AUSTIN MCBROOM AND BRYCE HALL PROFESSIONAL
AUSTIN MCBROOM AND BRYCE HALL TV

From the start, he was able to immediately attract an audience from his years of notoriety as an influencer and tremendous wealth available to pay the best available trainers and buy the time to chase his dreams.

AUSTIN MCBROOM AND BRYCE HALL PROFESSIONAL

But Paul’s fame and money has made him unlike most professional boxers. “Strip away the celebrity status and success as a content creator, what he’s doing is no different than any other professional boxer,” Espinoza said. An experienced clown, Paul knows the best jokes have a grain of truth in them.Īt the news conference, Stephen Espinoza, the head of Showtime Sports (which was co-producing the fight with MVP), called Paul “unprecedented,” adding that no boxer has ever headlined at the Garden after just five professional fights. “When are you going to fight a real boxer?” someone else yells. “You’re not a real boxer yet,” a girl tells him. In a June YouTube video titled “The Biggest Risk of My Career,” Paul performs a skit about all the pressure he’s getting. No one will take Paul seriously as a boxer until he fights a professional, but the matches keep getting scrapped. was filling in for Paul’s original opponent, Tommy Fury, former Love Island UK contestant and professional boxer, who dropped out citing travel issues. That was supposed to change at Madison Square Garden on Aug. But two and a half years after the change, Paul has yet to fight a professional boxer. Using his influencer earnings, Paul formed his own promotions company, Most Valuable Promotions (MVP), in 2021 and personally picked his opponents: mixed martial artists, a fellow YouTuber, and a former NBA player. Few influencers from his era of fame have been able to successfully pivot away from YouTube to a different career, but he has kept the public’s interest as he’s shifted from creating content online to the boxing ring. A master of the internet’s outrage cycle, he still has 67.4 million followers across social media platforms, though his posting schedule has decreased dramatically over the past few years in favor of a rigorous gym routine.

Now 25, Paul doesn’t have to get fake married to his chaotic YouTuber ex-girlfriend Tana Mongeau, urge his friend to jump off a roof into a pool, or cover a car in peanut butter to maintain his fame. “When you grow up in the spotlight and you’re dealt so much power and responsibility at a young age, it’s easy to fumble. “Boxing changed my life and saved me in a lot of ways,” he told me later.

Rahman retorted resentfully, calling Paul a “content creator.” A longtime boxing reporter later told me the scuffle was “pretty standard,” but there’s nothing quite like watching two muscular men whose enormous egos are an occupational hazard lob verbal jabs back and forth.Īnd though Jake Paul the prank vlogger has supposedly been succeeded by Jake Paul the serious fighter since his January 2020 shift to professional boxing, it’s clear he’s intent on editing his public image like he might have done with a YouTube video: curating fights, creating drama, and angling unerringly for attention. Paul challenged Rahman to make his Instagram display name “I let my dad down” if he lost the fight. 6.ĭuring the news conference, one of Paul’s best-known skills - trash-talking, or what the announcer dubbed “tremendous theater” - was on display.

Paul was set to fight Hasim Rahman Jr., the son of a two-time world heavyweight champion, on Aug.

AUSTIN MCBROOM AND BRYCE HALL TV

The promotional materials showed a steely-eyed boxer ready to fight, but the man in front of me was hamming it up for the crowd.Ĭameras were trained on him, just as they had been for the past nine years: first by his older brother Logan, who filmed him wreaking havoc on the world as an absurdly exaggerated 16-year-old, and now, by TV reporters eager to broadcast interviews from a news conference about his first match against a professional boxer. In July, on one of Madison Square Garden’s more unassuming stages, Jake Paul gently sang “Empire State of Mind” beneath an enormous poster of his own visage.

Austin mcbroom and bryce hall