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

Opinion|Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson Is the Absurd Spectacle We Deserve

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.