Theatre of the Absurd: how (and why) YouTubers took over boxing
ALSO: HOW MANY SUBSCRIPTION MEDIA SITES IS TOO MANY?
I’m a pretty normal guy. I wake up in the morning, brush my teeth, put some clothes on, sit at the computer and work until it’s time to clock off and stare at a different screen until bedtime. I am, in short, not the sort of person you’d expect to get obsessed with watching the pre-fight shenanigans of two minor celebrities who have, for some reason, decided to box once another on pay-per-view television.
In October, the Manchester Arena will host two boxing matches. YouTuber KSI will fight Love Islander Tommy Fury, and, separately, another YouTuber, Logan Paul, will fight MMA enthusiast Dillon Danis. The build-up to the fight will be broadcast, internationally, on YouTube (home turf for the participants) before UK and US viewers have the opportunity to watch fists fly via PPV on DAZN (a company which is, if the adverts are to be believed, pronounced “Da Zone”). To many grown adults this will all sound like Greek. These are minor celebrities, basically unknown outside the narrow confines of their generation and medium, none of whom are professional fighters. And yet they will all make millions of dollars – and hundreds of thousands of people will tune in – to see them fight.
Boxing is the only sport which seems to have reversed the trend of professionalism that has gripped athletic undertakings. I was thinking the other day, during England’s heroic failure at the Women’s World Cup (heroic failure being, of course, the English default) about how part of the appeal of women’s football is that the men’s game has become too good. In order to be a male professional footballer in 2023, you need to have committed every ounce of your energy and every minute of your spare time to that goal since you were a toddler. The standard of skill, stamina, strength etc, is all so high that it necessarily precludes anyone who’s normal from participating. As a result, modern male footballers generally appear dead behind the eyes. Nothing – other than football – has happened to them since childhood.
The same is true of most sports. Tennis, golf, cricket, all those weird American ones: the standard has become so dizzyingly high that audiences now expect brilliance on a routine basis. The Champions League, the Grand Slams, the Majors, the Ashes, the Superbowl/World Series/NBA Finals; these are all zeniths of their sport and major broadcast opportunities. And sure, there’s a place on YouTube for 5-a-side teams to ply their trade (I’m also a keen follower of an amateur tennis player who chronicles his attempts to secure 1 ATP singles point), but generally public demands have been to get stronger, faster, sharper, better.
Boxing? Not so much. The innate violence of the competition has ensured that there’s a whole market of people who basically just want to see celebrities punch one another. This is not exactly a new phenomenon. In the early 00s, FOX launched a reality TV show – Celebrity Boxing – which pitted minor celebrities against one another. Fights included Vanilla Ice vs Todd Bridges (Bridges knocked down Ice and won unanimously), Tonya Harding vs Clinton accuser Paula Jones (Jones surrendered in the final round), and Joey Buttafuoco, famous for his affair with a 17-year-old who subsequently shot his wife, versus the female wrestler Chyna (Buttafuoco won on a split decision). It was a train-wreck, of course, pitting low-level celebrities, desperate for a payday, against one another in a bloodsport. Of the 8 “celebrities” to participate in the second episode, 4 are now dead.
The crapness of the show didn’t stop the BBC from commissioning its own version. Ricky Gervais fought businessman Grant Bovey on primetime TV (and won), and political journalist John Pienaar was due to fight Spandau Ballet frontman Tony Hadley when the plug was pulled on the enterprise. The boxing establishment had rebelled against the professional promoters involved in the project. Among their staunchest critics was super-promoter Frank Warren (who called it "a farce of the noble art of boxing") who would, many years later, find himself promoting Tommy Fury in his fight against Jake Paul, perhaps the biggest, to date, clash of non-boxer boxers.
Over the past few weeks, the pre-fight posturing between Dillon Danis and Logan Paul have been particularly gripping – and unedifying. Danis has launched a single-minded and deeply misogynistic campaign against Paul’s fiancé, Danish supermodel Nina Agdal which, thanks to the mysteries of the Twitter and Instagram algorithms, I’ve been subjected to almost against my will. There is still a couple of months to go before the fight, and that means weeks of further brand building and publicity mongering. Both men are incentivised to build a franchise out of the fight. Should the acrimony reach fever pitch then there is nothing to stop Danis vs Paul II or Danis vs Paul III. It is a cow that, if necessary, can be milked for years to come.
Certainly this is not a trend born of a sporting agenda. Reactions from sports media to previous YouTuber fights have ranged from incredulous disdain to surprised politeness about the participants’ competence. But nothing and no-one has suggested that the display is analogous to the real thing. Floyd Mayweather, one of the greatest boxers of all-time, fought the elder Paul, Logan, back in 2021. It was a pitiful display, the great man reduced to humouring the lame advances of his competitor. No winner was announced. Eddie Hearn, the leading promoter involved in these fights, labelled the bout “dreadful”.
Nor, however, is this out of the grand tradition of reality TV milking celebrities for all their worth, whether it’s on Strictly Come Dancing or I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!. DAZN, who are broadcasting these fights as part of their “X Series” have struck a 32-fights per year deal with Eddie Hearn’s Matchroom Boxing, reported to be worth more than $1bn (the biggest deal in the sport’s history). UK-based DAZN has now launched worldwide, and has a valuation of several billion dollars. At the core of their proposition is a conflation of these two worlds: sports and entertainment. To them, that doesn’t mean making Ronnie Corbett snowboard down a half-pipe or having Esther Rantzen windsurf across the Bering strait: it means turning personalities into sportsmen, and sportsmen into personalities.
It’s no surprise then to find the worlds of social media and sports smashing into one another like a multi-car pile-up (and with the same aesthetic potential). It is symptomatic of an unavoidable trend. Stars of social media are breaking out of the confines of their digital furrows. It is happening across the media, not just in sports. TikTok A-lister Charli D’Amelio won the last season of Dancing With the Stars, while her deputy on that platform, Addison Rae, is due to take the lead role in Eli Roth’s next slasher film. Feastables, a snack company founded by YouTuber MrBeast is now available at every Walmart, 7-Eleven or Target. The Sidemen, a vlogging supergroup, reached No.3 in the UK Christmas charts with their song “Christmas Drillings”. The barrier between the their world and ours is slowly eroding…
And social sports, as it might be termed, is just the first frontier. My hometown football club, Crawley Town FC, announced last season that it would be talent scouting at a YouTuber charity match (it had previously signed The Only Way is Essex star Mark Wright on a short-term deal, and played him in an FA Cup game against, at the time, Premier League Leeds United). Ben Foster, meanwhile, played most of last season wearing a GoPro as he kept goal for promotion chasing Wrexham (who are a whole other story). Before the decade is out, I don’t doubt that confusion will reign over who’s an athlete, who’s a celebrity and who’s both.
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