing streak in MMA Must have taken copious punishment in long career Must be two or more divisions out of ideal weight class.” He is a businessman semi-boxer, and I’m more open to the idea that he might be, overall, good for boxing.  Hello, The New Yorker did a multi page feature on him, he’s now proven he’s got staying power, and isn’t almost over his 14th minute.

Our friends at Showtime made a decision during this pandemic period that there would be a shift in what wagons they’d be hitching to. So, though purists scoff, denigrate and diss, I have to think as long as Paul’s leveraging is reasonable, this play is a better bet to keep a program growing than most if not all the other options.