IRVING, Texas — In another year, maybe even in another week, the spectacle and absurdity of this might have felt different. What are you supposed to say about a 58-year-old sports icon on a slickly-lit stage with a 27-year-old “content creator,” on the brink of a boxing match whose only relevance is the curiosity of a country with an insatiable appetite for spectacle and a media platform willing to pay massive amounts of money to help us scratch the itch?
What are you supposed to think? What are you supposed to see?
Friday’s fight between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul is a circus. It is also America.
That may not have seemed so clear if this fight had taken place when it was originally scheduled back in July. Now, a little more than a week after a presidential election that has put Donald Trump into power for a second time, it is undeniable.
Whatever side of the political divide you occupy, there is no mistaking the cross-currents that helped elect him for a second time reflect a society that has changed in many of the same ways that are turning an exhibition boxing match between two people who are not really professional boxers into the most culturally relevant boxing event of the past decade.
This fight isn’t merely happening outside the rules and norms of a sport with a wide berth for lawlessness and corruption, it’s happening expressly because the cult of absurdity that occurs daily on social media is now the most powerful and lucrative force in American life.
“A lot of fighters go in there and have boring-ass fights, like Floyd Mayweather,” Paul said Wednesday at the official pre-fight press conference, referring to the all-time great who went 50-0 as a professional and won 15 major world championship belts across multiple weight classes.
“I’ve brought a lot of excitement to the sport going against the biggest names and making matchups fans want to see. I’m going to continue to do the biggest fights, biggest pay-per-views, biggest streams across the board, and I think people resonate with my content and promotional ability.”
What’s more preposterous? That a YouTube stunt man who only started boxing a few years ago would believe — perhaps correctly — that he is the future of a sport that once belonged to Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis and Mayweather? Or that Tyson, several years closer to being eligible for Social Security than to his last official fight in 2005, has legitimate reasons to get in the ring Friday aside from a big payday and publicity for his cannabis ventures?
“I’m not gonna lose,” Tyson said in a press conference where he offered few words but plenty of nostalgic glares for a few thousand fans holding their cell phones high above their heads to snap pictures of a man whose legend is ingrained in memories of their youth.
We know we are being played. Millions of us aren’t going to care.
In the days leading up to and following the presidential election, one of the major themes that emerged was the salience of the so-called influencers, people ranging from comedians to conspiracy theorists to a woman who literally became famous and now hosts a high-profile podcast because she made a funny reference to oral sex during a woman-on-the-street-style interview that blew up on social media.
That presidential candidates were climbing over each other to appear alongside and answer questions from these types of “influencers” would have been considered evidence of a fundamentally unserious society less than a generation ago. Now, political pundits call it meeting the voters where they are.
The consequences of that change in how Americans engage with civic life are not yet clear, but if politics aren’t immune from an attention economy that elevates narrative and storytelling over tradition and expertise, then sports won’t be either.
And it’s why the ramifications of Friday night and the success it’s likely to have should be taken seriously across the entire sports industry.
What’s happening here isn’t just a fight. It’s a test to see whether Netflix and one of the most famous social media influencers on the planet can create the veneer of legitimacy out of something that by any traditional measure would be illegitimate. What is a big-time boxing match without a belt, without being sanctioned by one of those well-known organizations with three letters, without traditional rules, without even the ability to bet on it in at least six states that otherwise allow gambling?
It’s nothing. But it’s everything.
For half a decade, sports leagues have pondered how the migration of viewers from cable and network television to native streaming platforms might change both the economics and the possibilities of their business model.
So far, they have merely dabbled. The NFL and NBA have struck smaller deals with Amazon while keeping the bulk of their product on linear television.
Netflix has largely eschewed live sports and focused on its highly successful sports documentaries, citing the high costs of bidding for those rights. But this year, Netflix has dipped its toe into live broadcasts, including a crossover golf match involving F1 drivers and PGA Tour players, an exhibition tennis match in Las Vegas between Carlos Alcaraz and Rafael Nadal and a three-year deal with the NFL to broadcast games on Christmas Day.
The so-called “Netflix Slam” event with Nadal and Alcaraz was interesting. Tennis exhibitions are notoriously non-competitive, but this one was slickly presented with professional announcers, high-level production values, lots of celebrities in the audience and a trophy ceremony that looked like a Grand Slam final. If you didn’t know any better, you’d have thought you were watching the best the sport had to offer — only without commercials.
The data on how many people watched is opaque. Netflix hasn’t, and probably won’t, release the numbers.
But what it showed is that you can create a high-profile sporting event that can hook millions of people on streaming without being tied to a traditional tournament like the US Open. And in this case, Netflix and Paul have created the boxing match of the decade on a platform that has gone around the pay-per-view model simply by pitting him against an aging cultural icon who hasn’t been a real professional boxer in decades.
“No one has had a boxing career like mine,” Paul said, in one of the rare moments Wednesday that didn’t seem like hyperbole. “It’ll be studied and judged, but I’ve risen to the top because I’ve taken risks.”
It is incredibly audacious. It is also genius.
What’s very clear in the wake of Trump’s second election is that many Americans, and maybe even a slight majority, do not have misgivings about the fungibility of our institutions. If that is true of the U.S. government, it is undeniably going to be true for sports as entities peck away at the way things have always been presented to the public.
Does that mean the NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball or the International Olympic Committee are on the verge of being replaced by whatever absurdity the next influencer is cooking up?
Of course not. But millions of people have followed Paul’s evolution from someone they grew up laughing at on YouTube to someone who has reinvented himself into a plausible pro athlete.
To deny the allure and efficacy of a famous person going around the system to create an entirely new reality is to deny what we have seen American voters lean into now twice in the last decade.
For better or worse, this is who we are. And for better or worse, Netflix and Jake Paul are just the latest who figured out how to benefit.
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