Guilty pleasure

Notes from last night's Jake Paul/Mike Tyson boxing match--and all the hype and more compelling action leading up to it.

For about a month, it was penciled into my mental calendar: the much-hyped boxing match between social media star-turned-boxer Jake Paul and former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson.

I’ve mostly been a casual boxing observer, going back to the first big fight I recall: Muhammad Ali’s shocking loss to Leon Spinks in 1978—a setback that Ali redeemed with a win reclaiming his champ status later that year.

Over the years, I’ve occasionally tuned in to the sport, though with an increasing sense that it represented a “guilty pleasure” of some kind.

Now that I’ve had about 24 hours to let Friday night’s Netflix special simmer, here are some observations:

• I thought the heavily favored Paul would win, likely by knockout, though I wasn’t surprised by the unanimous decision. There was more downside for Paul in knocking out his much older (by over 30 years¹) foe. What if he seriously hurt Tyson? What if his aggressiveness opened the door for Tyson to land a knockout punch himself? Much too tempting to play it safe, so that’s what Paul did on the way to his $40 million payday, double Tyson's take.

• Tyson is noted for, among other things, saying, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” On this night, his plan largely consisted of ducking punches from Paul, but not much else. This knockout avoidance was perfectly aligned with Paul’s conservative plan to jab, jab, jab, but not go for the big wallop.

• This all made for a pretty boring fight, as Tyson appeared to inflict more damage on his boxing gloves, gnawing on them through each of the eight two-minute rounds.² This “biting fixation,” as he termed it after the bout, is something former heavyweight champ Evander Holyfield is familiar with.

Tyson chomps a piece of Holyfield’s right ear in their 1997 fight.

To underscore the generational gap between Paul and Tyson, here’s a story from January 18, 1997—when Jake was all of one day old. It previews the Tyson/Holyfield fight later that year:

• The best shot delivered by Tyson was his slap of Paul’s face at the weigh-in on Thursday, a rather predictable part of the pre-match hype. By not retaliating, Paul exercised the same restraint that was his trademark inside the ring.

  

  Note the prominent display of event sponsors in the background. At the heart of this whole spectacle, of course, was making a buck.

• In those few instances when Tyson lunged toward Paul, my adrenaline and excitement surged—a primal reaction matched by the AT & T Stadium crowd’s collective roar in those moments. Could Tyson replicate his prior triumphs in the ring? It took only a few seconds to learn that, no, he most certainly could not.

• The three other bouts leading up to the main event made for much more compelling action, especially the rock ’em, sock ’em fight between Ireland's Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano, who hails from Puerto Rico.
  
  I thought Serrano should’ve gotten credited with the win; she landed about 50% more punches than Taylor. But it was Taylor who got the split-decision victory. Here’s the pre-match screenshot of these two determined athletic warriors:

  

  You can find the bloody images of Taylor and Serrano elsewhere, if you’d like. I’ll wrap things up with this commercial from my childhood, a close approximation of their slugfest:

1. Paul, at 27 years old, and Tyson, at 58, marked the biggest age differential in professional boxing history. In other terms: 11,159 days separated them. That’s nearly one billion seconds—somewhere around 964 million, to be a bit more precise.

2. A normal boxing round is three minutes. The shorter rounds helped Tyson make it through, though he looked weary from the get-go.