The most scrutinized fight of the year goes down tonight in Arlington, and Netflix would like you to treat it as a really big deal. Turns out welding a streaming giant’s resources to Mike Tyson’s cachet and Jake Paul’s audience makes that a manageable ask. A phalanx of media has descended on Arlington to cover a 58-year-old trading punches with a YouTube star more than three decades his junior. An estimated 65,000 will be in attendance at AT&T Stadium (per Paul’s camp) and millions more will tune in globally in five different languages. Paul expects 20 million people will see the fight; even a fifth of that would rival Floyd Mayweather versus Manny Pacquiao in 2015 as the most viewed boxing match this century.
This is hardly the first mega sporting event to be held at Jerry World, nor will it be the last. But Tyson-Paul is singular in both its significance and conditionality. We’re used to spectacles like this being buttressed by layers of excellence. The World Series matters because it pits the two best teams in the sport’s premier league against one another. The World Cup, coming in 2026, features the most powerful nations playing the world’s most popular sport. That I am even explaining this feels unnecessary. Each event builds atop the last, balling up decades of history and memory and glory into something no one strains to justify as appointment viewing.
Tonight is not that. You probably gleaned as much from phrases like “58-year-old” and “YouTube star,” and if those didn’t get the point across, consider that this fight was postponed from July due to Tyson recovering from an inflamed ulcer. They’ll box eight rounds instead of 10, each lasting two minutes instead of three, wearing gloves four ounces heavier than standard to reduce the impact of each blow. If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was an idea hatched by two people intent on making as much money with as little exertion as possible—and, wait, yep, that’s mostly what this is according to Tyson, who said in a recent interview with the actress Rosie Perez (you read that correctly) that he first brought the idea to Paul four years ago.
“I’m just saying, you got a YouTuber that has 70 million fans,” Tyson said in the Q&A, which ran in Interview Magazine. “No champion has that many fans. And I’m the greatest fighter since the beginning of life, so now what does that make? That makes an explosion of excitement.”
And a reported $60 million in purses for the two fighters, around two-thirds of which will go to Paul. The $20ish million heading to Tyson will double his reported net worth.
This fight exists for no reason other than people will watch it. It’s as nakedly a commercial vehicle imaginable even in a sport pebbled with greasy promoters, a byzantine system of title belts, and fighters wagering their bodies and brains against a meager taste of profit. Put another way, Tyson-Paul is the most boxing thing out there—aside from the glaring absence of stakes, story, and skill.
Which leaves us where, exactly? What do you do with something that, for all of its trimmings and impending profits, means nothing?
Whatever you want.
That is what empty vessels are for, after all, to fill in and assign meaning. Tune in for lurid curiosity or to morally grandstand. Take the good with the bad and zoom in on the undercard, which features maybe the most important women’s boxing match ever. Marvel that Tyson, a veteran of six decades of poor choices, still walks among us, let alone will be in front of us throwing hands. Ruminate on Paul’s chances of becoming a serious fighter, as a 27-year-old latecomer who clearly cares about the sport but whose 10-1 record is mostly wins over MMA fighters and celebrities.
Or don’t make any of this out to be more than it is, and instead spend your Friday night elsewhere. Backing away from this furnace of self-insistence is always an option, and it’s probably the wisest one, given the prospect of staying up until midnight to watch a well-past-AARP-eligible caricature of a champion lumber around the ring with a glorified hobbyist. You would be hard-pressed to consider either to be very good at the sport of boxing in 2024, and pressed even harder to consider either to be a very good person. Gobs of other entertainment are more qualitatively and ethically appealing than this.
So turn away. Or don’t. Drive to Arlington to make a memory, or conk out early and pass one by. Whichever choice you make is the right one for you. It’s hard to make value judgments about something so vacuous.
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