Why the result between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul matters

Paul’s direct line to Generation Z places him in a unique position to bolster boxing’s popularity within the younger age bracket

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With all the craziness surrounding Friday’s big fight in Texas – in which 58-year-old Mike Tyson will face YouTuber-turned-fighter Jake Paul, 27 – it is easy to see why many people are sighing, shrugging their shoulders, and saying “Not for me”.
This is an unapologetic freak-show. Even Netflix’s own build-up series – The Countdown – has compared Paul’s promotional approach to the Barnum & Bailey Circus, which took giants, bearded ladies and Siamese twins from town to town.
Beneath all the absurdity, though, there is something interesting going on. Like it or not, Paul is opening “boxing” – I use quotation marks because this is almost a separate sport – to a completely different audience than the hardcore pay-per-view crowd.
Whatever the quality of Friday’s fight – and it could be an absolute turkey – Netflix’s involvement is guaranteed to deliver the biggest live boxing audience since the 1970s, when the likes of Muhammad Ali and Ken Norton used to fight on ABC.
As the boxing commentator Corey Erdman put it in a recent podcast, “When I travel around, I usually get into an Uber and the driver says, ‘Oh, there’s a fight in town?’ This is the one fight that people in my family who barely know what I do for a living are asking me about. [It will] probably be the most-viewed boxing match of this generation.”
And if Paul should win on Friday, which is a highly plausible outcome, as he is far from being “a bum” in boxing terms, it will boost his profile even further. As he himself has put it. “When I knock Mike Tyson out, I’m gonna be the new face of boxing.”
If you are a traditional boxing fan, or especially a professional boxer, whole thing feels sickeningly dystopian. Yet even those who love to pooh-pooh the event will surely be checking their phones for the result.
We should not pretend that boxing – the old version – is totally moribund. Two years ago, Tyson Fury sold out the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium for a predictable beat-down of an ageing Derek Chisora, so there is a willing audience. And the advent of Saudi money is increasingly persuading reluctant heavyweights to go into battle against each other.
Yet with every live event hidden behind a paywall, the sport feels increasingly niche. Channels like DAZN preach only to the converted. Meanwhile, mixed martial arts is coming up on the rails as a serious rival, especially among the young.
Paul’s great strength is that, as the world’s most successful YouTuber, he knows how to access Generation Z: the people who have grown up on social media. He is not afraid to emphasise the absurdity of his fights, nor to play the heel. Faced with a roomful of sceptics, he will start the ball rolling himself by chanting “F— Jake Paul” until everyone joins in.
In The Countdown, Paul keeps saying that “story is everything”. In the same show, he claims that he came up with the idea of fighting Tyson while hallucinating at an Ayahuasca ceremony in Costa Rica two years ago. More likely, it was a stroke of marketing genius, conceived in a business meeting.
For all the tawdriness of hitting a 58-year-old – a medical no-no, given the way that punch resistance declines over time – it is hard not to be intrigued by the unpredictability of this contest.
Both parties are genuinely convinced that they cannot lose. Paul because he is fighting an old man. Tyson because he is a boxing lifer, an all-time great whose 56 professional bouts delivered no fewer 44 knockouts. And now he is facing a manufactured fighter: a puffed-up 27-year-old with just four years of training behind him, and what every other social-media commenter calls “a punchable face”.
”I am not gonna lose”. ❌Defeat against Jake Paul is not an option for Mike Tyson 🎙️#BBCBoxing #PaulTyson pic.twitter.com/SOvaGxqqgH
While Paul was building his reputation with a series of daft bouts against YouTube celebrities, former basketballers and washed-up MMA fighters, Tyson offered encouragement on his Hotboxin’ podcast, commending this self-styled “disruptor” for bringing millions of eyeballs to a “dying” sport.
Yet during Wednesday evening’s media conference, which found Paul’s “Problem Bot” mascot roaming the auditorium and former British cruiserweight Tony Bellew heckling from the press seats, Tyson had the grace to look embarrassed. This is not the sort of stripped-down, sweat-and-sawdust combat that he studied in minute detail during his five formative years of training with Cus D’Amato.
Unfortunately for the purists, content is everything in the modern world. Paul understands that, as did the Formula One strategists who conceived the petrol-headed soap opera Drive to Survive. That show transformed the whole sport, and Friday’s fight could prove similarly seismic.
The Mike Tyson story
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