Former UFC middleweight champion Sean Strickland recently beat up a social media influencer I never heard of and don’t care about, which I’m sure was designed to get press for all parties involved. Or maybe “Tarzan” has nothing better to do after coughing up the 185-pound strap to Dricus Du Plessis at UFC 297.
Either way, video of the beatdown (watch it here) didn’t sit well with celebrity boxer Jake Paul, who is sort of like the digital bodyguard for the influencer community. “The Problem Child” offered Strickland $1 million to throw hands at the YouTuber’s training compound in Puerto Rico, an offer that was quickly shot down by UFC.
Blame Chief Business Officer Hunter Campbell (and broke children).
“I will fight this man. You let Conor McGregor fight (Floyd) Mayweather, this is an easier fight, easier money, can I do that? And then Hunter explained to me that [Paul] sells no fights,” Strickland said on YouTube. “When they have fights, they give away tickets. He doesn’t make money. His target audience is children — they don’t buy pay-per-views. So … a little depressing. I thought to myself, you know what? I’ll take a payday beating up this (expletive) man, that sounds easy enough. But sadly, Jake Paul is an influencer. He sells to children. Children don’t buy pay-per-views. I dunno man, get some adults to follow you and we will fight.”
Paul sold more than 500,000 pay-per-view (PPV) units for his Nate Diaz boxing match last August, so I guess all those children got permission from their parents to buy the fight. He also broke a ticket sales record for his Anderson Silva bout the year before.
If you pass the credit to Diaz and Silva, then surely Strickland cold do likewise?
“So here’s the thing, Jake Paul, you clearly know I can’t fight you,” Strickland continued. “You know this. The UFC knows this. We all know this, that you and me cannot fight. But what we can do, is you can get in your fancy plane, you can fly your ass to Vegas, and we can have a little pow-wow. I’ll do it for free. I don’t need a check, I don’t need to live stream it. I will do it for free, sir. So if that is something you want, you wanna show everyone how big and hard that dick is, let me know when.”
Hopefully he brings his (cough) “head gear.”
Strickland, who turns 33 in just a few days, is currently awaiting his next assignment. Until then, we’re likely to suffer through several more rounds of bathrobe-and-dirtbike soliloquies as “Tarzan” ponders everything from Machine Gun Vampires to pro-castration politics. I guess it beats another rambling video from this retired freedom fighter.