Key Takeaways
- Sports broadcaster Emily Austin joined Jake Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions to cover weigh-ins, face-offs, and fight-night interviews for its historic first championship boxing event with TikTok LIVE.
- Amanda Serrano rallied over the final five rounds to beat Lucrecia Manzur by majority decision, retain her featherweight titles, and secure career win No. 50 in the first unified women’s title fight scheduled for 12 two-minute rounds.
- Austin’s MVP appearance follows a packed run with DAZN and the FIFA World Cup as Paul’s newly merged MVP-PFL operation expands and he targets a boxing return before a possible 2027 MMA debut.
Emily Austin has spent the past few years becoming a familiar face around some of boxing’s biggest fight nights. On Friday, she stepped into a different corner.
The 25-year-old sports broadcaster worked with Jake Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions in Temecula, California, for MVP’s Aug. 21 card at Pechanga Resort Casino, covering weigh-ins and face-offs before conducting interviews on fight night.
The timing was pretty hard to beat. The card marked the first championship boxing event broadcast in partnership with TikTok LIVE, while headliners Amanda Serrano and Lucrecia Manzur made history in the first unified women’s world title fight scheduled for 12 two-minute rounds.
Serrano had to work for milestone win No. 50. Manzur pushed the seven-division champion the distance before Serrano retained her WBA, WBO and Ring featherweight titles by majority decision, with two judges scoring it 116-112 and the third 114-114.
And those final scores don't quite capture how close Serrano came to seeing the night go another way. Manzur was ahead on all three cards after seven rounds before Serrano swept the final five. Afterward, the Argentine challenger called sharing the ring with one of her idols a “dream come true,” while Serrano summed up the experience a little more simply on social media: “Wow this was rough! lol.”
For Austin, being planted in the middle of another big fight week is starting to come with the territory.
When asked about her schedule in a 2025 interview with Max Raskin, the DAZN reporter revealed, “I have 18 fights a year contractually. That's 18 times a year I'm flying.” And that's before the rest of her calendar gets involved.
Austin has said boxing was a newer lane for her after working primarily around team sports, but the stakes quickly grabbed her. “The pressure in boxing is immense,” she told Global Networker, noting that when one athlete is standing alone in the ring, there is nobody else to shoulder the loss.
That schedule has only widened in 2026. Along with working major fight cards for DAZN, Austin spent part of the summer covering the FIFA World Cup before making the jump into Paul's MVP universe.
She arrived there during a particularly big stretch for the company. Just weeks earlier, MVP merged with the Professional Fighters League, bringing boxing and MMA under the MVP banner and creating a combat-sports company representing nearly 400 fighters. Paul called the deal a way to accelerate MVP's original mission “by a decade.”
His own fighting career, meanwhile, has been on pause. Paul hasn't competed since Anthony Joshua knocked him out in the sixth round of their December 2025 heavyweight fight, breaking his jaw in two places.
Now recovered, the YouTuber-turned-boxer is eyeing a return by the end of the year or January, with MVP co-founder Nakisa Bidarian recently naming a Tommy Fury rematch among the possibilities.
Paul is thinking beyond boxing, too. Following the PFL merger, he said he hopes to make his MMA debut in 2027 after first returning to the boxing ring.
