Aljamain Sterling is of the belief that the boxing bout between Jake Paul and Anthony Joshua wasn’t legitmate.
The former UFC bantamweight champion thinks that there must have been some sort of agreement in place between the two parties to ensure the fight reached a certain distance. Joshua, an Olympic gold-medalist and former two-time heavyweight champion, knocked out Paul, a YouTuber who took up boxing a handful of years ago, in the sixth round of their Netflix-streamed bout.
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“My direct thing when I was watching this was, where are the lines?” Sterling said in a YouTube video. “Because it felt like, you’ve got this Olympic-level, high-caliber level, world-class boxer in Anthony Joshua, who looks like he’s playing with his food, and people are sitting there eating it up like, ‘Oh, Jake’s doing a really good job. He’s moving his feet. He’s staying away.’ I’m just like, ‘Oh, you’re telling me this guy forgot how to cut the ring off?’
“… The way I feel, is that there’s just no way a guy of his caliber, of Anthony Joshua’s caliber of boxing, all the experience he has fighting all these other world-class guys, because we’ve seen how he fights them, and then Jake Paul comes in there, who just relatively started boxing – he’s pretty skilled for a guy at his level, for how long he’s been boxing – but not heavyweight level. Not fighting a guy who’s as well-decorated as Anthony Joshua.”
For a majority of the fight, Paul circled around the ring as quickly as possible, doing everything he could to avoid getting cornered or trapped against the ropes by Joshua. It was a sound strategy, as the much smaller man compared to Joshua, but eventually, the fight caught up to him.
“It makes me wonder, was there a bet on, let’s just carry Jake Paul to X amount of round?” Sterling said. “Make him look good, we want to entertain, and maybe there’s a lot of people putting money on going past three or four rounds, or something like this. I gotta speculate and wonder about all these other small little details, but I can’t bring myself to grasp.
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“I give him respect. He got his jaw broken. You can’t fake that. But that’s what should have possibly happened in the first round, and that is my point. There are levels to boxing, and no disrespect to Jake Paul. Again, entertainer, great for the sport in terms of bringing eyeballs, but that should not have gone that long.”
Sterling continued to speculate about whether something was going on, as he believes there were points during the fight when Joshua may have pulled a punch to avoid hitting Paul intentionally.
“I don’t want to say (the fight was) rigged, I want to say there was an agreement,” Sterling said. “… I’m literally watching him pull punches in the early rounds, and I was getting so mad. I was like there has to be a big bet, a big parlay, or some time agreement, paperwork.”
This article originally appeared on MMA Junkie: Ex-UFC champ believes Jake Paul, Anthony Joshua had duration agreement
