By Matt Lieberman: The referee Brian Stutts ended last Saturday’s fight between Jake Paul and Ben Askren before it ever got a chance to get going in Atlanta. The fight was stopped at 1:59 of the first.
YouTuber Jake (3-0, 3 KOs) registered his third knockout win as a pro career, hitting former UFC fighter Askren (0-1) with a right hand that put him down.
Askren, 36, scrambled off the deck and looked good to continue, but the referee gave him one look and surprisingly stopped it.
He made it back up in plenty of time and should have been allowed to continue, but the referee Bill Stutts was having none of it. Given how overweight and overmatched Askren was, it probably didn’t change anything that the referee stopped the fight early.
Askren clearly wasn’t going to win. With his dad’s body, he didn’t remotely resemble an athlete, and he had no business inside the ring with Jake.
It doesn’t matter that Jake isn’t a world-class boxer. Askren didn’t belong inside the ring with him or anyone for that matter.
You can argue that if Asken were Jake’s last opponent Nate Robinson, he’d have been destroyed just the same. Robinson looked world’s better than Askren, and he only made it to the second round against Jake last November.
Jake was given a win, which he obviously was more than happy to accept, but the ending left a sour taste in the mouths of the boxing fans that had paid $50 to watch the card.
Given the less than stellar undercard entertainment, the referee should have let Askren continue.
Sporting a pot-belly, Askren looked ill-prepared for the fight, unfortunately. You have to question whether Askren intentionally chose not to whip himself into the best possible shape so that he would have an excuse for himself. Some people are like that.
When they don’t want to deal with the mental anguish of having failed, they’ll underprepare so that they can live with their failure better.
Askren looked like a textbook case of someone that intentionally didn’t prepare himself by getting in the best physical shape he could for this fight.
The ringside view of Jake Paul’s TKO. @ESPNRingside pic.twitter.com/YgasSH1Br4
— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) April 18, 2021
“I said this fight was going to be easier than Nate Robinson, but nobody believed me as usual,” said Jake Paul.”At one point, I was the underdog as the betting favorite.
“I’m not going to let you forget that. That sounds crazy, but I was the underdog. I knew it was going to be easier because Nate Robinson was weird. He fought like a random guy on the street.
“I knew Ben was going to sit there like a typical MMA fighter and just have no head movement, and his body was going to be wide open and I’m just too powerful,” said Paul.
It would be a good idea for Jake not to blow his win out of proportion. He wasn’t facing a real boxer. This was another case of Jake fighting a non-boxer.
Until Jake begins showing that he can beat world-class fighters from the sport of boxing, he needs to tamp down his enthusiasm. There is a heck of many boxers that Jake could have fought last Saturday night that he would have shown where he’s at. Fighting an obese former MMA guy meant nothing.
“I was saving the right hand for that moment because I knew he wouldn’t see it coming. My coach in the corner was, ‘Don’t load up, don’t load up,'” said Jake.
