TV | Sports
It’s Over, Gen X
Mike Tyson and Jake Paul showed us our own asses
Warning: Mild Nudity
This past Saturday I watched Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson in Southie with my friend, the original Southie Yuppie who is occasionally called D Train by his peers. His daughter, a Gen Z “Zoomer” and excelling science student, is sitting to my left. She spent most of the night tolerating my optimism. She preferred to wait for me to realize the ramifications of this fight and what it meant for my generation (Spoiler: Nothing Good).
I kept trying to fightsplain to D Train’s daughter the differences between ranked fighters and amateurs like Jake Paul, the differences between a boxing dilettante and someone who grew up in violence. I even brought up my father, who fought on a regular basis while growing up in Fairmount, Rhode Island. Of course, he died from cancer almost twenty years ago and neither being a good fighter nor having the strong bones of a man half his age made any difference at all.
The more obvious evidence against my argument was sitting right next to me. D Train, only a couple of years younger than Tyson, was nursing a broken shoulder after a bad fall in the street and facing an operation in just a few days.
That’s right. I was rooting for a fifty-eight year old while sitting next to someone close to fifty-eight who went to the hospital for…falling too hard.
Today I’m wondering whether I’ll be able to pinpoint the moments my bones brittle up. Friday night, my denial was strong.
As the first fight was in progress, I made a TikTok and said the following:
I’m not making predictions. I’m not making a bet. But here’s what I want. I want Tyson to beat Jake Paul in Round Two. Then I want him to jump out of the ring and beat the douche canoes who bought those two million dollar ringside experience seats, and I want him to just run outside and start punching cars. Just do it. Come on, Mike Tyson. You are Gen X’s rage. Be the instrument of our rage. Please.
Sheer nonsense. All of it. Tyson and Paul are both Trump shills. Tyson has been one for even longer. Paul is just the bigger asshole by default of his brother Logan (who came with him to the ring like a pro wrestling manager). Logan’s transphobic summer antics made Jake’s statement that he’s a proponent of women in sports a chef’s kiss of assholery.
So why did I care about Tyson winning? Chalk it up to depression.
Generation X has completely blown it. And there’s little hope for redemption. Some of us are doing good work, but the majority have recently decided to go all in and join the so-called winning team by voting for Trump. We had a chance to do one good thing and vote for a smidgeon more kindness, something that wouldn’t have hurt us at all. Collectively, we couldn’t even pull that off.
In my eyes, I’ve completely blown it. I continue to write, to work, to do what I can. Regardless, it’s hard to shake the fact that my time is over. Or if it ever began.
Tyson made his money off of uberboomer Donald Trump. He is in many ways the penultimate gen-xer, full of wasted potential, sacrificing his integrity to go all in with the boomers in hopes that he could get one more payday.
The Pauls are just two more members of the next generation who haven’t learned any lessons from Tyson and are going all in with the elders with all the money and power. They don’t care about anything besides themselves, but they’ll be as cruel as they need to be for clout and money.
In the end, I hated the younger of the two fools more. So I was willing to side with Tyson, a convicted rapist, just to see my fellow old fart hurt someone younger.
It was then that I realized I finally knew something of what it’s like to be someone who voted for Donald Trump.
I don’t want to get any closer to that mentality than I did on Friday night.
Boston rapper and producer Lewis Morris put it well on his Facebook post:
I’m confident a majority of y’all tuned in to hate-watch trash-ass Jake Paul (possibly) get knocked the fuck out. That’s the hustle. It’s literally pro-wrestling type shit.
No matter how many articles I write dissecting pro wrestling, I can still be a mark. So can many of us. Millions of us tuned in to watch Jake Paul dance around Mike Tyson, who struggled to keep up even during shortened rounds.
The Pauls didn’t win on Friday. They’ve only set themselves up for more dog and pony shows as they draw closer to death. Tyson certainly didn’t win anything. Any mystique he had as a performer and personality is gone, and people still can’t grasp that yet, but they will. Tyson will too, but it’s already too late to redeem himself with any new revelations.
The Boomers in power gave us an ugly shiny ball to look at for a few hours and left us depressed while we wait for them to fabricate another brass ring of hope. That’s what Tyson versus Paul was. Whether the fight was fixed or not doesn’t really change the outcome. I’ve just identified another form of entertainment meant to frustrate us, just like wrestling. I’m cashing out of this new spectacle while I’m still somewhat physically and emotionally healthy.
