Jake Paul may have gotten his jaw broken in a knockout loss to Anthony Joshua but the former YouTuber is still taking a victory lap for his performance.
Assessing his performance, Paul says he believe he won at least two rounds before he got dropped for the final time in the sixth. Add to that, Paul claims he “wobbled” Joshua from one the just 16 punches he landed (according to CompuBox) during the fight.
Joshua’s longtime promoter Eddie Hearn praised Paul for his willingness to accept such a daunting challenge but he couldn’t help but laugh when hearing that description of the fight.
“He definitely didn’t wobble A.J. but he landed his biggest shots,” Hearn told Ring Magazine. “A couple of right hands from the gods but he’s just not big enough, he doesn’t punch hard enough. I’m sure he got his attention but he certainly wasn’t wobbled.
“You’ve got to understand, [Jake Paul] was so far out of his depth. It was a horrendous mismatch. It was always a horrendous mismatch so you can’t expect him to go in there and stand and trade for three minutes. His job was to survive and look how far he got. I didn’t expect him to go that many rounds.”
As far as Paul winning rounds, Hearn believes that’s a dubious proclamation at best, especially considering the official scorecards for the event have never been released by the Florida Athletic Commission.
Hearn concedes there may have been a lone round that was a bit of a tossup but that’s mostly due to inactivity from both Paul and Joshua. Otherwise, he didn’t see any round where Paul possibly bested Joshua on the scorecards.
“There probably was a round that was quite close because no one actually did anything,” Hearn said. “It’s strange they haven’t released the scorecards. Because I’m sure if they won rounds, MVP would have gone ‘look!’
“I don’t believe he won any rounds on the scorecards but listen maybe he did, I don’t know.”
When it comes to the knockout, Hearn admits he thought that would happen earlier but he also appreciated that Joshua got some extra ring time following a lengthy layoff before facing Paul in December.
Hearn acknowledged that Paul suffering a broken jaw is definitely a serious injury, especially when it comes to boxing, but he commended the 29-year-old influencer for eating that punch and not going unconscious.
“The injury is a shocker and it’s not one you can necessarily bounce back from,” Hearn said about Paul’s broken jaw. “I know at the moment it’s like ‘yeah [I’ll be back]’ but especially when you’ve got lots of other stuff in your life as well.
“But I think Jake Paul deserves a huge amount of respect because he did it in the first place. He landed some shots and he took some decent shots. By the way, the shot that broke his jaw would have flatlined most heavyweights and he went down and went ‘wow!’ So you have to give him credit. The whole experience was fantastic.”
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