Like it or not, Jake Paul is the ultimate American success story

When Jake Paul lived in Los Angeles, he threw furniture into his drained pool and set it on fire. The flames reportedly stretched as high as his mansion.

When he hosted an “outrageous” party for a music video shoot during the early months of the 2020 pandemic, the Calabasas mayor ripped into him for “acting like Covid does not exist.”

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He turned the West Hollywood community into a “war zone,” according to his neighbors, who said they endured a “living hell” at the time.

Paul has come a long way since being fired from The Disney Channel, a company he was “causing problems” for due to multiple incidents from his time in Southern California.

He made $10,000 an episode, "working like six days a week for 12 hours a day," he once said. But his dismissal from Disney didn’t seem to affect his career at all. Really, he was just getting started.

Paul parlayed his popularity from Vine, where he posted silly but funny six-second clips to a growing audience, to YouTube, a platform where he has one of the most-disliked videos in history, and where he also got married in a publicity stunt and filmed a riot in Scottsdale, Arizona.

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With 20 million subscribers, Paul has been an internet sensation for so long it’s hard to believe he’s still only 28 years old and set to return to his third career — boxing — this weekend.

On Saturday, Paul fights Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., a former world champion fighter who is far removed from his physical prime.

Their fight headlines a Most Valuable Promotions (MVP) and Golden Boy Promotions show at the Honda Center in Anaheim, which is just a few miles from Disneyland. It’s a full-circle moment for Paul, ahead of the 13th fight of his pro career. The event airs on DAZN.

Long regarded as a bad boy — or, as his nickname declares, "The Problem Child" — Paul has always attracted criticism. Piers Morgan nodded toward the obvious in an interview that Paul rage-quit this week after Morgan suggested that Paul had only recently started fighting actual boxers and hasn't always fared well at it. He lost to Tommy Fury, the closest thing to a real boxer in his actual prime that Paul has encountered. And in Chavez, he fights a guy whose last meaningful bout was a bizarre loss to Danny Jacobs six years ago.

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None of this really matters, though.

Paul isn’t a typical boxer so nobody should expect typical boxing moves from him. He didn’t come through the amateur system. He generates fandom from some and inspires animosity in others. Regardless, he’s on the cusp of a world title shot.

If Paul pisses you off, it may be a case of not hating the player, but, rather, the game.

It’s organizations like the WBC that have emboldened Paul, elevating his standing in the sport by rewarding him with a cruiserweight ranking should he defeat Chavez.

A fight against the winner of the bout between Gilberto "Zurdo" Ramirez and Yuniel Dorticos, which takes place on the same night Paul fights Chavez, could follow if the American hasn’t lured someone like Gervonta "Tank" Davis or Anthony Joshua into the ring for an exhibition by then.

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Even if he loses, Paul is already a winner.

He’s a winner because he’s playing by his own rules, making bank, and creating his next career path.

American-made, American-born, and American-raised, Paul has seized every opportunity in a land where there can be plenty.

Some say that if Paul is a star in boxing, then it speaks badly of the sport. But boxing is not bereft of star power when it has Manny Pacquiao returning in July, "Tank" Davis linked with an August comeback, and Saul "Canelo" Alvarez fighting Terence Crawford in September.

It's hardly an indictment of the sport that someone like Paul can enter the fight game and become such a noteworthy player in a matter of years. That overlooks the fact that he’s an internet sensation. He’s someone who appeals to youth culture. And, for years, he was effectively a one-man version of the HBO series "Entourage." In an attention economy, few reign supreme the way Paul has.

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UFC heavyweight champion Tom Aspinall told me Thursday that one of the differences between combat sports and, say, tennis, is that athletes in the latter can only really prosper if they are bank-rolled by well-off parents to begin with.

In a sport like boxing, all you need is two fists and dedication to the craft. Skill level then determines how far one can go. The sport is renowned for having an open door. Don’t blame Paul for storming through it.

Paul is never going to dominate pound-for-pound lists. But he doesn’t even need to. That’s not the end-game here. The end-game is a world championship shot, or a high-profile fight against someone like "Tank" or Joshua. Hell, it already nearly happened with "Canelo."

After that, there’s a clear gap in the market for someone with as much brand and name value as Paul, who can lean on Nikisa Bidarian, the UFC’s former chief financial officer who helped mastermind the rapid growth of MVP.

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Once this weekend’s event is in the books, MVP turns its attention to an all-women July 12 show in New York, which Paul and Bidarian placed on Netflix. The third installment of Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano’s all-time great trilogy tops the card, and features Ellie Scotney, Alycia Baumgardner, and Savannah Marshall in separate fights. It’s legitimately a wonderful event.

Now consider this: Top Rank’s Bob Arum is 93 years old, and Premier Boxing Champions boss Al Haymon is 70. Even promoters once considered young blood like Oscar de la Hoya and Eddie Hearn are 52 and 46, respectively.

There’s a gap in the market for the next big thing in boxing promotion. And for better or worse, that next big thing is Paul, who has already built the best stable in women’s boxing.

He’s shown for years that he has a gift for being a frontman who can generate attention with ease. And if he eventually makes the transition from fighter to full-time promoter, it would mark his fourth career move in addition to his other various products and business interests.

It would be yet another opportunity he’d have seized, to punctuate his status as one of America’s ultimate success stories.