Celebrity pugilist Jake Paul has laid out some terms and conditions whereby he’d leave his boxing career behind, and take a one-off fight inside the UFC’s Octagon.
Can Jake Paul really convince Dana White to let him fight a UFC star? The head man of the Endeavor owned promotion has consistently expressed his strong disinterest in having anything to do with the Paul brothers on the promotional side of things.
“It’s just not what I do,” White said about the idea of putting together fights with Jake Paul back in August. “There’s a market for that. He could fight a different type of celebrity every week, and there’s going to be a segment of the population that wants to pay for that and see it, but that’s not what I do. I put the best against the best.”
But if White has stuck to that message, it hasn’t stopped Paul from trying to needle him into some kind of deal. And in his latest attempt, the former Disney actor and social media celeb even went so far as to offer to quit boxing altogether and fight in the UFC—if only White & Co. would meet a few simple terms and conditions:
1) Increase min fighter pay per fight to $50k (it’s $12k now)
2) Guarantee UFC fighters 50% of UFC annual revenues ($1bn in 2021)
3) Provide long term healthcare to all fighters (you previously said brain damage is part of the gig…imagine the NFL said that). There are many UFC alums who have publicly said they are suffering from brain damage
Happy new year @danawhite. Here is a real challenge for you…
I will immediately retire from boxing and fight Jorge Masvidal in the UFC if you agree to: pic.twitter.com/bJScDVITvL
— Jake Paul (@jakepaul) January 1, 2022
That offer appears to have been prompted by a recent statement from White, whereby the UFC president told Teddy Atlas that he had no interest in letting Jorge Masvidal take a boxing match with Paul while under UFC contract.
“You notice he wants to f-cking fight everybody that’s not in his weight class, guys that are older and all of this other bullsh-t. Go find a boxer,” White exclaimed. “Go hump somebody else’s leg, you goofball.”
This comes just a few days after Paul and White went back and forth over drugs & PEDs, with Paul claiming that the UFC president was a habitual coke user, and White claiming that he’d happily take drug tests if Paul took PED tests in exchange.
Seems unlikely that this new offer is going to be the kind of thing that brings everyone to the bargaining table in good faith. For now, Jake Paul vs active UFC talent is almost certainly going to have to stay exclusively a war of words.