Jake Paul got his jaw broken by Anthony Joshua. Now he's going back to what he knows best

Because hasn’t his voyage into combat sports been a game of escalations? A kind of increasingly dangerous hopscotch from being an internet renegade to becoming a legitimate boxer? Paul’s brand of drama was built, somewhat obnoxiously, through a series of double-dog dares disguised as boxing matches. He took it from a toe-dipping lark all the way to his heavyweight fight with Anthony Joshua last December … and then …  

Didn’t Joshua finally end the charade by shattering his jaw for everyone to see? Wasn’t that the endgame? Doumbé feels like the first sign of sobriety after a six-year bender. Which is to say, Doumbé feels too normal to win the Paul sweepstakes, especially when you line up all the ducks in a row.

Paul boxed a pro athlete in Nate Robinson in 2020 just for clicks and giggles, then outdid himself by boxing a pro fighter in Ben Askren. Of course, Askren was a clumsy-handed wrestler by trade who was coming off hip replacement surgery, and so Paul took out Askren’s heavier-handed Mizzou teammate, former UFC champion Tyron Woodley (twice). Then it was the 47-year-old former UFC GOAT Anderson Silva, a sniper whom Joe Rogan said showcased a “ballet of violence” 100 years earlier. 

Still, people wanted to see Paul, an interloper in the sweet science who proclaimed himself the new face of boxing, take on an actual boxer. You know, as in a person who boxes. So he fought a guy who technically fit the bill, Tommy Fury, brother of Tyson. That fight was an unholy (and completely forgettable) affair, in which Paul was dealt his first loss, prompting him to go back to boxing popular MMA fighters. This time he stood in against Nate Diaz, on cloven hooves some might say, before segueing into the ring with a couple of woodwork randos (Andre August and Ryan Bourland) to build up his résumé. 

That led to Mike Perry, a reformed MMA fighter who became the face of bare-knuckle boxing. That was a fun one.

Paul’s big-time Netflix bout against the 57-year-old Mike Tyson, on the other hand, was not fun, but it hit 65 million concurrent streams. It was an escalation of audacity, if anything, a thing that Paul relished, having shown the world he wasn’t: A) afraid of “The Baddest Man on the Planet,” and, B) afraid of streaming elderly abuse. Once things settled down, he went up against Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., the son of the legend who at one point, a decade before, held the WBC middleweight title.

Paul won a unanimous decision. 

If people were hitting the snooze because of the size difference there, they were shaken awake when Paul announced he’d be fighting Gervonta “Tank” Davis, a beleaguered mite-sized dynamo who would circle Paul like an electron. (You might remember the initial faceoffs, which were hilarious). After much bellyaching from the public (and more legal issues mounted for Davis), Paul pivoted, finally agreeing to fight the type of boxer who would satisfy all tastes and desires, while sticking it to his loudest critics.

He would fight the heavyweight Joshua, who was bigger than Paul, moreexperienced than Paul, less than 50 years old, and not washed up beyond recognition, like so many others. As expected, this proved to be the step too far. Though Paul made it to the sixth round of an eight-round fight, he got obliterated by a right hand that brought the curtains down in the cruelest way possible. That was supposed to be the outro, the play stupid games, win stupid prizes crescendo. Boxing’s great streaker, who’d intercepted the sport’s attention for five years, had finally been apprehended. 

Now he returns, a year later, to face Doumbé, who is not Sean Strickland, not Francis Ngannou, and most certainly not Darren Till. Doumbé is a Frenchman who showed everyone what a combat hotbed Paris was through a series of fights between 2023-2024 in the PFL. Even though he lost to Baissangour Chamsoudinov in one of them, Doumbé was the fiery heart of the French scene. And as a former kickboxing champion who claims at least 83 pro fights, he has his country’s full devotion, which makes his two-and-a-half-year absence from MMA a scornful PFL folly.

The Paul fight will happen at cruiserweight (200 pounds), in Dubai, on Dec. 24. Doumbé traditionally fights as a welterweight (170 pounds), which means he’ll be — by far — the smaller fighter. In other words, we’ve flipped back to Paul’s earlier scripts, where the asterisks shine like wheeling galaxies. Paul will face an undersized non-boxer in his return to the ring, which places the advantages back to where he likes them. Which is to say, with him. 

The thing is, even if it’s anticlimactic, this time the storyline might be that Paul came back at all. A broken jaw, for a guy who makes plenty of money running his MVP promotion and by putting women’s boxing on the map, is a hell of a thing to overcome. You get your jaw wired shut and the straws you eat through have a way of becoming existential. 

Yet Paul is coming back, and his was always going to be a tough second act.

He’d have had to announce either a fight in the MMA cage or that he was boxing against Godzilla next to keep on that path of escalations. I thought it might be the former, given that he now owns the PFL, but perhaps Paul is trading escalations for misdirections this time through. Maybe he’s thinking about the bigger picture in helping to launch Doumbé’s profile in a strategic way ahead of MVP’s more dedicated foray into MMA. 

Maybe the shine isn’t meant for him this time, so much as for what he’s building around him. Or maybe he just wants to beat up one of his better commodities, to kick off another run in the sport he forced his way into. 

Either way, the second act is where things get interesting. Or, you know … this is where things stop being interesting for Jake Paul the boxer, depending on your point of view.