By Christopher Sloce
In 1963, consensus shattered in Dealey Plaza. Someone shot President John F. Kennedy, Jr. The official answer is Lee Harvey Oswald. It’s important it’s only an official answer, and we have one man to thank for that: Abraham Zapruder, a local clothing manufacturer who captured the moment on home camera, a historical tragedy made personal. It’s the implication of the home camera that’s most instructive here: if the world could be recorded, and that recording could then be analyzed over and over, then the official stories of narrative and consensus died along with JFK. We left modernity, and entered post-modernity along the traveling path of a bullet from a Sears-Roebuck gun. All postmodernists try to do is understand postmodernity, in all of its nebulousness, its negations, its newness. Something changed, and what did? The argument against postmodernism is an argument against understanding the ways societies change over time, and this idea has been fought about ever since, with the most notable opponents of “postmodernism” hearkening back to white-washed, mythic American past not unlike the one before November 22, 1963.
In 2024, in the same city (the AT&T Plaza is actually in Arlington, Texas, but I can’t think of anything more postmodern than the way suburbs get treated like the cities they surround) Mike Tyson lost a boxing match to a former Youtuber (spiritually, he still is) named Jake Paul. When people talk about monoculture, it is this. Everyone had an opinion and cared. People found common cause with a 58 year old man, whose life they had deemed a monstrosity not twenty years before, a time before he was turned into a novelty because he hung out with a tiger in a Todd Phillips comedy. That cause was mashing out a YouTube irritant who made himself a boxer by sheer clout.
For the first time in his life, Tyson was a hero. Before there was just the spectacle of a man who could knock anyone out, for whom boxing was not just boxing, but a reason to be alive, fighting the way he did growing up when he was just a kid from Brownsville, New York, born to a sex worker mother, a troubled youth with a lisp who loved pigeons, who learned what he was meant to do when another boy tore the head off of one of birds.
Watching the Tyson camp’s procession to the ring, stately as a funeral party on the way to pick up the dead, you can see some of the personalities that were integral to Tyson’s makeup and fall from grace. Up to a point, he would come to a ring with Cus D’Amato, who adopted him when his mother passed and taught him everything he knew. In another fight, he comes to the ring with his wife, Robin Givens, clad in a white gown. They were married quickly and seemed to divorce just as quickly. Here it was revealed there was another side to Mike Tyson. This was a side that was hurt and angry. A side that lashed out on everyone around him. There were two luxury car crashes, one that a New York paper claimed doubled as a suicide attempt (which Tyson and his team denied). The other was in an argument with Givens, where he attempted to give the car he crashed away to the NYPD. Givens’s sister told the press he physically abused Givens. He was addicted to cocaine, alcohol. In 1992, he was convicted of sexual assault and went to jail. In the pop understanding of Tyson, this is where it mostly ends. He went in at 26, and he came out at 29. Rather than a force, he had become a curiosity: the fights declared “he’s back!”, more novelty than Sonny Liston. In 1996, Tyson lost his title to Evander Holyfield, whose ear he would one day chomp off during the infamous 1997 rematch, like he was a paid “geek” in the circus boxing always threatened to turn into, only there to bite the heads off of chickens and scare marks. When it came time to fight Lennox Lewis, a stately outfighter, there wasn’t even a debate about where Mike was. Lennox Lewis’s jabs ended his career as the “Baddest Man on the Planet”. What would follow was further legal trouble and a compounding drug problem. Then he appeared in The Hangover with a tiger and got a half-bakedAdult Swim cartoon, all of which were built on his persona as a wild, larger than life figure who walked a line between danger and absurdity. Defanged of his fighting prowess, he was made ridiculous by the very forces that sold him more as a weapon than a man, and relegated to the Elysian Fields of American celebrity: podcasting and a cannabis line with his name on it.
When sports figures become legendary, the question has to become why we ascribe legends to some and not others. To use a term that has begun dotting the sports landscape like dandelions, what gives an athlete’s story aura. Tim Duncan is unquestionably a better basketball player than Allen Iverson in every meaningful metric, but a complicated confluence of factors make it so Allen Iverson is an icon and Tim Duncan is merely great, makes it so Allen Iverson feels greater than the sum of his parts. Where Muhammad Ali had the Black Power movement, his refusal to fight in Vietnam, his lyrical trash talking before a fight, Mike Tyson’s legend was built on a series of brutal knockouts when he was a young man, a coiled rage that became totally destructive of the self and anything around it, and then the flailing, the fall from grace. This is a legend that’s been burnished as much by how the sheer force behind his hooks and uppercuts as it is the man behind them, a man who played the monster so well he found no separation between the part and the man and has howled in pain ever since. Mike Tyson is Mike Tyson’s revenge on the world, and Mike Tyson has to deal with the ramifications.
There’s a misunderstanding that society “forgave” Mike Tyson by allowing him to do a mediocre Adult Swim cartoon and the now carbon dated The Hangover. If that’s forgiveness, I hope my enemies never forgive me. Ali, Liston, Smokin’ Joe Frazier, Sugar Ray Robinson: these men are treated like legends, much in part because boxing was a bigger draw in their time. Mike Tyson came at the end, when George Foreman was better known for grills and naming his kids variations on George. It’s one thing for a life to have a tragic arc and another thing entirely to be made the subject of a tragedy while you’re conscious of it. That, if anything, is Tyson’s burden: never outrunning his reputation except when it’s convenient for the audience.
Which brings us to Jake Paul. Jake Paul has the inverse issue to Tyson: he runs in lockstep with his reputation as being annoying. Everything about Jake Paul is annoying, unless you’re eleven or twelve. He is built on annoying your older sibling, your mom, and your grandmother. He was so annoying to people in the LA neighborhood of Beverly Grove that he was featured on KTLA, a move that got him kicked off of a show on the Disney Channel called Bizaardvark. Like every Youtuber, he has an annoying series of rap songs. One kicks off “It’s everyday, bro, with the Disney Channel flow.” Every word in that line might as well be a klaxon.
Twelve year old boys are the perfect suckers: they think they know everything, which means when you impress them, you also flatter their internal feeling that they’re a genius. Jake Paul living a life that’s essentially professional fun upends everything they thought about adulthood. It feels like getting away with something, which Paul’s miles long “Controversies and Legal Issues” section on Wikipedia would confirm. His charm, as it exists for an audience of children, was predicated on a football jock rictus that looks even better hidden behind the crooked elbow of a dab than it does mugging in the perpetuation of an endless adolescence.
As annoying as Jake Paul is, his interest in boxing seems to be as genuine as anyone can manage when their career is being a professional fly-in-the soup. It was after he beat Deji Olatunji, a Youtuber, in his first match that the former jock turned entertainer found something in the sport that kept bringing him back. His record then demands further scrutiny. Two of Paul’s first three professional wins were against another Youtuber named AnEsonGib, and former New York Knicks point guard Nate Robinson. This is a recurring theme of Paul’s record: not boxing boxers. For Tyron Woodley, Jake Paul was supposed to be his professional debut from the world of mixed martial arts, and Paul beat him twice. He then beat an ancient Anderson Silva and Nate Diaz, two other MMA fighters, as well as winning fights against Ben Askren, an MMA fighter most famous for being on the receiving end of the fastest KO in UFC history. It’s impressive in the abstract that he was a Youtuber and these are professional fighters, but let’s cut the bullshit: Jake Paul is now a boxer and he hasn’t boxed many boxers. Paul’s 11-1 record is more reflective of who he’s fought than any genuine skill. As serious as Jake Paul is about boxing, he is not a serious fighter by any other metric than the record. His one loss comes from Tyson Fury’s younger brother.
In fact, boxing itself has housed a number of spiritual sideshows in amateur boxing, from Uwe Boll fighting Lowtax to Mickey Rourke’s brief sojourn to the Jose Canseco Barstool match that feels like the spiritual predecessor to this fight. It’s not unheard of for someone from the world of entertainment, seeing their prospects winnow, to look at boxing as another way to make a few dollars. It’s why Celebrity Boxing happened back in 2002 and featured such lights as Vanilla Ice and Danny Bonaduce. These people are rarely good at boxing, which is why a show like Celebrity Boxing lasted only 3 episodes. What makes Jake Paul’s adoption of the sport so striking is it feels no longer like there’s a separation from spectacle and reality. As Guy Debord intoned in France, a prediction of May 1968:
The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is ostensibly the focal point of all vision and all consciousness: But due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation.
In other words, it’s everyday, bro. Jake Paul’s Mickey Mouse record is real, and unreal, in the same sense the rat from Steamboat Willie is a representation of Disney’s power in the world without actually being a real mouse. Jake Paul is both boxing and just a silly match against one of the best known boxers of all time, and enjoining those two in the whole creates the event itself, but everyone who knows anything about boxing knows it was a sort of sham contest against a damn near 60 year old man who hasn’t fought meaningful fights in 20 years. His record is a depiction of his ability to get top of the line trainers, to train, and to dedicate himself, and also an extended bit of YouTube style japery. With boxing losing valuable space to its less graceful cousin MMA, the necessity for it to be big and meaningful has only grown. If Jake Paul didn’t exist, he would have to be invented, and what an invention he is for his creator. Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson was promoted by a company called Most Valuable Promotion, of which Jake Paul is a founder. Paul set up a space inside of boxing where he is both Don King and the fighter, and Jake Paul is his best work, and Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson was his career masterpiece in being annoying. At the weigh-in, he did a bizarre clamber up to Mike Tyson, who then slapped him, probably because no matter how much of a work I think that was, Jake Paul is to annoying what Tyson is to intimidation.
If you wanted to better typify our 2024, you couldn’t do a better job than picking Paul vs. Tyson. It felt like a hallucination Samuel Taylor Coleridge would have had if he was huffing Galaxy Gas instead of smoking opium. Boxing, like the rest of the world, has suffered from a cheapness that comes from jettisoning any idea of the future for a nihilistic drive for total return on investment. It’s already a diminished sport, replaced by mixed martial arts. When Hunter S. Thompson was dispatched to cover the Thrilla in Manila, he spent Rolling Stone’s dime floating in a hotel pool with a bottle of whiskey. I watched it in a one bedroom apartment on a smart TV our old neighbor gave us; I used her Netflix account because she didn’t sign out and I ate a Shaqaroni pizza from Papa John’s with my partner. Five years ago, we would have had to go to a bar showing it or watch it on PPV. Now, the rot was streamed directly to us on the streaming network where binge watching was invented, where the constant drone of the rewatch plays at a binaural frequency, and where the ownership has overtly given up on rigor.
An odd sensation you will get while watching things like the Marvel movies is that the creators of these movies don’t respect the source material enough to do anything but constantly joke about the stakes, which we’re then supposed to feel at the precise moment it’s necessary. While Sam Raimi’s Spiderman trilogy featured plenty of jokes, he also had enough sense and skill to layer in the inherent comic book melodrama that superhero stories have. The Marvel movies feel embarrassed to be superhero movies, but cover up for it by telling you that superhero movies are both Important, just as good as any high-falutin art picture about men in Bulgaria committing suicide after a drought, and simultaneously just a fun little thing for you to enjoy and how dare you not enjoy this, what are you some kind of hipster? The contempt for the audience is crouched in a sort of strongman populism: because the hipsters think you and your sports and your Funko pops are lame you should allow us to be the arbiters of good taste and stuff that nerd Martin Scorsese in Davy Jones’s locker for you. This is a pattern you see everywhere: an institutional contempt couched in poptimism like cyanide in an Almond Joy.
Boxing has always had its underlying layer of grime– Jimmy Cannon called it sport’s red light district for a reason, as the street and mob influence on boxing is never far away– but there’s a reason that even someone like Don King, who Tyson said “more bad to black fighters than any white promoter ever in the history of boxing,“, is remembered more for the “Rumble in the Jungle” than the man he shot or threatening to break Larry Holmes’s legs. But grime and chintz are two different things. When Oscar Wilde said some people were in the gutter but looking for the stars, those people weren’t sitting in neon green gamer chairs or eating cheap large pizzas with Shaq’s mug on the box, or watching one of MVP’s fighters, Neeraj Goyat, hump Whindersson Nunes (another youtuber) in the corner.
Sports take metaphor well, and boxing may take to it the best of all; if sports can be war, then two men in a ring using only their hands to battle is as simple as it gets, one soldier against another. When Ali came to Zaire as a Muslim man and George Foreman came with German Shepherds, the Zairian didn’t see puppies but the instruments of Belgian rule, and they responded with two words in Bantu: Ali bomaye. In English, that’s “Ali, kill him!” Sports and our attachment to them and what makes them important is because of our own interpretative processes. This is what makes sports text to be interpreted and understand in the frame of our lives.
Which brings us to both the great interpretative lens and the dominant force that has stood over boxing’s 19th, 20th, and 21st century: race. Boxing cannot escape race, and like most things that are influenced by race, the only way to not bring up the racial dimensions is for the racial dimension to have never been introduced in the first place. Jack Johnson beating John Jeffries sparked an attack on black celebrants of Johnson’s victory. If I were to give a loose chronology of all the moments where race has impacted boxing, this wouldn’t be an essay, it’d be a book.
All one has to do is look at Mike Tyson. In the late 80s and 90s, the white audience could only see him as an unfeeling Caliban with a right hook and uppercut, a fighting dog starved of love and affection to create the perfect killing machine. A super-predator. But Tyson had an internal life, like all athletes do, and one the complications of which were best explained by the man himself, rather than a plantation theory of how to build the most fearsome boxer since Sonny Liston. It’s an internal life that has to reckon with how the man who treated him like his son also taught him how to hurt other men and how sooner or later all he knew how to do was hurt people. This is the central tragedy of Mike Tyson’s life, one that exists alongside the terrible things he did, and a context he is unable to escape because he went from Kid Dynamite to the Baddest Man on the Planet all in the greedy eyes of the public. To go from that to Mike Tython, the lisping, instant Chuck Norris-ian figure with a weed and vape company is its own, rhyming tragedy.
If Jake Paul had any Sour Patch Kids flavored Ghost induced genius in this whole thing, it’s that he was able to exploit every era of Mike Tyson at once, creating the sort of dilation that tends to only come with TikTok highlight mixtapes making the beginning, middle, and end of a career one contingent product. John Berger wrote that CNN’s depiction of constant crises across the world was akin to the hell of Bosch’s “Millennium Triptych” that, “There is no horizon there. There is no continuity between actions, there are no pauses, no paths, no pattern, no past and no future. There is only the clamour of the disparate, fragmentary present.” There’s something similar to the deployment of Mike Tyson in Jake Paul’s quest for relevance. When Mike Tyson slapped him, it was the chaotic Mike that crashed cars . When Mike Tyson interviewed his son and revealed to be wearing a set of assless chaps, he was the wacky party animal of The Hangover. And in his acceptance of defeat, fighting against the odds, he was his third act: a man fighting his way back from the wreckage of his own life for respect. But respect is a commodity that if you have to ask for, the value has already diminished, and it’s a quality that only seems more ghastly when you realize that more than any figure, Jake Paul resembles William Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen of Absalom, Absalom, a man from the margins who was told go around back once by a house servant and spent his entire life trying to build into his “design” of the great Southern aristocrat through a single-minded, ruthless abandonment, an event presaged by his insistence on setting up fighting matches between his slaves that he occasionally joins. The more brutal a sport, the more you can assume the people who are willing to do it are people pushed to the margins, just to get out. Jake Paul is an outlier by coming into boxing seriously from a place of prestige. This was his design.
There is also no value to be gained from an event as plain boring as Tyson-Paul. The greatest tell of the night came when Hall of Fame middleweight boxer Andre Ward was asked about Paul’s boxing and all he could say point to was his power and that he was improving. If this is an improvement, then Jake Paul may be the worst boxer to watch in history, because this was the worst boxing match I’ve ever seen. Even with a shortened two minute round time, Tyson was exhausted by the end of the first frame. Jake Paul is nothing if not in fighting shape, so he was able to make a match of it by going through the motions and winning an easy unanimous decision by technically outboxing Tyson. He threw more punches, he landed more punches. That’s enough to get a 10 on the scorecard. But he was fighting Mike Tyson, an idea degenerated not only by the vicissitudes of age, but the forces of making a man a commodity. If Jake Paul really wanted to prove his mettle in boxing, there are other heavyweights who are actually ranked who could get him closer to his supposed goal of being the world heavyweight.
In a way, Jake Paul’s fight was that ultimate 2025 sin recast as a virtue: a clout chase. You can say Jake Paul is annoying. You can say Jake Paul is parasitic, and like a lot of rich people treats Puerto Rico like his playground. But you can’t say he lost to Mike Tyson, and even if he had lost to Mike Tyson, it’s Mike Tyson. You can’t say he just fights who gets in front of him because there’s not a boxing league making everybody’s schedule. It’s an event designed for his audience to say to some apoplectic gen xer that we’re done with the 90s, that sports were a series of plumbers and accountants until, conveniently, the time young people started paying attention. And in that hatred of any sort of past event weighing on the present, it resembles nothing more than our current climate, where talking about the bloody history not only of America but the world is “woke”, where everything has had its catalytic convertor removed to be sold, where the culture attaches context to nothing but the immediate moment, where the moneychangers aren’t just in the temple, they are the temple.
The greatest evidence of this is a familiar ill to any sports fan: the way sports fandom has integrated sports gambling to the point they are one in the same. Before each card on the fight throughout the broadcast a helpful explainer popped up to explain how sports betting worked: what a moneyline is, what an over under is, how to bet if you thought Mike Tyson would knock Jake Paul out. The hype that Mike Tyson would, somehow, turn back the clock and turn Paul into a fine paste created a rush to bet on him, which meant services like DraftKings could give better odds, attracting more suckers who would feed their money into the impossible happening. For sports bettors, when the impossible doesn’t happen, it means a lot of people lost money. There’s no way Jake Paul didn’t know this. One of Paul’s many ventures is a sports betting app called Betr. If you wanted to create a gambler’s dream event, it would be this: make the clear better fighter an underdog by reputation alone while everyone with any brains knows who would win. It went the distance and a unanimous decision for Paul, which no average sports fan wanted. But for the handicappers and the house, it was a victory. The introduction of sports betting into the simple act of following sports trends to a general financialization of everything, including our passions, and the results have been disastrous. Paul-Tyson’s cheap, unfulfilling result feels like the end point of a certain kind of logic that the sports world has taken in: now that we have your ass in the seat, how else can we get money from you? No wonder, then, that NBA and NFL ratings are down.
But people still watch sports. And the reason for that is sports allow us to connect with impossibility. Even the most broccoli-haircutted memefication and monetization of sports does nothing to detract from the fact that people who train themselves all their lives to do something are good at it, and the excitement comes from the fact that these are humans with personalities and flaws and histories. Arthur Ashe’s match with Jimmy Connors at Wimbledon says something about the people in question and about the world where they played tennis. The card at Paul vs. Tyson that best typified this was the battle between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano. For ten rounds of punishment, Serrano and Taylor laid into each other. Eyes were cut, accusations of headbutts from Taylor were thrown from Serrano’s wing. There was already enmity there from their 2023 match over fighting dirty, and it showed. When boxing is like this, there are not too many things that match it, other than a great tennis match.
But the single most dramatic moment of the match was Mike Tyson’s walk out. It was in complete contrast to Jake Paul’s interminable ride to the ring in a chopped up Chevy Truck with no less than “In the Air Tonight” playing and his Renfield of a younger brother and suicide forest enthusiast Logan sitting in the bed. My family have all been fight fans for ages, and it was this intro that seemed to raise my uncle’s ire the most. It was a procession for a king, but a king of what, exactly? We all knew the truth, but the world of boxing has fretted about its reach and sold itself out in an austerity of imagination that leads to someone like Paul now slithering his way into relevance.
When Mike came out, there was no procession or glamor or even anyone with him. He was alone. “Murdergram” by Murder, Inc, a team-up of Jay-Z, Ja Rule, and DMX was playing. He was slow, his eyes betraying some realization, some knowledge that deep down, he was playing somebody else’s game after a lifetime of forcing other boxers to play his. He had shown his ass, had shown there was still some of the Mike in him that scared everyone, but it wasn’t enough to count when the time came. The Tyson who used to size up opponents was gone. There was just now Michael, walking into a fight he would lose, where at the end he would pretend he had any interest to fight Logan Paul. When he called Logan out, Logan Paul affected a blaccent and said, “Motherfucka, I’ll kill you, Mike!”
But the victor spoke first. The night wasn’t about him. He shouted the usual litany of Richard Scarry job positions: the cops, the firefighters, the nurses, the military. It’s the era of truth, he says. It’s the era of good, there’s a shift in the world, and good is rising. America is back, baby, Jake Paul says. You know what America he’s talking about. It’s the same America Jose Marti thought of when he said: I know the monster well and I am acquainted with its entrails. It’s the one you and I live in, and its brain is rotting.
