Mike Tyson and YouTuber Jake Paul face off during a press conference. Mike Tyson and YouTuber Jake Paul face off during a press conference ahead of the exhibition boxing match on Netflix in November. Picture: Kena Betancur / AFP
Image: Kena Betancur / AFP
The winner of the Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson was … irrelevant. It’s all about the money, and don’t think for a second that it was be about anything else.
After the dust settled on the highly-anticipated, made for streaming exhibition boxing match on Netflix, that took place in November, both YouTuber Paul and Tyson would be left laughing all the way to the bank.
Both fighters reportedly earned between $30 and $40 million each, or R545 and R726 million.
‘Iron Mike’ Tyson is undeniably one of the best heavyweight boxers of all time, but that was at the turn of the century, with the prime of his career coming during the mid 90s. Paul, in contrast is 27 and has just 11 pro fights to his name.
This trend of boxers coming out of retirement many years later for something that is nothing more than an exhibition fight, despite all the hype saying otherwise, is not looked kindly upon by the pugilist purists.
Ahead of the fight, a CNN headline read: “Jake Paul and Mike Tyson face off in a boxing event unlike any other”.
While that is most certainly true, the question remains: Is this a fight that everyone wants?
Eddie Hearn, fight promoter and Matchroom CEO took a dim view of the event when he told Fight Hub TV: “He (Tyson) is 58-years-old.
“I find it very sad, but it’s a big event. I understand people are going to watch it. It’s entertainment, I guess, but for someone who idolised the guy growing up, not the best day.”
Another former boxing heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua, however, was more in favour of the fight.
“I personally think it’s really good,” Joshua said on the Jonathan Ross Show.
“I think that the boxing hardcores, the boxing fanatics, they don’t like it because it’s like, ‘Why are they disrespecting our sport?’
“Let’s say we divided this crowd in half, and you have half of the people that are hardcore boxing fans, and half of the people that love a certain YouTuber, but that person brings all these people into boxing, which benefits everyone else that’s involved in the industry.”
There’ve been many examples of fighters coming out of retirement like when Floyd Mayweather fought MMA star Conor McGregor in 2017. At the time Mayweather was 40-years-old and McGregor was 29. After the fight went 10 rounds, Mayweather won on TKO.
Incidentally, Mayweather would later fight Logan Paul in June 2021. Logan is Jake Paul’s brother and also a prominent YouTuber. The fight went the full distance and no winner was announced afterwards. Talk about an anti-climax, although Mayweather dominated the punches landed stats with 40.2% compared to Paul’s 12.9%.
It’s difficult to say why these fighters, especially why the retired boxers need to dust off their gloves yet again. But it’s rooted in fighters probably facing a future without an income and looking for one more big pay day.
The best example of this, perhaps, was when Muhammad Ali came out of retirement to take on his former sparring partner Larry Holmes in 1980. A couple weeks before the fight, Ali was battling with his health already and was unable to walk into a training ring unassisted.
The fight itself saw an overweight Ali look like a shadow of his former self, and Holmes pulverised the former heavyweight champion of the world. Right after the fight Ali was given painkillers and anti-depressants.
Hollywood actor Sylvester Stallone was ringside for the fight and said it was “like watching an autopsy on a man who is still alive”.
It’s also widely believed that contributed to Ali’s Parkinson’s syndrome. In fact, Ali was so stubborn that he even fought again a year later, which resulted in another loss to Trevor Berbick. Ali fought 61 times in his pro career, winning 56 and losing five. Three of those five losses came in his final four fights.
In the clash between Tyson and Paul, though, we did not see such severe damage as there was much more emphasis placed on the fighters’ safety. In fact, there was not much damaged to either fighter at all, with the authenticity of the bout debated afterwards. The lead-up, the fight itself and the aftermath were all part of a carefully orchestrated money-making exhibition.
In time, the manufactured and contrived ‘beef’ between Tyson and Paul will be forgotten and all that will be left will be those extra zeroes in their bank accounts.
And in the face of their overflowing masculinity, in the words of Abba: “Money, money, money. Must be funny, in a rich man’s world.”
* The views expressed are not necessarily the views of IOL or Independent Media.
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