On the Ground at Jake Paul v. Mike Tyson, the Fight America Deserves

Mario Costa, a 70-year-old Jersey City bar owner, was standing in the lobby of the Toyota Music Factory, an event center on the outskirts of Dallas, Texas, chewing on the stub of an unlit cigar and pondering the latest turn in the operatic and notorious life of one his oldest friends, Mike Tyson.

“I had one of the kids from the hood call me up and ask, ‘Why’s Mike doing this? Does he need the money?’ I think it’s just the challenge. You always have that in you. It’s the nature of the sport.”

Costa had first met Tyson in 1984, when the boxer was just an 18-year-old amateur on the brink of one of the most ferocious and dominating runs in history of American sports (37 straight wins, 33 of them by knockout, the undisputed heavyweight championship of the world). Now, Tyson was 58 years old and nearly two decades removed from his last professional fight, but he was on the brink of a strange comeback that was both a verifiable BFD and an awkward event that had puzzled more than just the neighborhood kid who had called up Mario Costa. 

As Costa chewed on his stogie in the lobby, Tyson was getting ready to step onto the Music Factory stage for a public weigh-in. In 24 hours, he would face off against YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul in a decidedly non-championship bout that would be broadcast live on Netflix. The streaming giant was heavily promoting the fight to its 283 million global subscribers, and, it seemed, every other media outlet in the world had followed suit. For the week leading up to the fight, the internet — RFK Jr. and Matt Gaetz nominations aside — was basically turned over to Tyson and Paul. And it worked. According to the streaming service, even with buffering issues, 60 million households ended up tuning in. 

The match-up was an oddity. Paul is 27 years old and has been boxing seriously for just half a decade, but during that time, he has leveraged his social media celebrity and a string of knockout wins against non-boxers into becoming — for better or worse — the sport’s biggest draw. Tyson is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest heavyweight fighters of all-time, but during his last real bout, in 2005, he quit after the sixth round of a scheduled 10, saying “I don’t got the fight and guts anymore.” It was unclear what exactly had changed in the intervening 19 years.

Costa told me his friend was more balanced now — after a life marked by a rape conviction, a prison stint, bankruptcy, and addiction — Tyson had settled into life as an entrepreneur, family man, and subject of endless fascinations. (Tyson has starred in a one-man show about his life, directed by Spike Lee, and an Animal Planet docuseries about his longtime hobby of pigeon racing.) Costa is now the custodian of the boxer’s “300 to 400” pigeons, keeping the birds in coops near his Jersey City bar, the Ringside Lounge. Costa told me he could see Tyson’s newfound equanimity in the way he interacted with his birds. Tyson, who lives in the Las Vegas suburbs, would stop by sometimes to take out his favorite roller pigeons, admiring their freedom as the birds flapped high into the sky then tumbled in curlicues through the air. “He said, ‘This is rich,’” Costa told me. Tyson had realized material wealth was less important. But what Tyson’s serenity meant for his ability to punch Jake Paul remained to be seen.

“If Mike can knock him out early it’ll be done.” Costa said. “Punchers never lose the punch, and Mike’s a puncher.” But even though Costa regards Paul as “just a joke,” an unskilled fighter who is, at best, a pretender in the sport, he worried if Tyson didn’t win the fight in the first few rounds, the edge would shift toward the natural physical advantages of youth.

Standing near Costa, other members of Tyson’s entourage projected more confidence. Tyson’s sparring partner, Mike Russell, a blocky cruiserweight, predicted the revitalized Tyson was “going to come in and win spectacularly by knockout. I truly believe he’s going to win in the second round.” One of Tyson’s business partners, Adam Wilks, an affable Canadian with a graying goatee, felt the same way. “Jake’s going to get knocked out in the first two rounds, but for him, it’ll be a win. He got in the ring with Mike Tyson. He comes out a winner.”

As the pre-fight weigh-in began, the vibe seemed to fit this win-win analysis — it was perfunctory, predictable, and businesslike. Tyson and Paul walked onto the Music Factory stage, they took their turns on the scale, and Paul chugged a can of Celsius energy drink, a sponsor of the fight and a brand he endorses. Then they both lined up for the stare down, where boxers stand chin to chin and, according to habit, grimace at one another. Paul, apparently, stepped on Tyson’s toe. Tyson hand shot up and slapped him. 

“Talking’s over,” Tyson said, before turning to walk offstage. Paul, who had sat down in a lotus position after the slap, stood up and bellowed into Helwani’s mic: “He hits like a bitch. It’s personal now… He must die.”  

The whole thing felt like pro wrestling — off-kilter and oversold. But it was also probably real, at least real in the bizarro real world in which Jake Paul v. Mike Tyson was set to exist. In retrospect, no other moment between the two men would feel as spontaneous or dangerous.

THERE ARE A FEW different ways to conceptualize the fight between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson. As a contest of human bodies, it was the young versus the old. As a sporting matter, it was a matchup of Paul, now ranked as the 126th best heavyweight in the world, against Tyson, a long inactive athlete. As an actual boxing match, it would be briefer and less demanding than a standard men’s fight — contested over eight two-minute rounds, instead of 10 or 12 three-minute rounds, with the fighters using cushier 14-ounce gloves (10 ounces is standard). Far more relevantly, as a business proposition, it was a marriage of Paul’s 7.7 billion YouTube views and 27 million Instagram followers with Tyson’s four decades of international celebrity and notoriety. Tyson would take home a reported $20 million (Paul’s fee was said to be twice that) while getting a publicity boost for his vegan hamburger chain, Mr. Charlie’s, and Tyson 2.0, the cannabis brand he runs with Wilks. (Among the products, Mike Bites, edibles in the shape of Evander Holyfield’s right ear with the missing chunk Tyson bit off in their infamous 1997 fight.) For Paul, the upside was even clearer: a content creator who had long been paid by the click was about to get the biggest platform of his life.

The crowd at AT&T Stadium that had come to see the spectacle was an eclectic mix — hardcore fight fans; couples on a very expensive date night; a smattering of proudly MAGA-hatted bros; closer to the ring, men and women with hard bodies, diamond bling, and conspicuous lip filler. But as varied as the crowd was, no one really believed that Paul v. Tyson would be anything close to the best-fought matchup that could be staged. That will take place next month, when heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk takes on former heavyweight champion Tyson Fury. But it’s highly unlikely 60 million households worldwide will tune in to that fight. Expertise and traditional credentials are not winning the day — not in a world in which a former reality TV star has won back the presidency and set about filling out his cabinet with cable news hosts and conspiracy theorists. And now here was Jake Paul — Vine and YouTube star — taking over the sport of boxing. If you had already suspected saying outrageous shit into a camera was the most prized skill of our moment, then the Paul-Tyson fight seemed designed to provide further proof.

Paul, who endorsed Trump in a YouTube video he said God had pushed him to make, at least had a sense of humor about his boxing charlatanism. He knew people thought he didn’t deserve it, and he was happy to play into their revulsion. At the weigh-in, Paul’s promotion company offered fans an opportunity to punch a life-sized model of Paul’s billy goat-bearded and eminently punchable face. When fans lustily booed him at every turn, Paul grinned and gave fans his best imitation of a WWE heel.

BY THE TIME MIKE TYSON and Jake Paul made their entrances into the middle of AT&T Stadium, the crowd of 70,000 had just finished watching an almost unbearably intense 20 minutes of boxing, a women’s lightweight title fight between the Irish champion Katie Taylor and her Puerto Rican challenger Amanda Serrano. Taylor and Serrano had previously met two years ago at Madison Square Garden, a match that had been billed as “the biggest women’s fight of all-time,” and had 100 percent delivered on the hype. The rematch had been absolutely thrilling, a display of just how balletic and brutal boxing can be. The women were fast, dazzling, and inexhaustible, with Taylor and Serrano both throwing over 500 punches and landing over 40 percent of them. Serrano fought the later rounds with a gaping gash above her right eye, blood pouring down her face as her corner struggled to stanch the bleeding. Taylor, by the end, looked like she was gasping for air. 

For nearly everyone in the stadium, even those on the floor near the ring, it was easier to watch the fight on the 160-foot-wide jumbotron than to look at the ring itself. The longer the fight went on, the more people would briefly avert their eyes, then turn their heads to look again. You wanted to look away, but couldn’t. Taylor was declared the winner, the crowd didn’t like it, but it almost didn’t matter — the entire fight was shocking and thrilling and almost superhuman.

Throughout the night, as the undercard fights came and went, the stands had been gradually filling up. By the end of Taylor-Serrano, every seat was full, the stands looked endless. On the floor, Shaquille O’Neal and Rob Gronkowski were in their seats. Charlize Theron, ignoring the jumbotron camera, looked on as well. So were a host of slightly less starry celebrities starring in upcoming Netflix series like Ralph Macchio and Josh Duhamel. A 23-year-old woman sitting on the floor at the back of the most expensive seats told me she had wondered whether Donald Trump himself would walk into the stadium. He didn’t, but Texas governor Greg Abbott, a considerably less colorful Republican, took a ringside seat, arriving through the fighters’ entrance. No one seemed to notice.

And then, finally, it was time. Hundreds of fans stood at the barricades blocking off the path where the fighters would enter. Nearly everyone in the crowd stood up. Then Paul, the gleeful villain, drove onto the floor, perched on the seatback of a lowrider convertible next to his brother, Logan. Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight”, likely a troll of Tyson (he sings it in his cameo in The Hangover), boomed over the speakers. Paul smiled when he heard the inevitable boos. Then it was Tyson’s turn. The aged hero walked out onto the runway alone, wearing a black terry cloth poncho, stone-faced and implacable as the stadium erupted in applause. The stage was set. The anticipation was overwhelming. The fight began.

In the first round, Tyson looked sharp, Paul was on the defensive. Nothing happened, but it seemed like it could. If you closed your eyes, you could imagine the moment of communal ecstasy that would erupt when Tyson knocked out Paul with a catastrophic uppercut. It felt like an approaching thunderstorm. The anticipation was barometric. But the thunderstorm did not arrive. By the third round, it was clear Mario Costa’s prediction had turned into prophecy. The longer the fight went, the more Tyson showed his age. Paul was throwing and landing many more punches. Tyson, increasingly, was just standing there, taking it, barely mustering a few short bursts of counterattack.

In the fifth round, as the fighters plodded around one another, the crowd broke into a loud cheer, as if hoping, somehow, they could shock Tyson into form. It didn’t work. By the sixth round, boos were raining down from all sides. Tyson was compulsively biting his gloves, as if warding off a sharp pain. Paul seemed to be taking it easy. What Netflix called the “most highly anticipated live boxing match of all-time” had revealed itself to be a dud. By now the crowd was mostly quiet, the hopeful cheering had stopped. Not many people even bothered to keep booing. As the eighth and final round finished, many in the crowd started moving for the exits, not bothering to wait for the judge’s decision. It was obvious Paul had won, but even more obvious no one really cared. One man near me, more than a little drunk, raised his right hand into the air, his middle finger extended. He kept it there for minutes. Another man next to him muttered “terrible.”

Tyson had looked listless, but the crowd never turned on him. He was still the GOAT, the guy everyone had come to tell people they had gotten to see live. If his skills were diminished and his stamina unimpressive, well, he was seven years short of Medicare, after all. It wouldn’t hurt his legacy. Plenty of great athletes have had weird and inglorious codas.

Paul had looked good, but 60 million households had tuned in for a show. And once the low-riders and walk-ons were over and an empty ring with two big guys was all that was left, they didn’t get it.

In the post-fight interview, Paul and Tyson talked about how proud they were of their efforts, hugging and sharing in a sense of accomplishment.

“It’s the era of truth, it’s the era of good,” Paul said, seemingly stoked about both the election and the fight. “There’s a shift in the world and good is rising, the truth is rising.”

But the crowd at AT&T Stadium wasn’t going to be hoodwinked into good vibes. They knew what truth they’d seen. As everyone walked to their cars and the crushing traffic in front of them, fans who paid hundreds, in some cases thousands, of dollars shared a similar look. Just an hour earlier, the place had been intoxicated. Now, a collective hangover set in. It was nauseating, with face-scrunching levels of regret, filled with an ironclad resolve to never ever fall for this kind of hype again. Like most hungover resolutions, it would be forgotten.