Tyron Woodley fell to 0-1 in his pro boxing career recently, with a split decision loss to influencer/combat sports disruptor Jake Paul. Since that loss, Woodley has claimed—repeatedly—that he was the real winner of the fight and that he would not go through with a tattoo bet he made with Paul unless a rematch was made official.
The bet behind this squabble involved the loser of the fight getting a tattoo that proclaimed their love for the victor. Initially, it seemed as though the loser would get inked on fight night, with start tattooist Tatu Baby brought in to seal the deal.
However, that didn’t happen after Woodley claimed he told Paul he would only get an ‘I love Jake’ tattoo if Paul agreed to a rematch and that Paul agreed to this. With that rematch seeming unlikely, Woodley is refusing to get the tattoo.
“He, out of his own mouth, said, ‘If you get the tattoo, then we’ll run it back,’” said Woodley (per MMA Fighting). “And I said, ‘Bet.’ And he said, ‘Bet,’ and we shook hands on it. I don’t know what world he’s in, but I feel as if that superseded the original bet, and I sat there, and his management walked up to me, and he said, ‘This is what the numbers are going to look like.’ I said, ‘Bet. Let’s do it.’ He said, ‘Alright, cool, it needs to be done tonight.’ So I sat up until three or four in the morning, waiting for them to hit us back. I talked to my manager, and I said, ‘What’s the deal? Where’s the tattoo person at?’ And he said, ‘Hold on one second, they said hold on,’ and it got strung out all night. I don’t know if they ever even heard back.
“It went from, ‘Get the tattoo, and it’s a rematch,’ to ‘get the tattoo and we’ll think about a rematch,’ to, ‘Oh, he didn’t get the tattoo, so there’s no rematch.’ It sounds like he’s just fucking scared to fight. He knows he squeaked out by the hair on his chinny chin chin; a lot of people thought he lost the fight. He got saved by the ropes. Man, shit, if I was him, maybe I’d just run off into the wind, as well. But if he’s sitting there acting like that’s not why we’re doing the fight, he’s a fucking liar.”
Paul seems to have moved on from Woodley and has recently been talking up potential fights with either Tommy Fury or Jorge Masvidal. Woodley bashed a potential match-up with Fury and claimed it wouldn’t come close to selling the same amount of pay-per-views he and Paul achieved (Woodley claimed their fight may by the year’s fourth highest selling pay-per-view).
“Nobody wants to watch no damn Tommy Fury,” he said. “They saw us fight already, there’s some controversy. Some people thought I won. Some people thought there was controversy that I haven’t even brought up yet, that we were like, ‘Ah, that wasn’t in the original agreement.’ I still feel like it’s unresolved. This is the beginning of a trilogy, and no other fight option that he has is going to do what we did with just organic drama.
“Jake, get your ass whooped again. This time, I’m putting your ass down. I don’t want to take about no other fight. All I’m thinking about is getting back into training camp, fixing those small errors, and just not getting out of shape. … Any opponent you say, fuck all that noise, let’s get this shit cracking again.”
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