American professional boxer Teófimo Andrés López Rivera. Who happens to be the current unified lightweight world champion, having held the IBF title since 2019 and the WBA, WBO and Ring magazine titles since defeating Vasyl Lomachenko in 2020 couldn’t hold his cool has he went wild on his tweeter handle to lambast the current happenings in the boxing fraternity.
He tweeted “Stop this YouTuber boxing. Stop diminishing the sports that we’ve worked so hard for! Shit not Sweet.”
The Undisputed lightweight champion Teofimo didn’t point fingers to anyone but one can say without fear or doubt that he was making reference to the likes of Jake and Logan Paul.
The less talented Logan Paul of the Paul brothers, lost his pro debut to fellow YouTuber KSI [AKA Olajide William Olatunji] in November 2019 on the undercard of Billy Joe Saunders vs. Marcelo Esteban Coceres in Los Angeles.
Logan recently signed on to an exhibition bout against Floyd Mayweather Jr, but the bout has been called off.
These are two different schools of thought amongst Boxing fans all over the world on Teofimo tweet. One school of thought argues that YouTubers Jake and Logan Paul turn to come into boxing in order to have large number of followers on their social media handles, resurrect their dead careers, make money or gain attention from the general public.
The other school of thought are of the view that the YouTubers are helping boxing become more mainstream by using their platform to promote the sport with their YouTuber fights since most boxers lack the showmanship needed to catch the attention of the casual and non-boxing fans to get them to start watching the sport. They also added that the promoters and the fighters in boxing hurt the sport by failing to take the risky fights that would attract more interest.
One will expect the World Boxing Association (WBA), promoters and other stakeholders to have a round table discussion to come with lasting solution to this canker which may eat into world boxing.
What’s you view on this?
By:Ebenezer PK Brinful.
