Jake Paul is amused by UFC president Dana White’s latest comments putting down his position as a long-term player in the combat sports world.
Earlier this month, White said in an interview that he thinks Paul is a fad in the fight game whose “shelf life if very f*cking short.” White thinks Paul is destined to wash out, and Paul finds that humorous because he sees himself just getting started.
Paul, who is scheduled to box former UFC welterweight champion Tyron Woodley under the Showtime banner on Aug. 29, said White’s comments reek of desperation, and he thinks White is unknowingly doing him a service.
“I just think it’s funny,” Paul told MMA Junkie on Wednesday. “If you really are losing relevancy, then no one talks about you. The fact this guy talks about me more than he talks about any other fighter of his, it’s pretty funny. You would think Jake Paul’s the No. 1 fighter in the UFC the way he promotes me. I think it’s smart. When he calls me out, everyone writes about it. All the articles write about it, then he pushes his narrative of what he wants to market behind it. Then he knows I’m going to respond and then cook him, and he knows it’s going to drive attention. He’s an old hater.
“He sees what I’m doing to his business model. I’m affecting his pockets. I’m talking about fighter pay. This guy’s betting $7 million on blackjack, but his fighters are starting GoFundMe pages. There’s all this bad press about him coming out because of me, and that’s messing up his business, and he’s going to say whatever he can to diminish what I have going on, and try to ruin it. What he doesn’t understand about the internet is him talking about me only adds fuel to my fire.”
Paul said he doesn’t really know where this feud with White will ultimately go. White has said publicly that he doesn’t see a scenario in which working together with Paul would be possible, but Paul isn’t so sure.
Right now, Paul is just kicking off a partnership with Showtime, so he has his own goals to focus on. However, he said he’s not going anywhere, and he’s not as firm in dismissing a scenario in which things could come together to do business with the UFC boss.
“I guess we’ll see,” Paul said. “I guess I’m just sort of undeniable to him, because of knocking out Ben Askren when he said he was going to bet a million dollars on him. Now I’m going to fight one of his top welterweights of all time, so you know at night he’s praying to God like, ‘Please, dear Lord, don’t let Jake Paul win this fight and knock out one of my top welterweights of all time.’ He’s a business person at the end of the day. He’s very greedy. He’s very money hungry. He’s driven by money. When I’m doing these massive pay-per-views and legitimizing myself as a fighter, he’s going to want to dip his bread into this business. He’ll have to put his ego aside eventually and let me take on a Kamaru Usman or whoever it is at the time.”
If White does, indeed, believe that Paul’s place in boxing will fizzle sooner than later, Paul said his mind will quickly change when he sees the pay-per-view success of the bout with Woodley, as well as his subsequent matchups.
Paul is adamant he’s not going anywhere. And as much as White may not like it, the 24-year-old said he’ll just have to deal with it.
“I think he’s just making excuses and trying to make his business look like the best one,” Paul said. “He sees what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to make boxing more popular than MMA, because MMA took over boxing for a long period of time, and I’m trying to bring that back and make boxing more popular again. I love MMA. I’ve always been an MMA fan. I just think it’s a changing of the guard, and Dana sees that, and he wants to delegitimize anything I have going on.”
‘I’m affecting his pockets’: Jake Paul relishes ‘old hater’ Dana White calling him a fad
