Opinion | Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson Was a Calorie-Free Feast of Absurdity

Half the fun of any fight, whether it’s boxing, wrestling or mixed martial arts, is the prefight hype. The opponents call each other terrible names, they glare in each other’s faces at the weigh-in and they appear in a slickly edited video on the Jumbotron as heavy metal music blares — all of it conspiring to persuade everyone involved that this Fight of the Century is going to be even better than the one that took place last month.

The hype reaches a crescendo when the fighters enter the ring (or the octagon, or whatever happens to be containing them), and the broadcaster introduces the combatants — this, really, is where fighting legends are made. This is where Muhammad Ali was called “The Greatest”; where, in the world of wrestling, we smelled what The Rock was cooking; where we were introduced to the immortal James “Bonecrusher” Smith. Who wouldn’t enjoy walking around the world being introduced as “Bonecrusher?”

On Friday night, as the much-anticipated (if guiltily so) fight between the 27-year-old YouTube influencer Jake Paul and the 58-year-old former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson was about to begin — before an audience of more than 70,000 fans crammed into the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, and the reported 60 million households watching live on Netflix — it came time for Paul to be introduced. I was curious how the influencer would be known. Jake Paul: “The Hashtag Assassin?” “The Inflicting Influencer?” (I’m fond of “The Mute Button.”) Just before Paul entered the arena, an announcer bellowed “In this attention economy, he commands it and he turns it into capital!”

Well, not exactly “Bonecrusher.”

Roughly half an hour later, when the biggest boxing event in years ended after eight soporific rounds, many of the millions at home were no doubt wondering why they’d spent their Friday night watching this. But this is the Netflix promise: Hey all, you’re already a subscriber, this didn’t cost you anything but your time, why expect anything more? In the end, all Tyson-Paul promised was spectacle and, in the end, that’s all we got.

The problem with spectacle as an end to itself is that it crowds out actual quality. It’s one thing to watch a farcical fight; it’s another entirely when farcical fights are all that are left. This echoes Martin Scorsese’s complaint about comic book movies. The problem is not that all comic movies are bad; the problem is that if studios only focus on making comic book movies, it’s what audiences will expect — and they’ll slowly become accustomed, even inured, to the declining quality.

We are seeing this phenomenon not just in boxing or in other sports, but in many aspects of American society, from silly stuff (an influencer entering the ring against a legendary but over-the-hill boxer) to food commerce (a YouTuber puts his name on a restaurant chain but ends up being accused of serving raw meat to customers) to, perhaps inevitably, cabinet appointments (a famous television host gets a high-profile nomination, but doesn’t somebody actually have to run the place?).

This is not to say the ability to draw eyeballs doesn’t matter; in most arenas, you can’t get anything done if no one’s watching. But there’s a cost in prioritizing the attention economy. Early estimates indicate the Paul-Tyson fight might have been the most-watched boxing contest of all time. All this despite Paul not actually being a serious boxer and Tyson being, you know, 58 years old. If the Paul-Tyson match was the first fight you watched in years, was there anything about it that made you want to watch another? Perhaps this is what the people wanted — not a boxing match, or anything new, but a faint reminder of something they once vaguely recall enjoying.

The appeal, stoked by Paul’s uncanny (one might even call it subconscious) ability to play the part of the heel, a guy you want to see hit repeatedly in the face, was to watch Tyson unleash one last beating. The average sports fan, or even the average Netflix subscriber, had most likely not watched boxing in years and many probably knew of only one living boxer, active or otherwise: Iron Mike Tyson. Viewers wanted two things: to see Tyson, whose life story has played out before us over four decades now, rampage like he did when both he and we were young, and to see Paul’s nose enter the back of his brain. They wound end up getting neither, and not much resembling actual boxing either.

Tyson had an initial charge in the first round, but he, quite understandably, tired almost immediately. He would end up landing a total of 18 punches in the entire fight and, by the end, was mostly just swaying back and forth, like your dad when he gets up from his chair too fast. By the fifth round, it was obvious where this was going, and after weeks of bluster, including when Paul said Tyson “must die,” the night took on the energy of a bad first date in which both parties are politely sitting silently until the check comes so they can go home.

If anything, Paul seemed to take mercy on Tyson when he stopped throwing punches and let the old lion huff himself out, which, I’ll confess, was an actual sincere, recognizable human emotion, the first time I’d ever seen Paul be anything other than the bearded, human version of an energy drink. Not surprisingly, following the fight, Paul would, after a brief nod of respect for Tyson’s age being a factor in his lack of killer instinct, improbably imply this was related to a sprained ankle and torn ligament Paul suffered 22 days earlier, rather than acknowledge more empathy for Tyson. The one thing influencers and boxers have in common is that they are allowed to be human only in very short bursts.

The problem is not that Tyson-Paul was a bad fight. The problem is that it became instantly disposable content, tossed away until the next empty calorie distraction replaces it, until we run out. Yes, the fight commanded the attention economy and turned it into capital. But that is all it did. And if we continue to settle for this — in fact, demand it — eventually the attention economy is all that will be left.

Will Leitch is a contributing editor at New York Magazine and author of seven books, including the novels “How Lucky,” and “The Time Has Come.” He also writes The Will Leitch Newsletter.

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