What did the mouse say when he bit into a brick? Thuck.
What did Mike Tyson say after he lost to a man of the social media age? Thuck this. Thow me the money.
Throw him the money, chuck him the financial lifeline he so obviously and desperately needs. Cover him with a rug of solitude and let him go gentle into that good night, not a tired, old 58-year-old with a pension plan p*ssed up against a wall after a life of misdirection, conviction, addiction and abuse.
Mike the monster. Tyson the Terrible. Iron Mike the irritable. Boxer, once the baddest man on the planet, the most devastating of punchers who visited the most devastating of pain on others reduced to the saddest man in the planet with his punch so weakened of power that the best shot he fired in this circus was the slap he hit Jake Paul with in the build-up.
Mike the meek, the former world champion and convicted rapist, rolled out as the ultimate symbol of these dystopian times to lumber around as a barely walking punchbag for a man whose claim to fame was being on the Disney Channel and performing a prank show called: I Sunk My Friend’s Car And Surprised Him With A New One. It was a metaphor for this fight, the wrecking ball that was Tyson became a wrecked car and was given a new one in the form of a $20m pay day.
Tyson called Paul a “manufactured killer” and described himself as a “natural-born killer”. This was Netflix’s way of manufacturing an event and killing off a part of boxing that endeared us to it — the art of the fight, mano a mano, the gore, the brutality, the survival, the early mornings and late nights, punches that shifted the earth on its axis, wobbly legs and heaving chests in the late rounds. Tyson’s lungs were heaving in the second, his legs were gone by the third and his head had probably not even bothered to travel to Dallas.
Pure exploitation
This was a farcical circus that brought in an audience of more than 100-million for Netflix. Unless, you were one of the millions who, while saying it was dumb, tried to watch it anyway only for it to buffer worse than a porn movie over an ISDN line in the early part of the century. Tyson-Paul was porn, pure exploitation of a once-great boxer and a grown-up from the Mickey Mouse Club. Were you angry and confused by why this fight was happening when it was first announced? That is the point, wrote Tom Usher in the Guardian in April, is the point of “influencer boxing”.
“In the same way you might hate the Kardashians or Piers Morgan but are still hoovered irresistibly towards their content, there’s now a sporting version of that rage-bait. It doesn’t matter if it’s loud, annoying and lacking in skill; in fact, it seems to be better for engagement metrics if it’s exactly those things .… that’s the problem with a cultural economy that rewards attention and engagement over artistry and genuine skill. Boxing, and sport, generally, has, like nearly everything else expressive in humanity, been homogenised into one sole output: content. It doesn’t matter how competent these influencers are at fighting — as long as it’s ‘good content’, nobody cares.”
But people did care. Barry McGuigan, the former featherweight champion who at 63 is five years older than Tyson said it was sad. “A 58-year-old man shouldn’t be fighting,” he said. “He just shouldn’t … I don’t want people to say in 20 years: ‘Oh, that’s that guy that had that sham of a fight with that YouTuber.’ ”
When Mike Tyson retired after losing to Kevin McBride about 20 years ago, he said: “My heart is not into this any more. I am not going to disrespect the sport any more by losing to this calibre of fighter.”
Hearts and respect can be bought and paid for by those who are forming our entertainment future into the Hunger Games. A fight to the death, a return to the gladiators of the Roman Empire. Will we not be entertained? Were we entertained by this event that resembled the sport of boxing only by being held in a ring by two shirtless men wearing shorts, boots and gloves? This is the future of entertainment in what marketers call the “attention economy”.
The economy’s attention will now move on to the next farce. We are so thucked.
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