The Mike Tyson–Jake Paul fight last night was a disgrace to boxing with zero compelling narratives. We wrote about it anyway.
The great stories of Mike Tyson’s fight against Jake Paul last night were the ones left untold. This might have been the story of Tyson, a convicted rapist, getting his just deserts. I am not fond of nursing grudges against people who have served their time in prison, but Tyson remains unrepentant, and even as he prepared for last night’s fight, his lawyers have been preparing for another rape lawsuit. Look past the admittedly impressive PR rehabilitation of Tyson’s brand and what you’ll eventually see is a violent criminal who deserved to get put on his back one last time.
We didn’t get that story. Neither did we get the story most viewers probably wanted: the story of Jake Paul losing his teeth to a living legend. Few of them probably knew much about Paul’s pathetic boxing career or even his ridiculous support for Donald Trump; but it is a testament to his sheer unlikability that judging on sight alone most people preferred Tyson.
To say that Paul embodies the archetypal juvenile undomesticated white American frat bro is an injustice to frat bros everywhere. Paul is the guy who shows up uninvited at a frat party, insists on talking ten decibels louder than the music, and eventually gets kicked out after hitting on someone’s girlfriend.
We didn’t get that story, either. And neither did we get the story that the fight’s marketing clearly wanted to tell: that of an aging Tyson raging against the dying of the light, losing decisively but going down swinging.
Instead, what we got was a dramatic tragedy — but without the drama. Tyson somehow looked ten years older than he usually does as he lumbered to the ring. You could say that his first two rounds were competitive, but Paul was fighting conservatively at that point, trying to avoid any opening surprises and waiting for the inevitable. In round three, the inevitable arrived. Tyson’s legs were wobbly, and his blocks were weak; in between rounds, he gasped for air through a wide-open mouth. Just five minutes into the match, a fifty-eight-year-old Tyson shifted into survival mode, futilely chasing a spry Paul around the ring and absorbing hit after hit. For the final eight rounds, the only question in anyone’s mind was if Tyson would lose on points or by knockout.
Modern boxing, Norm Macdonald once noted, is only different from antebellum slave fights by a matter of degree: both feature men who are economically coerced into violence for the entertainment of a relatively affluent crowd. Watching him make that point earlier this week, it occurred to me that I’d probably be able to provide my own cultural analysis of the Tyson-Paul fight. Surely a spectacle of this magnitude, backed by the full marketing power of Netflix and sold to the world as a profound moment in history, would be able to provide some lessons about the horrors of capitalism — right?
Here’s the best I can come up with: moments before the fight, there was a bizarre moment in the locker room. Mike Tyson’s son gave him a brief interview — and then when he walked away at its conclusion, the camera panned back to reveal that he was wearing assless chaps the whole time. It was a pointless humiliation, not just for Tyson but for everyone involved. I felt ashamed and degraded. It was approaching midnight, so the only real alternative was sleep, but still my conscience chided me: “What are you doing with your life?”
This is just capitalism. Sometimes it doesn’t have profound stories to tell us; sometimes there aren’t profound insights to be gained with the right level of Marxist analysis. Sometimes capitalism is just two guys getting richer while one of them shoves his ass in your face.