Jake Paul appears to be moving on from Tommy Fury.
Appearing recently on the “Boxing with Chris Mannix” podcast, Paul shot down the idea of rescheduling his previously booked fight with Fury and suggested the 22-year-old Englishman hasn’t earned the right to get the big payday the bout would provide.
Paul also took aim at Fury’s more accomplished family members.
“Of course. He wants the payday. But I’ve said it before, I don’t want to take the fight with him. He doesn’t deserve it,” Paul said. “And I would rather fight Tyson [Fury]. I would want Tyson to come down to cruiserweight and that would be a bigger fight. So I’d rather fight Tyson or his dad. His dad, John, did a better job of promoting the fight than Tommy did. So I would fight his brother or his dad before I’d fight Tommy.”
Paul (5-0, 4 KOs) hasn’t been left wanting in regards to options since his sixth-round knockout of former UFC welterweight champion Tyron Woodley.
Fury, whose eleventh-hour withdrawal from the Dec. 18 contest due to a broken rib and chest infection paved the way for Paul vs. Woodley 2, renewed his calls for a rescheduled bout with the YouTuber-turned-boxer in a fiery appearance last week on The MMA Hour. Fury called Paul’s performance in his rematch with Woodley “appalling” and “the worst six rounds” of boxing he’d ever seen, while also insisting that he was the biggest current fight available to Paul. Fury added that he expects to be medically ready to compete by March.
But it appears as though his belief in that matchup is unrequited.
Instead, Paul expressed an openness to answering the challenge from former WBC middleweight champion Julio César Chávez Jr. (53-6-1, 34 KOs), who recently proclaimed that he’d go so far as to retire if he was defeated by Paul.
“It’s interesting. I like that fight a lot, because it silences the critics,” Paul said of Chávez Jr. “He was a former world champion, and I know I could beat him. And you look at his record, it’s like 50 wins or something, and I don’t even know the losses, but it’s a good record. So that challenge excites me and I’m down. And this is what people don’t understand is that, even after I knocked out Woodley, they were all like, ‘Fight a real boxer.’
“I’m like, ‘You guys, I tried, and he dropped out of the fight two weeks before.’ So I want to fight a real boxer, newsflash, and I’m going to. Just have some f*cking patience.”
Chávez Jr. is certainly a name many MMA fans will be familiar with. Along with being the son of boxing legend Julio César Chávez, the 35-year-old memorably suffered a decision loss to former UFC middleweight champion Anderson Silva last June in Silva’s first professional boxing match in nearly 16 years. Silva was 46 years old at the time of the bout.