Mike Tyson throws a punch at Jake Paul. Photo / Getty Images
THREE KEY FACTS
OPINION
And so, what was the point of all that?
After a week of hullabaloo and fanfare, Mike Tyson-Jake Paul was dull, dull, dull – a glorified sparring session in which neither man was prepared to step in and make a decisive move.
The only thing that Tyson did manage to knock out was Netflix itself, which crashed under the pressure of so many streaming requests. In eight rounds, he threw just 97 punches, which works out at almost exactly one every 10 seconds.
Dancing around the ring like Wayne Sleep, Paul barely had to do anything to clock a dominant victory on points. One judge felt that Paul had taken every round (80-72), while the other two threw Tyson a bone by ruling him the winner of the first (79-73).
The build-up pantomime had featured plenty of synthetic venom, including Tyson’s choreographed slap at Thursday’s weigh-in, as well as Paul’s constant trash-talking. But any illusion of enmity was forgotten as soon as the “fight” – if we can call it that – got under way.
The two supposed rivals stopped even pretending to throw punches some 10 seconds before the final bell went. First Paul started nodding and genuflecting in a display of respect. And then, once time had been called, they stood together with their foreheads touching: an older man and a cosplay boxer who had fooled the world.
During the post-match press conference, Paul was honest about having carried his opponent. “I tried to give the best fight I possibly could,” he said, “but when someone’s just surviving in the ring, basically, it’s hard to make it exciting. His age [58] was showing a little bit.
“Like, after he slapped me, I wanted to be aggressive and take him down and knock him out and all that stuff. But that kind of went away as the rounds went on.”
While this might seem like a betrayal of the whole concept, it was also a mercy. Had 27-year-old Paul really gone after a lumbering Tyson, he could have inflicted some horrible damage.
The fans in the AT&T Arena seemed understandably disillusioned by it all. They loved Tyson’s walk-out and arrival in the ring, which had a rare electricity. But by the later stages of this eight-round bout, they were beginning to shift uneasily in their seats and to emit the odd boo.
When the MC called for applause at the end, those boos multiplied. For all the quality of the two previous undercard fights, which were both rippers, most of the 80,000-odd attendees went away feeling short-changed.
Like Diego Forlan – the former Manchester United star who wangled his way into a professional tennis tournament last week – Paul doesn’t deserve to be performing on a stage of this scale, alongside real professionals. And yet he was competent enough to get out of the way of Tyson’s punches, which were not only rare but also telegraphed.
Credit where it’s due: Paul does at least have a decent chin. When Tyson managed to land a rare left hook in round five, he opened his mouth wide and waggled his tongue to demonstrate that he wasn’t hurt.
The whole evening reminded us why we should admire the real boxers, and acknowledge the risks they take. Tyson remains their patron saint, no matter how diminished he might be by the passage of time. But Paul is still an interloper, using his social-media skills and marketing nous to force his way into the debate.
Real boxers resent Paul’s shortcuts and sharp elbows. Which helps to explain why, during the press conference, nine of the 12 undercard fighters had predicted – against all sense and logic – that Tyson would win.
The one upside of the evening was the quality of those undercard bouts. Almost by accident, Paul brought millions of eyeballs to a magnificent war between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano, while the welterweight clash featuring two Mexicans – Abel Ramos and Mario Barrios – also delivered an excellent watch.
As the headline act, however, Tyson’s comeback proved embarrassingly hollow. The whole stunt felt like a middle-aged couple digging their wedding gear out of the loft, in the hope of reviving the excitement of their honeymoon.
In such circumstances, the best one can hope for is a brief frisson, which is exactly what Tyson’s walk-on provided. You might be able to remember the original adrenaline rush, and even to enjoy its ghostly spirit. But you can’t actually recreate it.
Still surprisingly quotable when he wants to be, Tyson had earned a few headlines last week by predicting that he would “bring the Devil himself” to the ring. While this was a smart line, it was always likely to be an empty promise, unless Paul was going to stand there and make like a human speed bag.
When Paul declined to make himself a target in exchange for clicks, eight two-minute rounds dragged on even more painfully than Netflix’s overblown build-up series The Countdown. We shouldn’t really have been surprised. To adapt a movie catchline from Tyson’s heyday, the greatest trick these two ever pulled was to convince the world the Devil was real.
The Kiwi cruiserweight steps in at late notice to challenge Jai Opetaia for the IBF belt.