Midnight on Friday, November 15th, the biggest boxing match of all time fizzled out anti-climactically. News outlets claim it broke several different kinds of records, but who knows if that’s true. See… There’s a problem with objective journalism on the topic of this match: Jake Paul was involved. Netflix was too. They hosted the streaming, and apparently did such a poor job that subscribers tuning in missed most of the fight to unbridled buffering. I tuned in through a stream of the venue’s jumbotron hosted by Antonio Brown’s Twitter. The pauper seats, in other words. I found out about Antonio’s stream through an internet thread that was the only source of up-to-the-moment info on the fight I could find. News outlets up til the moment itself were just rehashing the lead-up hype, the now-iconic moment of Mike Tyson slapping Paul HARD at their weigh-in for stepping on his toes. Mike Tyson is long past his prime, and told reporters that Paul stepping on his toes inflamed his sciatica. The match between the two had been postponed when Tyson got beseiged by ulcers. This is far from the first time Tyson’s health has plagued him. The previous penultimate match of his career ended with Tyson getting knocked out after tearing a ligament in his knee, which killed his ability to throw his signature punch. His last match before his retirement ended with Mike quitting the sport altogether in a torrent of frustration. It would be 20 years before he’d enter the ring again. His reign was a brief yet brilliant flash in the history of the sport. He won the heavyweight title at 20, the youngest person to ever do it. He was the first to hold the World Boxing Association, World Boxing Council, and International Boxing Federation titles all at once, and the only person to ever attain them all in a row. He didn’t just win fights, he knocked out opponents in seconds. His reign as world champ lasted 3 years, which seems insane to me for a sport where you try not to be concussed into involuntary submission. He ascended with a fury that was legendary even at the time, but he went out in a blaze of notoriety that will never be topped. Despite the shocking upset of his biggest losses, he’ll always be remembered at his most formidable. In most people’s minds, he’s the crazy guy who bit a guy. He says he only bit both of Holyfield’s ears in retaliation for Holyfield illegally headbutting him throughout their multiple matches, but Tyson also swears he never sexually assaulted anyone. His prison stint for sexual assualt in 1991 would disagree. If you look too closely, the truth tends to blur around Tyson. His status as a symbol has been contested. Was he really the terrifying machine portrayed in The Hangover, of all things? Did he line up easy opponents to knock down like tomato cans? Did trouble mysteriously flare up any time he faced a bonafide world-class athlete? Should he have been disqualified from the sport forever for taking a chunk out of Holyfield’s ear, even though the two are now such good friends they released CBD gummies in the shape of Evander’s missing cartilege? Should Mike Tyson be rotting in prison for raping an 18 year old? The world at large can’t seem to agree, passionate as we all are in the disparate ways we feel about him as a person and as a figure. It’s obvious he had a troubled life, full of the kind of extenuating circumstances that paint his downfall as a sympathetic tragedy, despite everything else we know about him. He was the most controversial figure in a sport that may only be second in controversy to wrestling. Even still, every comment I read everywhere was rooting for him that Friday night.

I summarized Tyson’s controversies to properly set the stage for how much the world loves to hate Jake Paul right now. Jake Paul is arguably the most polarizing figure in the entire history of boxing. I’ve never followed any sport too closely, but from my point of view as a casual bystander, there is no greater heel, at least in this moment, than Jake Paul. Is that an achievment in itself? I guess so. The question is, how much control does Paul have over that? The Paul brothers are about as visible as stars get in such an overexposed age. They’re avatars for a new brand of opulence that’s especially exhausting. They sprouted from the prank YouTuber mire and have continually climbed the ladders of success, to the protest of pretty everyone I have ever talked to. I do not understand their popularity. They are thoroughly fuckin’ odious to me. They have the kind of rancid vibes that make people hate them feverishly without any clear cause, so that when inevitably, these infallibly human dudebros actually do something repugnant, it’s a bit of a strain to react to. We already despised them with every ounce of flesh on our bones, there’s no headroom left for our disgust. Do the Pauls know this? Am I just viewing them from a bubble, and in their world, they’re beloved figures who’ve earned every cent of their ostentatiousness? I tried asking uh, anyone I know. Everyone backed me up. The Pauls are indeed insufferable. That is precisely what makes their pivot into the boxing world such a historically lucrative business move. They’re the perfect heels; heels that seem totally unaware that they’re heels. Like how a bad movie is all the richer for thinking it’s a good movie. They can’t possibly be as fuckin’ bonebrained as they appear; if they were really that brick-stupid, somewhere in their brutal ascendancies, they would’ve fallen through a bridge they burned into the poverty of irrelevance. Instead, they have the kind of creature comforts a tzar couldn’t even dream of, while a figure like Bougie2988 apears to be one inevitable breakup away from as hellish an existence as is possible in our spoiled rotten age. The Pauls are essentially the apex promotors of our time. Their sideswipe into the boxing world may have been met with backlash that was audible from space, but it was greeted with record profits too.

When I see copy that Tyson vs Paul broke several kinds of records, I believe it, unlikey as it seems. How could it beat the Fight of the Century, or the Thrilla In Manilla? Those are ingrained in our collective consciousness as historic events. Muhammed Ali, avatar to a staggeringly varied amount of people, clawed his way back into his profession after being punished for consciensciously objecting to the goddamn Vietnam War only to suffer shocking defeat, then achieve his revenge twice. Now that was a fight we could project our own personal & societal struggles onto! Was Tyson vs. Paul a historic event? Nope! The sponsors sure wanted it to be, but if all the feedback I’ve seen so far is any indication, this was only a great disappointment, too dull to even be a historically notable letdown like The Great Disappointment (when all the doomsaying of a Christian sub-cult failed to produce Christ’s 2nd coming). This was not the poetic deliciousness of Christ staying home again, it was the proverbial wimper instead of the advertised bang. It simply didn’t go like anyone hoped. It did not deliver anything anyone wanted. The dissatisfaction started with the outcome. Jake Paul won… by unanimous decision. Unanimous decision is as unsatisfying a thing as has ever been devised. It’s winning by technicality in a contest of brute force. It’s like a chess move clinching a rock fight, a drag race won by parallel parking. It’s not what we come for. We want a knockout! God, even a TKO will do. These are bodies pitted against each other in a sweepstakes of agony. We wanna see bonecrunching blows. We wanna grit our teeth as the punch connects. We wanna see flesh yeild to flesh, a fist reshape a face, even if only for a moment in a slow-mo replay. Tyson vs. Paul did not gratify this least dignified yet most enthralling desire. For some hullaballoo involving two of the most risible heels we’ve ever seen, that was the greatest sin the event could have committed.

If Tyson vs. Paul goes down in history, it will be with the joke epitaph, “elder abuse”. A 27 year old facing a 58 year old with health issues who had not set foot in a ring in years, had been professionally retired for two decades… One of the records the match broke was for the largest age discrepancy in history. 31 years. That’s almost as long as I’ve been alive. That’s over a third of a lifetime. Tyson actually looked great for his age. Promos showed the same spry panzer of a man that’s existed in the public imagination since his last knockout. Health issues can be overcome, the kinda wealth Tyson has is as great a help in that aim as time to work on it. Did he fix his bum leg? This couldn’t just be a total farce. So much has to happen behind the scenes for a fight to even be announced, especially on a record setting scale, so it had to mean Tyson was at least in comparable fighting shape to the man three decades his junior, right? The question went from whether an old hasbeen stood a chance against a fresh upstart to whether a contender could stand a chance against a champion. Whatever hype machine the Paul brothers pilot, it was working Tyson’s tried & true intimidation magic for him in the public imagination if not the Pauls’. The buzz around the fight turned from bewilderment to wonder. It was clear from the comments who we were all rooting for, even if in a hesitant or bedraggled way. From heel vs. heel, a face emerged. A face with an iconoclastic face tattoo.

I had forgotten the fight was happening that night. I had no plans to watch it. I just saw an ad somewhere, and found myself home from hanging out with friends. When I saw that ad, I felt a twinge of something. Something compelled me about the matchup. I hadn’t even thought about it since it was announced everywhere like a virtual version of the changing of a season, but I instantly was rooting for one of the fighters. A narative unfurled in my head, a vision floated like a butterfly & stung like a bee in my mind. I needed to watch this dang skirmish. I needed to see what would happen. It could get ugly, but I hoped against hope. I wanted Mike Tyson to win. I tried to find some up-to-the-moment reporting on the event. I dug through the piles of second-hand reporting reported third-hand, nearly gave up after a Twitter search only yeilded a sea of spam accounts posting engagment bait, then serendipitously stumbled upon a random-ass forum with members commenting in real time. The match hadn’t started yet, but it was unclear when it would because the Netflix stream was suffering technical issues. Finally, shortly after the opponents’ walk-ons, somebody found the jumbotron stream on wide receiver Antonio Brown’s Twitter. I refreshed the thread to read commenter’s thoughts in between each round. From their comments, my narative suspicions were confirmed: stray weirdos glossed over, the whole world was rooting for the former undisputed heavyweight world champion. The match looked promising at first. Tyson was back! He lurched out of his corner with purpose, landed a couple nasty jabs on Paul immediately. This was fantastic, exactly what I tuned in for. It lasted about as long as Tyson’s opponents in his defining matches. Age & nerve damage emerged from his corner with him for round two. It reminded me of my grandma, near the end of her life, shuffling across the living room with her walker. Paul obviously had Tyson licked in reach, but by round 4, he had Tyson licked in so many other ways, he dropped his gloves. Tyson’s rarely left his face. I realized halfway through the fight, that wasn’t just because it’s his style, but also because Tyson was biting them. By the end of the 8 rounds, Tyson looked like I feel after biking up this one hill that seems to go on for miles. I tried to tell myself, “It’s a feat that he’s even in the ring, on his feet.”, but boxing is not the setting for venerating vulnerability like that. It’s not appealing to the wholesome nurturer in us. I wanted to see a notoriously terrifying man unleash the beast, one last time. What I saw instead was a muddle that couldn’t be explained by the abysmal streaming quality. Soon as it began, it was over. At an undefinable point, Tyson stood almost still, like he was simply struggling to find his bearings. Paul got in one spurt of punches that made my heart flop wrongside up, and then Paul suddenly went kinda slack, like his gusto keeled over in his chest. As another grindingly boring round concluded with two confused looking dudes just kinda stumbling away, I must have blinked or something. There was no sound in the stream, at least not for me, so I had no idea what had just happened after that 8th round. All I could make out was Paul bowing graciously to someone he obviously admired, and the two sharing a hug that radiated all the enveloping warmth of human goodness even through several layers of glitching pixels. It would have been touching if I was not screaming internally, “THE HELL?? THAT’S IT??”. It was pretty silly of me. I wasn’t watching on a Netflix subscription, yet I felt robbed. Somehow, I knew it was Paul’s fault. For the first time in my life, he had suckered me too. All those eons of hairbrained crypto schemes he’ll never answer for, all his dues paid in frown-inducing hijinks waged, he finally pulled one over on me through a sport I only tangentially care about. God, it pissed me off. I think in that way, Paul showed his mastery of his craft. He was the consummate heel, right down to the behind-the-scenes real life cutaway. His brother knocking his hat off in his moment of triumph was my only balm.

In wrestling, there’s a grand tradition when a decorated wrestler retires. Instead of unceremoniously hanging up the belt, one last pageant is arranged: the passing of the mantle. In this case, the mantle is that honkin’ championship belt, and the retiring legend passes it on to a successor only after one final feat of fortitude. I love it so much. It’s a rare example of kindness in a cruel business, in a cruel world. It lets an employee who paid their dues exit on a high note. Isn’t that sweet? I guess if you take the kind of beating that could kill you on a chance off night for a stage hand, the least the big wigs could do is toss you the bone of an crowd applause severance package. Maybe the boss should just offer healthcare. Or acknowledge that CTE is a real occupational hazard? I dunno! I can’t help but love the practice still. It doesn’t always go right, though. It’s impossible to control every aspect of the show, right down to public perception of it. And in the case of Andre the Giant’s exit, he was done dirty by perpetual real-life heel Vince McMahon. I don’t want to wander into the kayfabe argument, how real wrestling is or isn’t, and how similar boxing as an industry is from its more unhinged cousin. I mean, Holyfield is undoubtedly missing a chunk of his ear. But was Tyson’s performance in the ring that night a performance in a different sense? Was Paul’s? I saw a lot of speculation everywhere I looked. How could Tyson stiffen up that much, so quickly? If Tyson wasn’t faking, how could Paul hold back with such self control when he’s a mindless twit? We came to see punches fly, but someone was pulling theirs. Only one of them was wearing boxing gloves, the other one was wearing kid gloves. It made the spectacle all the more deflating. As one forum commenter put it, “This is just sad, man. This is making me reflect on my mortality and shit.”. Some other people theorized that Tyson was biting his gloves in a desperate bid to curtail his infamously tempestuous temper as he held back on jackhammering away all possibility that Paul could ever look cute for YouTube again, but that sounded like a stretch to me. Missing pixels be damned, I know a winded dude when I see one. I look in the mirror often enough… The only explanation that made any sense was that Tyson yeilded to the siren call of a $20mil purse too soon into recorvering from ulcers, and experienced a debilitating sciatica flareup during the one representative punch he managed to land. Paul, who only plays a buffoon on TV, knew his role in the belt-bequeathing pageant as the heel granted a face turn from the most powerful facemaking force of all, nostalgia, restricted him to sparing his foe’s ass at the expense of delivering a memorable show. A young buck in his prime bestowed mercy on an old man past his. Of all the possible outcomes of the fight, I think commenters were bound to chafe at that one the most. Would they have preferred to watch one of the most reviled people on the planet deconstruct a living myth, in those godawful yet implausibly expensive shorts? God, yes. There is no juicier way to open a new chapter in a heel’s career than to have them absolutely demolish a familiar favorite. You know deep down that even if boxing is more real than wrestling, any ascendance is merely an arc, bound to end by the fact that it began. Paul would get his in time, just as Lennox Lewis shut up Tyson aggrandizing himself to the level of Sonny Liston back in the day. In a way, it would’ve been more honorable to Tyson’s legacy for him to go out with the bang of getting his ass beat by a worthy contender. Watching Paul hold back felt like a feedback loop of disrespect. There’s nothing cockier than a heel sparing a face the full brunt of their power. It says, I don’t think you can withstand my best shot because yours has not even phased me. In a traditional wrestling arc, that’s masterful theatrics, but in the context of a 58 year old man engaging in the profession that made him a star for the last time, it’s just anticlimactic. Why even hold this contest at all if it was just gonna be thrown in such an ingratiating, conspicuous way?

The twinge I felt seeing the ad again moments before the fight aired, the sudden hope I felt for seeing Tyson prevail, it touched on a deeper conflict than just an old heel softened by the limelight of nostalgia vs. the most intrusive backpfeifengesicht of the moment. On face value, this was not the match of the ages it was billed as. Lotta boxing wonks don’t seem to consider Tyson to be one of the true GOATs, and nobody takes the Paul brothers seriously. What this conflict represented was what its central players represented. It’s why I had to highlight all the context. A controversial figure recast into a beacon of our hopes in the contrast of an even more controversial figure that represents all the forces we feel stand against us… It’s not quite David & Goliath, unless it could be David after he had Uriah murdered so he could shack up with Bathsheba. Not a proper Goliath either, but a Philistine of a different kind: an artless oaf, an unsettling statue to tackiness, incuriosity, brutish opportunism. Tyson vs. Paul isn’t man vs. man, but man vs. nature, man vs. the world, man vs. himself. It’s a nigh literary struggle, it occupies mythic proportions. Am I being precious about the sport where huge, scary men beat the tar out of each other? We can temporarily forgive Tyson’s evils in order that we may repudiate Paul’s, because we can project our plight onto Tyson more easily than Paul. Answer honestly, do you relate to Jake Paul? Have you reaped not what you have sewn, but a harvest too bountiful for it to be what you alone could have ever planted? Have you succeeded in spite of, not the odds exactly, but your own flawed nature? Do you like Huey Lewis & The News, though their early work was a little too new wave for your taste? If you’re actually reading this far into my blather, I bet the answer’s a big, existentially-laden “I guess not.”. We are not Jake Paul. We are not really Tyson either, or at least I hope not, but we are definitely not Jake Paul. Mike Tyson, the figure and not the man, represents the artisan, the auteur, the passionate madman, the raw, undiluted potential of simply taking yourself seriously enough to try as though you’ll succeed. Paul represents the entitled brat, the grating figure of fun, the asshole the world loves but you see through. Irrespective of the toi he’s poured in and the savy he’s had to hone, he appears to have been handed everything we secretly believe we deserve but suspect we’ll never have. Stability, popularity, fucking heaps of so much money you couldn’t even count the piles… I don’t know if there’s more to his story, if I’m glossing over the fine details of the big picture. I don’t care. It’s almost immaterial that he’s been endlessly outed as a top dog con man, running insultingly lazy schemes in the most infuriatingly spam-infested time in history. The stories of his diverse methods of abuse are a Google search away. There are whole YouTube channels devoted to trying to expose him. It’s fruitless because everybody already knows. It’s the same effect as Donald Trump. Everybody knows he’s a scam, his fans just love him for it. If you don’t know you’re being scammed, the most effective trick a scammer can pull on you is to convince you they’re only scamming everyone else. Maybe they’re only scamming people you hate! Maybe they’re on your side, you’re in this together. I can’t fucking stand the genre of prank videos the Pauls spawned their fame from, but I imagine the draw of it is feeling like you’re in on a joke with actual stakes. The crueler the prank, the greater the honor that you’re on the “laughing at” end of it. In the politics of the parasocial, it’s a intoxicating feigned form of intimacy. For people who see through that, or simply detest the spectacle of louts mistreating people for yuks, it’s utterly invigorating in its ability to enrage in the way that only truly trivial things can be. For Paul to have the gall to cut his teeth in that godforsaken field then attempt to shift into another that engenders a solemn, earthy respect for embattled victors akin to the way people feel about grizzled war vets, well, it probably feels a bit like stolen valor to afficionados. It’s the difference between Muhammed Ali as an icon vs. uh… PewDiePie? Even Jackass, there’s something kinda loveable about those hooligans. Despite doing fairly similar work on paper, Steve O has a gravitas the Pauls will never barge their way into posession of. There’s just something horrifyingly uncanny about the Pauls. I know a couple diagnosed sociopaths, and I’m glad the language around sociopathy is shifting toward understanding rather than blanket ostracization, but “sociopath” as it’s commonly thrown around wantonly does describe a phenomenon usefully. The Pauls are Patricks Bateman, with all the airbrushed posturing and chipper goofiness camoflauging unsettling inhumanity. I respect hard work, but not a hustle. They’re hustlers, in the most pejorative sense of the word. There are working class YouTubers, you can be essentially a blue collar content creator, but the Pauls are of the influencer caste. They’re just a stack of grifters in a trenchcoat. That’s what it all boils down to, what this fight is at its core: the venerable old guard vs. the unworthy heir, a genuine legend vs. a wannabe huckster, the originator vs. the poser, the truth we know vs. the lie we’re sold. It’s all a show, and we all know it, but we still wanted to see the American dream hand the American reality its spoiled rotten ass. If hard work doesn’t triump over even a lazy grift, if integrity isn’t its own reward, if justice can be paid off to turn a blind eye, if there’s no Heaven for the righteous but more importantly no Hell for the wicked, what’s it all for? Jake Paul is the embodiment of white cis male privilege, the patron demon of failing upward into demigodhood. He has only ever fucked around, never found out. Mike Tyson went to prison for his crimes, got suspended from his profession for his transgressions. Mike Tyson got off easy, but he knows the sting of consequence. He has male privilege, but not white privilege. Jake Paul may never know the sting of consequence, not really. He’ll always be shielded from the brunt of it, even if that shield is human. Mike Tyson could’ve become, for a shining moment, the embodiment of Jake Paul’s consequences. This match could’ve been fucking around vs. finding out. A week after Trump somehow failed upwards into the highest formal seat of power in America AGAIN, we were robbed of even momentary catharsis. The grifter bully principality had a historic run of wins this month. Like Tyson standing there stunned as a deer in the headlights of some punk kid’s fists, the Democrats were as helplessly senile as if Joe Biden didn’t do the right thing and drop out. I cannot help but draw parallels, they’re hamfistedly hammered into every detail of this stupid punching competition like fate itself is a pugilist shackled to ineptitude by refusing to acknowledge its prime is in the past.

With all that said, I still haven’t even dug into the core of why the idea of this fight was so compelling and why the result is such a fucking bummer. The beating heart of it is, beyond some kinda avatar of heroic ideals our gusto subsists on, Tyson represented our fears of aging. “This is just sad, man. This is making me reflect on my mortality and shit.”, is comical in how distraught it is to feel so unexpectedly world-weary watching what should’ve been the visual equivalent of fast food. We all worry that, as time winds down our mortal coil, our power diminishes. All the anti-ageism in the world can’t argue away my mortal terror when I hear of a grandparent suffering a catastrophic injury. At that age, a simple slip down a step can change your whole paradigm for the worse. At 36, my body aches in ways that jar open new vistas of horrid speculation. To see Mike Tyson, still a tiger of a man in pop culture’s mind, visibly crumble in what shoulda been his element was not fun. It was even worse to commiserate with goddamn Jake Paul in the heat of the moment. What would I do if I had agreed to participate in a mass market cultural event, only to find myself suddenly thrust into the decision how much mercy to show a man entering his 6th decade of a notably turbulent life? How much I should potentially alter the paradigm of how his body is able to function, all to appease his fans and mine, the two of which are probably belligerently mutually exclusive? I… would question all my life choices. Then ultimately do the same thing Paul did. And I hate that with all my soul. I’m a late bloomer. I hope! I took a little longer than most people I know to find my niche in the world, at least in the job market. I’ve always wanted to be a recording artist, a singer songwriter, but it has only really started to come together for me in the last few years. I know I’m not old by any means, but I feel like my prime is now in the past tense. I’ve had trouble with allergies, cramps, my memory. Age has pilfered the ease with which I could’ve enacted my grand plans had the inspiration struck in my 20’s like it’s apparently supposed to. I know there are exceptions to the rule. In my field, Leonard Cohen only got started at my age, didn’t write “Hallelujah” until his 50’s. In Tyson’s field, George Forman was still knocking opponents out at 46. Whether these anxieties are unfounded or not, I still feel them. They flared up like a rash watching Tyson in that ring. Other comments I’ve seen, some of the copy I’ve read, conversations I had at work today have all touched upon this common dread around entropy claming our spark, the flair that we think makes us special. All the zen in the world, all the mindfullness that contentment is the only worthwhile goal can’t mollify that dread away, not when we see a cultural byword for indomitable virility reduced to pitiful blind jabs at thin air. Even more elemental than a defender for romanticized notions of self-determination, Tyson became the conduit for our terror over the self-reliance age will pry from us. Am I just projecting? Did you feel it too? It depresses me because it depresses me. I don’t want to feel sad for Mike Tyson. I want to feel vaguely irritated that he’d have the gall to put himself on Cassius Clay’s pedestal, but then kinda think he might not be too far off-base when I see him in action. As with the reactionary boomer confabulation that all the epochs in human glory are behind us, it’s aggravating to see people treat some possibly misplaced idea of a human being’s prime as a bygone era instead of one pinnacle descended to ascend another you weren’t capable of scaling before. Maybe I’ll never be able to scream in full chest voice the notes in the 5th octave of my range like I could in my 20’s, but my ability to craft a song from scratch is lightyears beyond what I was able to dream of back then. Maybe George Foreman’s boxing career ended at 46, but it’s not at all like he hasn’t lived an eventful life since then. Tyson hasn’t managed a KO since the 90’s, but has managed to stay in evergreen relevance in the quicksand of our culture by playing the weirdest hand a boxer has ever been dealt. I mean, you try spinning being “the guy who bit a chunk outta a guy’s ear” into a positive career! I feel wrong for feeling embarassed for him. Age isn’t a pitfall to fear, but a change to embrace, right? I think it’s like deconditioning out of capitalism’s toxic body image: an accomplishment we love for other people, but refuse to grant ourselves. Perhaps we’re looking at this match all wrong. We shouldn’t fear what age can take from us; age can never steal what he had, that we once had it. It was ours, and always will be, even if not materially, tangible in our hands, anymore. Age will never strip Tyson of his accomplishments. On the flipside, age will never let Tyson off the hook for his evils. Both will always exist as things that happened. In that way, we have triumphed over Jake Paul, but we didn’t need to do it vicariously through Mike Tyson. We have won over Jake Paul directly. We are not Jake Paul. We do not have to wake up tomorrow and face the kinda shit everyone is saying about Jake Paul after this absolute farce of a match. We do not have to live with Jake Paul’s decisions. We do not have to fear Jake Paul’s consequences. We do not have to pretend like Jake Paul does that we will ever belong in the boxing world, that we will ever be remembered as more than the heel in a face’s story. No matter what Jake Paul does henceforth, he will never be listed among the greats. Tyson is, and got to see it happen earlier in life than it usually happens for anyone. In that way, though Mike Tyson the human lost to Jake Paul the human, Mike Tyson the icon beat Jake Paul the upstart, and not by some namby pamby unanimous decision. It wasn’t a TKO either. It was a bonafide knockout, before Tyson even entered the ring. A career best for Tyson, another record broken. World’s youngest heavyweight champ, world’s first to get all the titles in a row, world’s first to bite an opponent’s ear so viciously it is branded with his name for life, and now, world’s first has-been to lose his last match to a wannabe with years of matches ahead and still come out the undisputed champion in the grand scheme of things. If you need proof that last honor is true, look up the memes of Tyson that emerged from the match. Watch Mike Tyson Mysteries. Look up a clip of his cameo in The Hangover (but for christ’s sake, don’t watch the whole thing). Whatever that is, charisma, star power, the “it” factor, Jake Paul will never have it. He may never know the unblunted sting of consequences, but he will never know the joy of being appreciated for who he actually is. Maybe you could have that over Jake Paul too.

The other type of commentary about this match I made note of was boxing fans pointing out that the undercard fights provided all the guts & glory the main event lacked, with the women’s match singled out as a top notch fireworks display. We see in part, not in whole. We don’t know the true story of Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul. We see a Lord Fauntleroy cosplaying the prizefighter life as a shiny new toy. We see a former paragon return to his profession long after he acknowledged his prime was slipping into the past. We see the gears of the machinery, glimpses of the inner workings of the industry. We have our suspicions, but they will never be confirmed. Maybe it was all a sham, more of a circus than we’d like to admit. Maybe it’s all for money, that’s the only purpose that drives any of it. Is boxing like art, is it important if there’s soul in it? The biggest names on the bill may have let us down, but the smaller print names didn’t. Sure as Jake Paul’s name now exists in the pantheon, another name will paper over his in the zoomed-out billing of history. Names have the power to make themselves, but the audience has the power to make them too. Maybe Jake Paul understands this. Maybe he knows his may not be a name that’s fondly remembered, but it’s a name that draws eyeballs all the same. While eyes are on him, maybe they’ll chance over some of the other names on the bill. If enough of us notice them, say them to each other the names will begin to stand out in bold. Jake Paul has the power to italisize the names, but he needs our help. If Jake Paul is evil, maybe he’s a necessary evil. The shadow reveals the light, the heel reveals the face. Our struggles reveal our strengths, just as the Jake Paul reveals the next Mike Tyson.

…Nah! Fuck the Pauls. Hope Their shit gets ROCKED.