I Watched Boxing For The First Time
There’s been a lot of new things happening in my life recently. I’m getting added to baby shower registries, my new full time job starts this week, and I have walked 37.5 miles at my seasonal retail job this month after working from home the last four years. My knees and feet do NOT like me these days. But I also got sucked into watching boxing for the first time ever this week.
Mike Tyson as a 58 year old fighting in a sanctioned official fight in almost twenty years grabbed my attention.
Let me back up a bit and mention that I grew up in a household with sports being a big deal all the time. My dad ran a sports memorabilia business in Denver, so sports literally put food on our table. I met so many professional athletes when they would come to card shows and sign autographs. Yet boxing never really appealed to me.
Maybe it was the fact that it was never on. Pay Per View and it’s expense being a big part of fighting was perhaps a big contributor to never watching it. It didn’t seem like something my dad was as interested in so it makes sense it was never on TV.
It also could be my aversion to violence. As a kid that was always too scared to hurt my head playing soccer, I never had any interest in violent sports. I was a big scared kid who didn’t like feeling pain, and still don’t. Football made sense to me, as there was an end goal. Get the ball to the spot to score points. Violent collisions occurred, and I never was interested in playing tackle football. But it made sense. Boxing was just two people getting paid a lot of money to beat each other up. I knew there was lots of training and tactics involved. I had seen Rocky. It just wasn’t readily available and I had no exposure or care to seek it out beyond what I knew.
Over the years I’ve seen clips, I’ve even been with friends wanting to watch UFC and things of that nature, and I just didn’t quite click with it. There grew an appreciation for the fitness and skills to a degree, but it just didn’t seem like it was for me.
Fast forward to Friday November 15th, 2024.
Mike Tyson, one of the most vicious and well known boxers ever coming out of retirement at 58 years old, to fight the 27 year old YouTuber turned boxer Jake Paul. Available at no additional cost to anyone with a Netflix account.
I took the bait hook line and sinker.
To be fair I hate watched it. Jake Paul is someone I just do not like. Nothing I’ve seen from him has been anything that makes sense as to why he would have gained a following. Maybe I’m just too old to get it. Maybe I’m just a dude who’s tried to make ends meet and never lived as comfortable as I’d like and dislike that he’s made enough money through his following to parlay into a boxing career where he can throw away a million dollars on the gear he wore to the fight. Whatever it is, I just don’t think he seems like a very likable person. Hearing him talk in interviews, and all the controversies around him, I just dislike everything he is about.
To be fair, Mike Tyson’s background is riddled with drugs, sexual assault cases, and even prison time. He isn’t a role model. Yet there’s something about how at least publicly, he has attempted to be a better, more like able person. Maybe I was just a sucker for his animated Scooby Doo like show Mike Tyson Mysteries that was on Adult Swim. Maybe it’s his laughing at himself the way he has in all the movies, and even in the pre fight interview walking away and mooning anyone who was watching.
Love them or hate them, they both are people that attract attention. Thus I found myself on the couch with my wife watching boxing.
To be honest, I wasn’t sure what to think from main event itself. The second and third fights on the card however, were absolutely captivating. I couldn’t look away. The skill was on full display and it was easy to see why people watch the sport. The ability to take the hits they do, while also having to try to calculate the other’s move. The exhaustion of throwing the punches while always moving, thinking, and trying to stay on your feet is incredible to behold. I don’t think I’m going to become a boxing connoisseur, but I feel like I understand it and am open to fight nights in the future that grab my attention.
The worst parts of the fight was the lose lose situation that the title fight set itself up for. No body won that. Jake Paul tried to grab cash and the ability to say he beat Tyson, but he barely looked like he was better than the champion who was almost thirty years older than him. At the same time, the champ looked older and frailer than ever simply by putting himself out there with someone so young. He did what he could to go after Paul early but lost the steam and just did not look like he should have been in that fight, despite going to the full time in the last round.
It also felt like in a lot of ways the consumers lost. The stream was terrible and Netflix solidified that they don’t have the infrastructure to handle that kind of thing. While they aren’t close to the same kind of draw simply from curiosity, the NFL has to be extremely nervous about their games scheduled for streaming Christmas Day on Netflix after how awful the streaming situation was.
Yet, despite the streaming issues, the concerns about whether there was a fixed fight in the main event because of the age difference, or just the disappointment that the old champ didn’t knock out the ego driven self proclaimed face of boxing out, it was still successful. It was successful because a large amount of the population that may never have cared or had access to the sport had a couple fights that were really engaging. I can’t be the only one that came away from this with a different understanding and respect for the sport from the fights that were really good. That alone I think was the biggest story of what this spectacle provided.