ARLINGTON, Texas — You didn’t really think he was going to do it, did you?
Most of you out there who were rooting for Mike Tyson to knock out Jake Paul Friday night in the boxing match of this weird, substance-free decade we’re living in were probably doing so for one of two reasons.
The first is that you find Jake Paul obnoxious and wanted to see Tyson inflict pain on the YouTube star, which is a perfectly reasonable conclusion.
The second is that a part of you, like me, always yearns to feel whatever you felt back in the late 1980s, when Tyson was the baddest man on the planet. This is not reasonable. If you are old enough to remember where you were when Tyson knocked out Michael Spinks in 91 seconds, then you most likely woke up this morning with a stiff back or a sore knee and a reminder to schedule your colonoscopy.
And none of us watching him have been through 56 professional fights, three years in prison and the kind of hard living that turned Tyson into a washed-up circus act before he walked away — back in 2005.
If you thought a 58-year-old Tyson had a chance to get in the ring and go blow-for-blow with a 27-year-old in his physical prime, albeit one whose only fights have been novelty acts, then you are denying the reality you experience every day.
Getting old is real. It stinks. It physically hurts. And if we’re lucky, it happens to all of us.
Tyson has indeed been incredibly lucky to make it to this point in life, to have stumbled into a lucrative second (or third) act as an entertainer and cannabis salesman.
But a boxer?
He’s not that anymore. Get real. It was never in doubt.
The stadium, the millions watching on Netflix — we’ll get to that in a moment — and really most of America wanted it to happen. Nostalgia has all of us in its grip in one way or another. And that’s why this bout, as ridiculous as the very concept of it was, became the most compelling show boxing has put on in ages. It was irresistible. And in some ways, it really delivered.
AT&T Stadium was packed, even though the vast majority of people in the stands were so far away from the ring they might as well have been in Oklahoma. Mainstream celebrities and content creators were all over the place. It looked and felt like a big-time sporting event, and a couple of the undercard matches were among the most compelling and violent fights you’ll ever see anywhere. (Katie Taylor’s controversial decision over Amanda Serrano was perhaps, pound for pound, the best sporting event of the year, even though the judges got the result completely wrong.)
It was a reminder of why boxing, on occasion, can still reach the highest of highs – even though those moments have become more and more rare as the years go by.
But then came the main event and it was … well, the best thing that you can say is that it happened and nobody got seriously hurt.
Tyson got a couple of good shots in early, and Paul looked scared out of his mind for a round. In the second, Paul kept his distance and stabilized. In the third, Tyson came out aggressive, looking for the knockout punch, and then it came down to the simplest concept in sports.
Young beats old.
Paul did the bare minimum, but he won. He didn’t win because he’s an elite boxer or because he landed a bunch of powerful shots. For all the sideshow inherent in this matchup, Paul won a fairly boring and straightforward decision for one reason — because he was fighting a 58-year-old.
‘There was (a) point where I was like, ‘He’s not really engaging back,’ ‘ Paul said. ‘I don’t know if he was tired or whatever, and I could just tell his age was showing a little bit.’
Paul hinted that he even backed off a little bit because he didn’t want to embarrass the legend, because he wanted to give the crowd a show. He also said he sprained his ankle three weeks ago and lost training time, which contributed to his lack of aggressiveness. Don’t buy it. Until Paul gets in the ring with a real boxer and proves that he’s something more than a guy who’s pretty decent by celebrity standards, this is what his career is going to be like: One scam after another, trolling us all the way to the bank.
Take solace in the fact that, if you missed it due to Netflix’s embarrassing technical issues, you didn’t miss much.
If there’s any lasting legacy from this circus, it’s the missed opportunity for Netflix to assert itself as a real player in the live sports space. Though the exact scope of the problems is hard to gauge, anecdotal reports on social media from people trying to watch the fight suggest that buffering and freezing and technical errors were rampant.
Folks were angry, and with good reason. When you hype an event this much and can’t deliver a smooth viewing experience, it’s hard to earn that credibility back.
We’ll see where Netflix goes from here. We’ll see if Paul wants to risk his reputation fighting a real professional or slink away with the tens of millions he’s pocketing here and find another trick to help him create content.
But people in the stadium voted with their feet – and they were leaving AT&T Stadium by the thousands before they even announced the winner. It was that obvious and anticlimactic. If you didn’t see it coming, however, that’s your own fault. A 58-year-old former athlete, even an icon, doesn’t belong in the boxing ring.
Let’s hope we never get suckered into something like this again.