If you’ve followed the career of Nate Diaz, his big boxing debut against Jake Paul this Saturday night looks less like a serious pursuit and more like a lifetime achievement award for accumulating all that scar tissue. Diaz has fought 34 times professionally in a cage, mainly within the UFC, and more than a few times unprofessionally on the street. For years, he has fought the social anxieties inherent in the fight game and the urge to slap reporters when they ask stupid questions.
He has gone to war with the UFC’s method of doing business, and now—after emerging on the other side as an iconic star at 38 years old—here he is, about to cash in on a true curiosity-based pay-per-view. Stockton’s finest has earned his moment.
If you’ve followed the career of Jake Paul, his boxing experience looks like a semi-accidental lark that he somehow willed into existence after all his YouTube success. He scored six straight wins against quasi-celebrities and former MMA fighters before dropping a decision to Tommy Fury in February. The word “novelty” sticks to Paul at every stop, yet he not only embraces that label, but he holds it up like a title belt and dares anyone to do a damn thing about it.
It’s been said that Paul has been good for boxing because he dragged the eyes of a generation of TikTokers into the ring with him. It’s also been said that he’s an interloper who denigrates the sport, especially as he appears just a week after Terence Crawford put on one of the most virtuoso exhibitions of in-ring prowess we’ve ever seen, against Errol Spence Jr.
So, what to make of Saturday night’s PPV (available on DAZN, ESPN+, and PPV.com) in Dallas?
It’s a weird one. This week’s promotion of the 10-round fight has been a little unfocused in that the stakes are primarily works of imagination—at least in the world of boxing. The boxing ring is just a drive-through ATM for both fighters. If Paul wins, he’ll add another MMA name to his list of casualties, and the chorus will kick up louder than ever for him to try that shit against a “real boxer.” (Sorry, Tommy Fury, but you know it’s true!)
If Diaz beats Paul, he’ll make a big sack of cash for doing away with a loudmouth irritant who keeps clobbering his sport mates. Paul’s promoter said this week that there’s a very real possibility that Paul’s boxing career will be over with a loss. Would a Diaz win set up his return to the UFC? That is definitely in play, and he would return a bigger hero than when he left. That trilogy with Conor McGregor isn’t dead just yet.
It doesn’t help that Diaz hasn’t been interested in promoting the fight at all, and one of the biggest story lines is that Paul is disappointed in Nate’s efforts there. Paul keeps trying to push the right buttons, but it hasn’t worked. The lack of heat makes it like an uncomfortable dinner party that the public can attend, though things did pick up at Thursday’s press conference, when the factions and a few security guards got into an altercation onstage. If Paul had paid closer attention to Nate over the years, he’d have seen that Diaz has never cared much for the “obligations” that come with the fight game. Media, face-offs, ceremonial weigh-ins, regulatory commitments. He hates it all.
Most of Diaz’s pre- and post-fight fracases—such as the brawl in Nashville and the water bottle–throwing incident before his second fight with McGregor—were reactionary and spur of the moment. The biggest pop Diaz got at the open workouts on Wednesday was when he asked the Texas crowd if anybody had a blunt. Only then did it start to feel like a Nate Diaz fight week.
If anything, Diaz versus Paul is a statement. Much like Francis Ngannou’s upcoming boxing match with Tyson Fury, this is a “Who needs the UFC?” event from both perspectives, as the perpetually undervalued Diaz actively realizes his true worth and operates his promotional arm (which he calls Real Fight Inc.). At the same time, Paul continues to take digs at the UFC whenever possible. Paul’s feud with UFC president Dana White is well documented, but every event he does under his Most Valuable Promotions banner comes off as a subtweet against White and his tyrannical ways. It’s never just Jake Paul against Nate Diaz or Tyron Woodley; subliminally, it’s always Jake Paul against the UFC.
Since he began boxing a few years ago, Paul has constantly poked at White. He brings up fighter pay within the UFC whenever he can. Paul has highlighted the discrepancy in revenue splits between fighters and owners in the UFC. He has put out a diss track video. When he fought Anderson Silva, he made a bet with the former UFC champion beforehand, asking him to help form an association to benefit UFC fighters. (Silva readily agreed, but it hasn’t come to fruition yet.) To use the wrestling term, this has been a subtle face turn for Paul with the portion of the MMA public that hates on the UFC and Dana White. Paul isn’t detestable anymore to MMA fans; he’s mostly just an annoyance that they tolerate.
Still, the heart of the conflict might be in the gap of what it means for each guy. Diaz and Paul are two very different people with very different lives and, realistically, two different versions of the truth. As far as Diaz is concerned, Paul has been masquerading as a fighter and exploiting the game without obtaining the proper credentials. If you know Diaz, you know he’s most insulted when somebody’s not keeping things real.
Diaz has been a fighter his whole life, and he’s been training with Cesar Gracie since he was a kid. Fighting is what he knows. Early on, Nate was Nick Diaz’s kid brother coming up on The Ultimate Fighter—the mean-mugging, noodly jujitsu kid who liked to slap at his opponents. He fought to get out from under his brother’s wing, but he still kept the spotlight on Nick each chance he got. Somewhere along the way, people understood he had the absolute conviction to fight for what he thought was worth fighting for, whether it be his coaches, his brother, or the freedom to do as he pleases.
That’s why he’s already won by showing up this week to box Jake Paul. He has been through hell and back fighting in the UFC, and at some point along the way—whether it was when he cut that promo on Conor McGregor after beating Michael Johnson on national television (“Conor McGregor, you’ve taken everything I worked for, motherfucker!”) or through the record-breaking McGregor series itself—he endeared himself to fans. People got behind his struggle. He epitomized what it means to fight and to be a fighter in the ring, in the cage, and in life.
And even this weekend’s fight is an extension of that.
It’s not Crawford-Spence, a fight that showed why sophisticated boxing fans feel obligated to protect the sport’s transcendent qualities. It’s not even Cory Sandhagen versus Rob Font, which is happening in Nashville on the same night as Diaz’s bout. It’s an MMA star who fought his whole career to afford himself a rowdy weekend versus the man who has made big paydays possible by simply being better at everything than people want to give him credit for. It’s a sideline fight pitting Diaz’s stubborn realness against Paul’s defiant cockiness, with the entire context being this—they can, so they are.