Photo by Jayne Kamin-Oncea/Getty Images
Logan Paul may have lost his boxing rematch to KSI, but he doesn’t feel like it was a loss. Here’s what he had to say after their second (and most likely final) bout.
YouTube sensations Logan Paul and Olajide “JJ” Olatunji aka KSI held their much anticipated boxing rematch at the Staples Center in Los Angeles California on Saturday night and once again battled it out for the full six rounds (watch the highlights here). Where the first bout in Manchester ended in a draw, this one saw KSI get his hand raised in a majority decision. The deciding factor in the scoring: a two point deduction the ref levied against Paul for throwing a punch when KSI was already down on the canvas.
After the bout, Logan Paul spoke with the press and while he didn’t seem particularly happy that he lost, he also wasn’t taking the L too seriously either.
”It’s one of two things: I either haven’t registered what’s just happened or for some reason I don’t feel like I’ve lost,” he said at the post-fight press conference. “Like, I’ve taken true Ls. Ls that have affected my life and will affect my life for the rest of my life. This doesn’t feel like that. Just some simple math here: if those two points hadn’t been taken away from me, I would have won the fight.”
”I think 9 times out of 10 I beat JJ,” he added. “Tonight was the night, that one out of ten times. You can hear my voice, I’m sick, I woke up sick, I’ve been sick for three days. The first thing I did this morning was sneeze three times and then I’ve been sneezing throughout the day. I tried to push through it, I kind of hoped my adrenaline would take care of the sickness. And if I’m being honest with you it took away that killer instinct that I’ve had this whole two months in sparring. That was the worst performance I’ve had in the past two months.”
”Something changed today, and I had a talk with my brother backstage and it got a little emotional,” Paul admitted. “It’s like there’s something in me that has a problem taking it from 99 to 100 and crossing that finish line in boxing and wanting to hurt that man in the room. I’ll talk in front of the media and do press conferences all day saying I want to hurt JJ but let’s be honest. I hope JJ’s f**king alive and well, for the rest of his life. I’m just not … I don’t know if I’m that animal, or at least today, that I needed to be. He got off the hook.”
As for why he threw that controversial and pivotal punch to KSI’s head when his opponent was down on a knee?
”It’s a fight and I haven’t been boxing long enough to tell myself I’m boxing,” Paul said. “If the person that, by the way for the past two, three months, past year, has been degrading my family, my brand, my friends, my fans … I dunno. Something just came over me and a I just tapped him a little bit. By the way it was a tap, it was not a full strike. If I wanted to do a full strike I probably could have put him down for a while. It was a tap and again … two points, no warning.”
Logan Paul’s second illegal move on KSI #KSIvsLogan2 pic.twitter.com/OcaZkXRWoo
— Buddha Bong Thong (@buddhabongthong) November 10, 2019
Paul left the door open for another celebrity fight but said he wasn’t expecting a third match against KSI.
”As far as what I’ll be doing in the future, maybe boxing,” he said. “If there’s a fight that’s right. If one of the seven celebrities wants to fight me, I’ll be here. But there’s a reason I became a content creator when I was 18 years old and choosing my career path and not a boxer. I like to try things. I like to do as much as I can, and the boxing vertical has been checked off.”
”I love the sport and I’m going to keep creating til I die for y’all.”