The Best American Magazine Writing 2022 by Sid Holt

Author:Sid Holt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

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“For your Jake Paul profile, could you just write, ‘He’s scum’ 3,000 times?” An email from a former colleague.

“ESPN is really going to give this dude clout?” A text from a family member.

“Come the f—— on. That garbage human deserves NONE OF OUR ATTENTION.” A text from a friend.

Everyone who asked what I was working on had this reaction when they heard it was Paul. Any serious consideration of Paul must deal with it—the idea that Paul is an illegitimate subject and that to give him any attention is to fall for his gimmick. It’s not just that Paul is disliked for potentially being a bad person; it’s that his success is considered illegitimate. He’s perceived as being famous for being famous, as being a nonboxer making money fighting nonboxers while stealing money from real boxers and having a laugh at the sport.

Paul is merely another media creature, rescued from banality only because he has so deeply internalized the incentives of engagement, of self as billboard. There’s nothing alien in his motivations. What sets him apart, rather, is the degree to which he has taken them. Any media person who has ever spent an entire day online reposting and responding to every positive comment they receive knows intimately what neuroses pursue and drive Paul.

On my first day in Miami, I watch Paul record a podcast episode at the South Beach mansion of Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports. When Paul arrives for the interview, he’s hunching over his phone in the passenger seat of his white Lincoln SUV while the rest of his entourage disembarks. His bodyguard opens the door and Paul says to his manager, Nakisa Bidarian, without looking up, “Posting posting posting.”

“What’s up?” Bidarian asks, stopping short of the lecture about tardiness he had been warming up while he and I waited for Paul to arrive.

Paul looks up for a second before returning to the phone, alternating between smiling at the screen and a blank, more concentrated look—mouth slightly open, thumbs working quickly.

“I’m shutting down the internet right now,” he says. “I’m getting into beef right now.”

He is accusing his erstwhile friend and fellow YouTuber turned boxer, Austin McBroom, of being a serial adulterer.

After the interview, we hear McBroom is outside Portnoy’s house waiting for his own podcast appearance. Here now is one of Paul’s greatest tricks, the ability to conjure via prestidigitation on his phone, the irreality of the internet into flesh-and-blood happenings of almost no consequence whatsoever. The two men confront each other outside as security steps between them. I count at least three videographers and several smartphones. No one looks very concerned this will grow violent.

I stand just beyond the group. As the two parties separate and McBroom goes inside for his interview, a line of pink neon script hanging in Portnoy’s dining room pops into my head: “It doesn’t get any better.”

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