Former Bellator and ONE Championship welterweight champion Ben Askren wasn’t phased at all by YouTuber Jake Paul’s antics at the press conference ahead of their April 17 boxing match.
Askren spoke with MMAJunkie after the pair’s pre-fight festivities that saw the UFC veteran pie face Paul after a staredown which led to a physical response from the social media star. Before this incident or the press conference even began, Paul with his entourage approached Askren who sat alone at a table to engage in some trash talk. He doesn’t seem all that bothered by the YouTuber turned boxer’s theatrics and see’s it all as the lowest level of things.
“Kind of what I think of his jokes, he always picks the lowest hanging fruit,” Askren said MMA Junkie afterward. “There’s not really any high-level thinking or high-level trash talk. It’s literally the lowest level of stuff, like the Masvidal thing. Do you think I’ve not seen the Masvidal thing a million times? A hundred responses to every tweet I do has that GIF on there – or is it a meme? Whatever the f*ck it is, I don’t know if he thought that was gonna bug me. That was bad.”
Askren overall came away unimpressed and continued on to say he just believes the antics after their faceoff with Paul shoving and tapping him, were all for the YouTuber to hype himself up ahead of their showdown that will be a boxing-pop culture spectacle produced by the social media company Triller.
“You could tell he was trying to talk himself into being really tough,” he said. “He came back kind of at me, just kind of pushed him away as I left. He didn’t really like that.”
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