Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson Is So America It Hurts

Jake Paul, boxer and YouTube star, will fight 58-year-old boxing legend Mike Tyson on Netflix tonight, which is the kind of sentence that could only exist in 2024 America. This fight(?) is specifically designed to land in the nexus between the zoomers who grew up on YouTube and memberberried millennials like myself whose brains switched on at the same time that Tyson gained fame for his ability to shut brains off. This event could be framed as nostalgia versus the future, and that kind of battle thrives in a country who has been wrestling with that dynamic at least since the 1950s appeared in our rearview mirror.

I put a question-mark in front of fight because even though they are advertising it as a sanctioned fight that will go on both men’s records unlike most of Paul’s fights…c’mon man. This is where the professional wrestling notion of kayfabe arises, as a showman who is defined by exhibition fights is now telling us that this one against a man seven years away from collecting Social Security is a real one. I will believe it when I see it.

Long before the YouTube stars realized how much money was to be made in this sport, boxing had already discredited itself with endless allegations and evidence of match-fixing, all organized under a provincial structure with a million committees and a handful of entities awarding so many championships out so as to render all of them meaningless. Many fight fans have defected from boxing to the UFC this century, but Jake Paul and company found a way to revive this moribund sport: as a land for washed up athletes to make a quick buck.

Which brings me to America, who is no stranger to creating vast levels of self-destructive bureaucratic madness in the name of enriching a small cabal of wealthy insiders, leading to a new kind of ruling class with much more superficial, greedy and transparent aims who leans on the help of B- and C-level celebrities. America also just elevated a cultural icon of the 1990s to a level his present abilities do not suggest he is equipped for, but like Trump, Mike Tyson’s opponent tonight is also an out of touch elitist filming a bunch of videos designed to reinforce the biases inherent within his audience, so you never know, maybe Tyson wins too.

But the open question of whether this intensely-hyped fight is real or just one big cash grab is a terrific metaphor for a country who likes to tell itself a lot of fairy tales that aren’t true, and the answer to most of our pressing questions is simple greed. Our democracy isn’t real, it’s rigged, and it’s done by design. The ambitious days of the Great Society and Muhammad Ali are long gone, and the cynical pay for play structure is all that remains from a near-century of greed stripping boxing and democracy for parts and selling them off to the highest bidder.

Like the Republican Party, boxing is no longer a boomer-driven endeavor, as the Paul brothers have resuscitated this sport in a way the purists never could within the rigid and corrupt structure they operated within for decades. The Pauls win by building a new media outside of traditional narratives, and now Logan Paul vs. Floyd Mayweather draws about the same number of PPV buys or more as the climax to the Saul “Canelo” Alvarez vs. Gennadiy “GGG” Golovkin boxing super-fight.

It’s a new world. The old one is dead. Those defending the manifestly unpopular status quo are being wiped out by a new generation of brash thinkers who are willing to accept society as they see it, not as they romanticize it to be.

And these new agents of change aren’t solely the bird-brained goobers they prove themselves to be time and time again. They have developed real skills which have proven to be effective in the arenas they fight in. With Trump, before his brain started seeping out his ears every time he talked, he had real political rhetorical skills. His instincts on what political opponents and constituencies to attack have been electorally proven right more often than not, and he has demonstrated that he is better at politics than most people who do politics for a living in this country.

Jake Paul is also no slouch, as the litany of over-the-hill fighters he has “defeated” in these exhibitions all have attested to his talents. It’s really not a wild notion to suggest that a rich guy with a lot of free time on his hands can hire experts to help him become a serious athlete, and Jake Paul has developed genuine boxing skills that add to the credibility he and his army of youthful eyeballs bring to the sport. His vision of boxing is still more spectacle than skill, and I don’t know where the sport is going, but if you told me that a decade from now there was a dominant UFC-style boxing promotion run by the Pauls, I wouldn’t be surprised in the least bit. The future looks a lot more like Jake Paul and Donald Trump than anyone thought it would.

The old rules don’t work anymore. It takes a new kind of thinker to meet this moment. Many rightfully point out that Trump and the Paul brothers are vacuous egotistical idiots who demonstrate little interest in any kind of pursuit that does not directly benefit them, but what does that say about the litany of people who they have defeated? Idiotic notions of the world rooted in the 21st century clearly beat thoughtful ones from the 20th century.