We cannot blame the viewers for the disaster that was Jake Paul-Mike Tyson, though I catch myself wanting to. There were too many of them. They did not know the extent of the damage which Mike Tyson had taken in the past, perhaps – the dabbling in cocaine, in mushrooms, in toad venom () – and frankly, asking people to spend their time on this earth reading about this stuff is unreasonable. More than that, it seems like a lot of people wanted to see Jake Paul in great physical pain and ignored logic, plus the fact that he is competent at boxing, in pursuit of that desire. There was plain curiosity in some viewers, the urge to be part of the thing everybody was talking about, if also stupidity, delusion, or malice in others. But they did not make this fight. 

We can blame the people who did. Start with Jake Paul, Mike Tyson and their respective support networks; the Netflix execs; the Texas Department of Licensing and Registration, who sanctioned a 58-year-old man to get his brain bashed in a little bit more, legally; and anybody who had a hand in promoting the fight. It’s the last group that helped hoodwink many of the viewers into believing that somehow, said 58-year-old man would regain the zeal he had at 18 – 40 years ago, a window almost twice as long as I have been alive – for just one night. 

The promotion was insidious, beginning with the matchup itself. It weaponized Mike Tyson’s name, a once-terrifying heavyweight and a figure still magnetic enough that his 1992 rape conviction, and other various atrocities, is no more than a footnote in most stories about him – regrettably, this one included, though it is not a story about Tyson. Donald Trump once said he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters; Mike Tyson is one of maybe four people on the planet who could say the same. 

The promotion harnessed, too, Jake Paul’s inherent loathsomeness. No one professionally affiliated with the fight would say the true appeal of this fight outright, so I will here: the chance to see one of the most annoying people in the world beaten up and humiliated in front of a global audience. 

Then came the outright lies. A commercial for the fight that popped up on various streams of mine, multiple times, showed footage of Tyson violently knocking out Michael Spinks in 1988. Woof! Since then, Tyson had been knocked out five times, done prison time, aged just the 36 years, and done drugs in volumes that probably would have killed a few elephants. But none of that mattered for the purposes of this fight. Okay then.

The public bought the bullshit, in sufficient numbers that Netflix is claiming the fight reached two more households than Tyson’s age, times a million. But that doesn’t mean this fight, and anybody involved with it, get a pass for appealing to all the worst instincts of human beings.

Media members fell into the trap too. Ostensibly serious people who cover boxing previewed this fight. They wondered about Tyson’s power, his stamina, his speed. What will happen if he hits Paul flush? they queried. Can Paul take those punches? The answer was always yes, because as it turns out 58-year-olds punch a whole lot less hard than 27-year-olds. 

And the surprise at how awful Tyson looked, or the outright denial. “Tyson looked slow and unsteady in a dull loss to Jake Paul,” to Emmanuel Morgan’s The Athletic/New York Times recap. : “Tyson showed signs of his life as a champion throughout the fight.” 

I slept over with a friend that night; one of their group chats pinged with an offer of a $25 bet that Tyson would win. I told my pal that when Tyson looked his age, the bettor in question would say that the fight was rigged – which happened right on cue, five or six minutes in, though not without an enduring hope that Tyson could “summon that dawg.” The dawg, along with Tyson’s speed and steadiness and vigor, died somewhere between Y2K and Obama getting elected for the first time. It has been a very long time.

By design, I didn’t watch the fight, but I have seen the moment in the third round when Paul hurt and wobbled Tyson with a succession of glacially slow left hooks. I sought this out because I wanted to punish myself for being involved in this sport at all. I’ve read that Paul let the old man off the hook after that. Perhaps they had a deal not to go for the knockout, but I do like the idea that a hint of compassion seized Paul in that moment – that the money he made for this fight, more than almost everybody in the world will see across their entire lives, wasn’t enough to ensure he would sleep well at night. 

The narrative that Tyson is the victim is tempting. Unquestionably he should not have been allowed to fight. But he signed up for this, knowing better than anybody else what his body could and couldn’t do, and what getting punched feels like. If his inner circle tried to talk him out of the fight, he did not listen. He was paid very well for his 16 minutes of masochism. The people who watched this, blind and misled, confident that they were not in fact going to watch the public battering of someone five times closer to Social Security than his athletic prime, are the wronged party here.

Does it bring people joy, lying to the masses? It is inevitable that immense groups of people will have hateful tendencies, that they will deny reality, that they will not, at any cost, admit being wrong. What can be controlled is taking advantage of these deep flaws. It is not to the audience’s credit that they expected a better version of Mike Tyson. But that expectation was enabled at every possible turn. 

In an ideal world, imperfections would still exist, but we would be better at not letting them destroy us. Evil is in those who prey on flaws, prying and widening them, encouraging and further warping the worst in people. Some of them helped this farcical fight happen. In an ideal world, it is they who would not exist – but instead of there, we live here.