Prince Naseem Hamed didn’t hold back when commenting on the influencer boxing trend escalated by Jake Paul, Andrew Tate, and the upstart fight firm Misfits.
It all seemed to start in 2018 when prominent creators KSI and Logan Paul held a ‘white collar’ crossover boxing show at the Manchester Arena in England.
Jake Paul fought on the show, too, beating Deji Olatunji by fifth-round knockout. But though he wasn’t the headline attraction that night, he’s separated himself from his YouTube peers by a significant margin considering he’s gone on to defeat Julio Cesar Chavez Jr and main event in much bigger crossover shows involving Mike Tyson and Anthony Joshua.
One man who doesn’t seem interested, though, is Naz.
“I didn’t watch him fight Mike Tyson,” he told the High Performance podcast. “I didn’t watch Andrew Tate’s last fight [against Chase DeMoor].”
He continued: “I want to watch unbelievable fighters that really want to win, that want a legacy in boxing. I want to see these guys win. I want to see these guys fight. I want to see these guys compete.”
Prince Naseem competed in one of the golden periods for British boxing, resonating massively with youth culture at the time through his elaborate entrances, generational punching power, and wins over Kevin Kelley, Wilfredo Vazquez, and Paul Ingle. He retired from the sport in 2002, with a win over Manuel Calvo, rebounding from his only loss — to Marco Antonio Barrera.
He speaks as someone who has experienced “the dizzy heights of boxing,” and said that the sport, in the modern era and presumably through vehicles like Misfits, “is being taken in a different direction.”
“It takes away from the beauty and the noble art of the sport because somebody comes in and earns more money than all the world champions.”
Naz wanted to note, though, that he doesn’t mind people “making money through boxing.”
He said: “If they can train, and they come from a YouTube background and want to do boxing, they’ve got a name, it’s a numbers game. Fighters going on Netflix, I’m happy for them.”
However, in the clip below, you can see that the actual TV-friendliness of it all isn’t for him.