Tommy Fury unconvinced by Jake Paul’s win: ‘Anderson Silva is not too far off my dad’s age’

Tommy Fury respects Jake Paul’s accomplishments, but he doesn’t see title belts in the YouTuber’s future.

Paul defeated MMA legend Anderson Silva via unanimous decision this past Saturday to improve to 6-0 as a professional boxer and overcome what was widely perceived as his greatest challenge since stepping into the combat sports world.

However, given the age disparity between the two fighters, Fury warns viewers not to read too much into Paul’s performance.

“I don’t know what to think of it because—I don’t want to be coming across as that, ‘I just hate Jake Paul, he just can’t fight,’ but please look at what a 48-year-old man has done with him,” Fury said on The MMA Hour (Silva, in fact, is 47). “I’m not being funny, but at the end of that fight it looked like he’d been in a fight with the WBC light heavyweight champion. He looked gone, like he went through the trenches in that fight. He got roughed up. And that’s a 48-year-old man. Anderson Silva is not too far off my dad’s age.

“Listen, Anderson Silva’s a great, but let’s be real, and let’s talk properly on how it is. The man’s nearly 50 years of age. He’s not trained as a boxer. He’s a professional icon, one of the best to ever do it in the UFC, in the cage, under a different set of rules. He trains in a lot of mixed martial arts. Now, when Jake Paul steps in with a man who just trains in boxing, especially after seeing it Saturday, I don’t see Jake Paul beating any average boxer. Even a not-that-good boxer would beat Jake Paul just purely because everything they do, they know about the sport. No disrespect to Anderson Silva because he’s got big cojones getting in there with a young, fresh man, at 50, so all respect to him. All respect to both men at the end of the day. They got in there and they had a good fight and that’s it.”

Silva, who turns 48 in April, went eight rounds with Paul, and both men had their moments throughout the bout. The most memorable one happened in the final round, when Paul connected with a counter right that dropped the former UFC middleweight champion. In the end, Paul won by a comfortable margin, with two of the judges awarding him 78-73 scores.

The outcome wasn’t a surprise to Fury. Before the fight, Fury said that he predicted a Paul win with age being a major factor that could not be ignored.

“I always knew Jake Paul would win this fight purely because no matter what anybody says, anybody who’s been out there saying age is just a number, no,” Fury said. “Age is age for a reason, and it catches up with you. A 50-year-old man cannot do the same as what he did when he was 24 or 25. You saw that Saturday night.

“Anderson Silva, he was getting gassed himself, as a very experienced man in fighting, and that’s purely because the man’s 50 years old. I think he did a remarkable job for getting in there and going the distance, I think he’s done very, very well. I knew Jake Paul would win because he’s the younger, fresher man and youth beats old age any day of the week.”

Fury and Paul have their own history with a pair of previously scheduled bouts ending up cancelled. Their first encounter was set for December 2021, but injury and illness caused Fury to bow out of the meeting, which led to former UFC welterweight champion Tyron Woodley instead getting a second crack at Paul. Fury and Paul were then set to fight this past August in New York, but Fury was unable to enter the U.S. due to visa issues.

Up next, Fury fights Paul Bamba on Nov. 13 in Abu Dhabi, and if all goes well, he still plans to face Paul in the future. He’s confident that “The Problem Child” won’t be a problem for him.

“Honestly, I’ll tell you this now: The first clean shot I land, and I’m talking about clean shot, the first clean shot that lands, he will be on the deck, and he will not get up,” Fury said. “Because I’ve been around fighting all my life, and I’ve sparred and I’ve fought—even these journeymen that I’ve been fighting and the recent guys I’ve been fighting, they’ve been getting hit up and down all their lives, and I guarantee when I connect on him with 10-ounce gloves on, he’s going down and he’s staying down, because he’s not a fighter.

“Trust me, if everyone wanted to pick up boxing at 22 and 23 and 24 and talked about being a world champion, I think everyone would. Champions in this sport are very, very rare, and some guy who’s just come along off YouTube wanting to throw his hands in it, for him to succeed is going to take a very special, special individual, and all these ones that talk and talk and talk and disrespect and this and that, they end up they can’t fight.

“Floyd Mayweather said it best. While he’s fighting MMA guys, he’s going to look incredible, he’s going to look like the dog’s bollocks, he’s going to look like he can stand a chance with anyone. But the minute he gets in there with half a fighter, everyone will see the true colors of Jake Paul. That’s the truest thing that I’ve heard on all this over the past two years.”

Having grown up in the illustrious Fury boxing family (Fury is the half-brother of heavyweight star Tyson Fury), Fury is confident the competition he’s faced in training is vastly superior to the opposition Paul has chosen in the first six fights of his pro career.

That includes Silva, because as decorated as “The Spider” was in MMA, there was no making up for his lack of boxing experience, according to Fury.

“Let me speak from experience, these guys that you see, these journeymen, they might be 0-70, let’s say,” Fury said. “They might have won two fights in 50. But I’ll tell you what they have been. They’ve been in there with Olympic gold medalists. They’ve been in there with national champions. They’ve been in there with every sort of amateur champion. They’ve been in boxing fights 70 times-plus, and the role of a journeyman for people who don’t know out there is show up and get paid, and they don’t have any ambition to win because their ambition is to fight the following week to get a payday to support the family.

“These guys have been in there, they’ve taken the shots around the head, and I guarantee Jake Paul could not stop an average journeyman, because they’ve been in there that many times with prospects. They know how to cover up, they know how to get through the fight, they know how to survive because they’ve been there. They’ve been getting smashed to pieces by prospects. They know how to get through a fight. Jake Paul wouldn’t know how to open him up because he hasn’t got that experience, and people that know about boxing will understand perfectly what I just said there.”