IT SAYS much about the current state of this sport that Jake Paul, boxing’s favourite antichrist, is beginning to sound like the voice of reason.
With ongoing, bitter battles surrounding the use of performance-enhancing drugs, a continued failure to make the sport’s biggest fights and the rise of ‘crossover’ boxing on one of the biggest platforms, suddenly the self-styled ‘Problem Child’ really isn’t that much of a problem.
And, in truth, Paul’s origin story is not too dissimilar to the thousands of others told in these pages over the past century: A man struggling for purpose, at a crossroads in his life, who stumbled across the sport and simply could not shake it off. The only real difference is that his following on YouTube was greater than the entire population of Romania or Chile.
“I think it helped me find out who I actually was,” Paul recalls, when
