“GET MY MOTHERFUCKIN MONEY, JAKE!"
-Snoop Dogg
The right hand followed the jab, just like they’ve taught it in rundown, stench filled gyms across the globe for more than a hundred years. Both connected flush, the victim’s curly mop flying every which way as he collapsed almost comically to the mat.
Ben Askren, the voluble amateur wrestler previously best known for a tete-a-tete with UFC President Dana White and a, um, knee-a-tete with MMA provocateur Jorge Masvidal, was suddenly infamous for a whole new indignity—being knocked silly by YouTube sensation Jake Paul, an anthropomorphized bottle of expired Axe Body Spray in a discontinued scent.
In theory you expect a sports commentator to maintain some vestige of impartiality and decorum in a moment like this. But when that commentator is rapper Snoop Dogg and that “sport” is celebrity boxing, I suppose I can forgive a little lowering of the bar.
After all, once wrestling god Ric Flair has refereed a slap fight between two overweight gargantuas and actor Pete Davidson has threatened to fire his agent on the air, the gloves, as they say, are most definitely off. And, in Snoop’s defense, boxing promoter Oscar DeLa Hoya had already established a new announcing low with a seemingly substance-aided stream-of-consciousness diatribe that lasted throughout the co-main event fight between former UFC champion Frank Mir and retired cruiserweight boxer Steve Cunningham.
Even the venerable Al Bernstein was drinking and indulging on the air, side-by-side with Slater from Saved by the Bell and someone called “Crimefaces.”
I swear to God, none of this is fabricated for effect. Triller, if it was nothing else, was a cornucopia of the deranged and the beautifully odd.
After weeks of discussion and much gnashing of the teeth about what it says about boxing, specifically and the culture, generally, Paul smashed dadbod Askren with ease. It was, with the possible exception of Mayweather vs. McGregor, boxing’s most potent moment of mainstream penetration since the glory days of Mike Tyson.
The world was talking, once again, about the sweet science. That is was a YouTube goof and a MAGA-loving MMA fighter with noticeable rolls of backfat is, possibly, kind of an issue. In the one actual boxing match on the card, journeyman Ivan Redkach collapsed after a body shot by Regis Prograis, pretended to have been hit low and was eventually carried from the ring in a stretcher.
On a night filled with gangsta rap, Justin Bieber, Ray Flores and a performance of the national anthem where someone forgot to turn the mic on until the song was well under way, boxing was just another terrible, amazing thing being performed by grifters and charlatans.
For hours (and likely for days to come) the debate raged online. Did Askren take a dive? Or, post hip surgery and well into middle age, was this all he had to offer? And, pray tell, what did the first round knockout tell us about Paul’s prospects as a professional boxer.
The short answers are:
Probably not
Yes
Nothing
Ultimately, none of this means anything at all from a sporting perspective. It was an entertainment extravaganza perfectly suited for our time, a combination of denominators so low that their combined height was only barely visible to the human eye.
Paul is a young man with some aptitude for boxing but little experience, a main event fighter drawing somewhere between one and two million pay-per-view buys whose competitive ability likely maxes out at the club level. That didn’t stop pundits and fans from fantasy booking him against everyone from wrestler CM Punk to MMA star Conor McGregor and boxing sensation Canelo Alvarez.
That none of these athletes competes anywhere near the same weight class as Paul means next to nothing—fans understand intuitively what critics don’t. Triller isn’t sports and the rules, as we know them, are out the window.