Opinion: In Defense of Paul vs. Tyson

Mike Tyson says he smoked toad venom, spoke to God and was instructed to return to the ring. Illustration: Catherine Dubeau

“Logic and boxing don’t necessarily go hand in hand.” 
–Commentator Steve Albert

The most damning evidence against Mike Tyson’s chances of winning his bout this Friday in Dallas is neither his advanced age nor his near two-decade-long absence from the ring. The most worrisome fact is that Jake Paul and his savvy matchmaking team sought Tyson out to fight in the first place.

Consider that the last time Tyson boxed in the State of Texas was in 1985, four years prior to Tim Berners-Lee creating the World Wide Web, and by extension Jake Paul.

It’s true that both in reality and in the abstract, the notion of a vital and competent 27-year-old challenging a 58-year-old, long-retired once great opponent strains our understanding of fair competition and perhaps even decency. But is it possible, that in his hubris, Paul picked a fight with the wrong old man?

Sometimes what appears to be a very bad idea is actually a vessel for poetry. Occasionally the machine of crass commerciality sputters and we are given nice things…

For reasons that admittedly strain credulity, I am confident Mike Tyson will be more than just fine. After all, the most damning evidence against Jake Paul’s chances of winning is that Mike Tyson has agreed to fight him.

Conspicuously missing from the Netflix-produced promotional series for Paul-Tyson is the unquestioned reason all of this is even happening. Following a suggestion from former NFL offensive lineman Eben Britton, then co-host of Tyson’s Hotboxin’ podcast, a shaman was summoned to the now-defunct Tyson Ranch headquarters to guide a morose Mike Tyson through a toad venom ceremony.

November 27, 2018: Tyson is catapulted into the toad dimension, meets God and is told to resume fighting. His trip ends with a feeling of total renewal. By all accounts, this feeling endures, evidenced by Tyson’s return to the ring for his exhibition with Roy Jones Jr. exactly two years and a day later. 

In a conversation with Rosie Perez for Interview Magazine, Tyson estimates that he has smoked toad venom at least 80 or 90 times. If you divide the total number of days elapsed between his first inhalation and the article’s date of publication, we’re looking at approximately one toad venom session every 25 days for the past 6 years. If Tyson meets God every time he smokes the Toad, they must be on exceedingly familiar terms by now.

SUPPORT INDIE MEDIA

So no matter what anyone will tell you, no matter how much they protest the merits of this fight (coverage begins at 8 p.m. on Netflix Friday), if they fail to mention the Toad, they are entirely missing the point. Tyson is famously a protégé of Cus D’Amato, who believed that boxing was almost entirely psychological, that the fighting spirit was paramount above all, that confidence applied properly would supersede genius. With true desire, Cus believed, one could fight forever.

I can only speculate, and I say this without meaning to sound hyperbolic, that Netflix is genuinely concerned that a Tyson endorsement (never mind a strong performance) on its platform could be enough to trigger a mass extinction event for the Sonoran Desert Toad. Otherwise I can’t quite understand its exclusion. It would be like a preacher neglecting to highlight the Resurrection.

Compounding the curious omission of the Toad is that, in the same Netflix promotional series, Jake Paul shares that the idea to fight Tyson came to him during an ayahuasca ceremony.

Meaning that both combatants who will meet in the most watched fight in the history of our world will be acting on independent visions received while under the spell of DMT. 

What rough beast, its hour come at last, slouches towards Dallas to be born?

The Case For Paul

Complicating Tyson’s triumphant return is a very game Jake Paul. 

To his critics, Paul remains an imp of social media — part of a group of young digital invaders who one day appeared on their phones uninvited and never went away. This fight would be the pièce de résistance in a series of exhausting and shameless ventures he’s perpetuated on society at large.

Part of the early genius of Paul’s ring career has been in the creative risk tolerance of its matchmaking: identifying opponents with marketable and fearsome reputations, just not in boxing. Former mixed martial art champions are faced with a devil’s bargain: fight Jake Paul and risk the public embarrassment of losing to a YouTuber in a sport they’re not proficient in, at a weight class often far above what they’re accustomed to, for purses sometimes exceeding their entire career earnings up until that point.

But insisting that he is a pretender who will unravel in the face of a real fighter is precisely the same flaw in thinking that gets passers-by to cough up money in a game of three-card monte. The refusal to reframe their idea of Paul and to appreciate he is very carefully selecting disadvantaged opposition while steadily increasing his boxing proficiency has been one of the sport’s most surefire betting opportunities for those of us who wager on fights, since the return for a Paul win is always enhanced by the wave of a righteously indignant public placing bets against their idea of him.

People don’t just bet against him because they want him to lose, they do so to reclaim the dignity of his opponent. Which is something to consider given the nature of my defense of Tyson’s chances.

In all but one fight thus far, a decision loss to boxer Tommy Fury, you’d have been rewarded for putting your money on Jake Paul. But like the passenger who berated Tyson on a flight in April of 2022, Jake may be met with a response so surprising and violent that it will matter little how old the person delivering it is.

“This is the greatest boxing match in the history of boxing and it’s because I’m a part of it.” 
-Mike Tyson

To those who say this fight is evidence that boxing is dying, I ask that you direct me to any other sport that could field this level of interest with as absurd a premise. Ignore the hand wringing that will be done on the merits of Tyson-Paul in op-eds and on podcasts, in print and on TikTok. Resist these predictable objections and embrace the naked incongruity that a 31-year age gap represents, or doesn’t.

Celebrate that Mike Tyson, the greatest student of boxing’s history and its youngest ever heavyweight champion is set to make his professional return after being revived in other dimensions. Be romantic enough to consider that this fight is not for material gain but to feed his reinvigorated spirit. Consider his intelligence enough to appreciate he sees something you may not. And give Jake Paul credit for having the audacity to fulfill a psychedelic dream.

Though it just may not be his own.

This fight is not evidence of a sport in decay, nor of a society on the brink of collapse. Tyson has met God, and he’s telling him to fight. The falcon can hear the falconer!  Leap into the gap.

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