Jake Paul traded the ring for a rally podium, and he spent his time throwing at the political left. Paul spoke at a Donald Trump rally, and The Gateway Pundit published video of the speech on Saturday. Its headline quotes him this way: “We Face Evil… Hate Has Never Built a Country. And the Woke Socialist Movement We Face Has NEVER Built a Country.” He used the appearance to urge his followers to get behind Trump.
That quote has an ellipsis in the middle, so there’s more speech than what got clipped. The Gateway Pundit’s headline didn’t say where the rally was held or what else Paul covered, and I’m not going to guess.
Paul isn’t the only fight-sports name on the campaign circuit this fall. Bo Nickal used a Vivek Ramaswamy rally in Ohio to announce his own fight news, as Bloody Elbow first noted. “I got a call backstage, and I do have some news, which is pretty exciting,” Nickal told the crowd. His middleweight bout with Joe Pyfer is off the December 12 UFC 335 card and will headline a UFC event in Cleveland in February. That would be the promotion’s first trip to the city since UFC 203 in 2016. Nickal’s last win, a stoppage of Kyle Daukaus, came at UFC Freedom 250 on the White House South Lawn in June. Combat sports and politics have been sharing a stage for a while now.
On the business side, Paul keeps showing up in conversations he isn’t part of. Ben Fowlkes of Yahoo’s Uncrowned wrote this week that some of Paul’s Netflix fights created the feeling that the whole world had stopped to watch. He put them in the same category as the UFC’s White House card. According to Bloody Elbow, Muhammad Mokaev said he no longer cares about a UFC return and called Paul’s MVP promotion “the future.” UFC middleweight champion Sean Strickland, who has floated a one-man strike over fighter pay, is reportedly considering leaving the UFC to fight Paul, according to a Sports Illustrated headline.
The lighter news came on October 15, when IFN posted a clip of Paul sprinting away after a snake that had been placed in a punching bag struck at him. The sources don’t include a fight announcement attached to the rally appearance, so his next ring date is still unconfirmed.
My take, from the numbers desk: the only figure in this story is zero, the number of fight dates announced alongside the speech. I don’t handicap rally crowds, and I’m not about to start. I’d much rather see a real line on Strickland vs. Paul, because a 185-pound champion who wants out of his contract against a guy who runs from snakes is a market I could work with. Until somebody books it, the only campaign-stop fight on my calendar is Nickal vs. Pyfer, Cleveland, February.
