1 week Ago
Whatever Mike Tyson is banking from his return to competitive boxing in his squeamish match-up with Jake Paul in Texas tomorrow night, engagement in the official press conference for the event clearly wasn't signed off on as part of the package. Old Mike just wasn't in the mood. Like one of those grizzled male lions stretched out under a burning sun as younger, more energetic members of the pride prance around him, he was too weary to hunt.
Most Valuable Promotions, the company founded by Paul as the vehicle for these show fights against various luminaries from other sports from basketball to MMA, did everything to prod and poke him. Their MC, Ariel Helwani, charged with running the event that played out in front of a public audience at the Toyota Music Factory in Irving, tried his darndest, as they might say around these parts, to elicit something from him, anything. Even appealing to Tyson's inner Cus D'Amato with a softball question about the paternal figure in Tyson's turbulent young life, the one subject that can find favour when he is in this brooding mood.
"What do you think he would say about this spectacle going down on Friday?" "He'd be very happy." What do you think he would tell you about how to beat Jake Paul? "He would be very happy." "Alright!" If remuneration was coming by words, Tyson would be back on the stand up circuit once more.
Maybe even another stint at the Helix. Every exchange carried the same abbreviation. "Is the old Mike back, is vintage Mike back?" Helwani exhorted, now quickly taking water on board.
“You talkin’ to me? I’m just happy to be here.” Paul, sensing that the exchanges were pivoting to awkwardness, chimed in with his own unique brand of rhetoric. "I fear no man so I want him to be that old savage Mike.
He says he’s going to kill me. Is that what you are going to do Mike? Cos I’m ready, I want that killer. I want the hardest match possible Friday night and I want there to be no excuses from everyone at home when I knock him out.
So is that what you are gonna bring? Homicidal?" he said with rising enthusiasm. “I’m just ready.” And on it went, question after question to a clearly out of sorts and disengaged 58-year-old smothered before they ever took flight.
Could they say anything nice about each other? "Well I think he is gonna look good in the picture when he is on the canvas and I'm standing over him," boomed Paul. Tyson looked straight ahead and said nothing. The descent to farce accelerated when the former British heavyweight champion Tony Bellew gatecrashed, brandishing a Fisher Price microphone with an elderly gent dressed in a Paddy Power robe and wearing boxing gloves beside him, a clear attempt to illustrate the absurdity of a 31-year age gap that has boxing bluebloods holding their noses with disdain.
Maybe Tyson, with his fixed stare at a point in the crowd and his clipped answers, has come to that realisation too. He wore the look of a man who knew this confluence between the staid old world of boxing he once knew and the Gen Z and Gen Alpha that Paul and his associates are seeking to draw, and with some success, into the sport isn't for him. The attention economy is just not Tyson's thing.
But he's knee deep in it now with the weight of the cheque to make it all bearable. Maybe only Katie Taylor wanted to be there less. Taylor is openly hesitant about these events but her bout with Serrano is the co-main event.
At least in name. If there was any doubt that they were in the slipstream of Tyson/Paul, it manifested over the 40-minute pantomime that unfolded. Few questions came their way.
Helwani did ask Taylor if her promoter Eddie Hearn, who has nothing to do with this event, would be in her corner tomorrow night. Taylor demurred but Paul cleared it up. "That's what they submitted to the promotion, it doesn't surprise me because he is a crowd chasing bitch," he retorted.
The event wrapped up with a canvass of the 12 other fighters on the card for a winner of the headline event. It fell to Tyson, 9-3. Paul rose from his chair to challenge the nine to a bet.
What did they want to lay? Taylor ventured Friday night's purse, Paul accepted. Whatever about his ringcraft between the ropes, his ringmaster craft beneath the big top is magnificent. Finally all 14 fighters came back out for their match up photographs and then a communal shot together.
Tyson was first to break, walking straight off stage almost before a camera had clicked. He'd had enough. It was time for the circus to move to another town.
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