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Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson: The Fight We Didn't Want but Couldn't Look Away From

Exploring our complicated love for Mike Tyson that drove this doomed spectacle

Joe Treetop
Beyond the Scoreboard
6 min readNov 28, 2024

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Photo by Johann Walter Bantz on Unsplash

If I told you that Netflix recently live-streamed what amounts to elderly abuse in a boxing ring, would you believe me?

In today's climate, you might.

What if I added that the abuser was a 27-year-old YouTuber and all-around irritant, and the abused was none other than “Iron Mike” Tyson — the once-undisputed “baddest man on the planet,” now a 58-year-old, super zen and beloved mycologist psychonaut?

For one, you couldn't accuse me of lying. Not even of hyperbole. This is, in effect, what we witnessed on November 15, 2024 — all 65 million of us.

Spectacle over sport

Greatness is perhaps nowhere more intuitively understood than in combat sports. We love seeing seasoned prizefighters collide at the height of their careers, like Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in the “Fight of the Century.”

The Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight didn't check any such boxes.

On the one hand, Paul isn’t an accomplished boxer. On the other, Tyson's ’80s heyday was long past by the late 1990s, when baby Paul was still…

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Joe Treetop
Joe Treetop

Written by Joe Treetop

Ex-hash dealer turned writer and incurable satirist, leveraging a shadowed past of strange encounters and even stranger people to examine self and culture.

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