As we sift sheepishly through the wreckage of Mike Tyson’s fight with Jake Paul, relieved that a 58-year-old body is not strewn somewhere in the rubble, we’re tasked with making sense of the damage. And three words come to mind.
The first one, you’ll have already heard, read, or said yourself: ‘sad’. That’s obvious, so let’s get it out of the way. We saw a man 30 years removed from his prime, unable to do what once made him a uniquely feared athlete. We saw him shuffle awkwardly around a ring, against a much less skilled man – 31 years his younger – and we saw him apprehensive to let his hands go. Hands that once dealt such captivating destruction, the likes of which had never before been seen in sport. And in the end, we saw him lose.
The other two words somewhat conflict with each other, yet somehow, both can be true at once.
So, next is ‘merciful’. If you are indeed sad at what transpired on Friday, in front of 70,000 fans in Texas and millions of viewers live on Netflix, imagine how sad you’d be if the former heavyweight champion had been knocked out last night. And actually, this is not an attempt to conjure sympathy for Tyson. He is a complicated figure, and a convicted rapist, lest we forget; no one is obliged to feel sympathy for him. At the same time, it is okay not to wish for a 58-year-old father and husband to get hurt.
Yet that brings us to the final word, and one that might seem to contradict the notion laid out above.
Friday’s fight between the heavyweight icon and the YouTuber-turned-boxer was ‘inauthentic’, and that is another problem in itself. Beforehand, there were claims that it would be scripted or fixed. In reality, the bout was never going to be those things, but this was not a real fight. It couldn’t be, when Paul was visibly pulling his punches, something to which he admitted after the eight two-minute rounds.
“I was trying to hurt him a little bit. I was scared he was going to hurt me, I was trying to hurt him…” Paul sounded coy as he spoke in the ring, but when asked at the press conference if he had held back, he opened up more. “Yeah, definitely, definitely a bit. I wanted to give the fans a show, but I didn’t want to hurt someone who didn’t need to be hurt.”
This would not have been an issue if Paul vs Tyson had been sold as an exhibition, but key figures went out of their way to make it an officially sanctioned, pro fight. That, paired with the constant talk of a knockout, was a bid to convince fans that Tyson and Paul (more so the latter) would take this seriously. It was an exercise of painful cynicism.
And to be clear, this writer is not surprised. Instinct always warned that it would be a pro fight in name alone, and that it would be fought more like an exhibition. But seeing that play out in real time, at such a hyped and viewed event, was still a sour experience.
And yes, to highlight the problem with the inauthenticity of this fight – to highlight how it ridiculed actual sport – might sound like implying: “We needed to see Mike Tyson get knocked out; that would have been true sport!”
Yet this is where ‘merciful’ and ‘inauthentic’ can be conflicting but simultaneously true. It is good that a 58-year-old man was not hurt by a 27-year-old. It is bad that fans were lied to. The fight was always going to be a lose-lose scenario.
That could have been avoided by arranging it as an exhibition bout, which would still have drawn millions of viewers who wanted to see Tyson box again – although the impossibility of Paul losing would have significantly lessened emotional investment, it must be said.
So, what was the actual solution? To never make the fight in the first place.
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