The sad, silly spectacle of Jake Paul and Mike Tyson

Was Jake Paul’s not the most punchable face in the history of punched faces? It was a face with all the character and lived experience of a canned ham. It was the consummate face of an influencer, with all the smirky grifting in search of the lux life that term suggests. There wasn’t a hint of true toughness - much less truth - in it. Just blandness cloaked in a poseur-pharaoh’s beard and topped by some box-color bleached curls, and God did you ever want Mike Tyson to put his very real fist in it.

If only to make Paul earn something, for once in his littered career.

In one corner of Jerry Jones’s sun palace in Arlington, Texas, was a 58-year-old with true scars and flaws, a man who still showed a hint of real menace as he won the first round of this strange tinny exhibition. Whose demons showed even when he smiled. Who had bleeding ulcers. Who did prison time for rape. Who grew up in tenements of Brownsville, New York, where his mother did sex work to feed him. Who became the undisputed world heavyweight champion at the age of 20, and whose 50 wins, with 44 knockouts, were nothing compared to his battering youth and his battles with drugs. You want something real, read his autobiography, “Undisputed Truth,” if you can bear it.

For a few seconds he was still terrifying, as he fought in just a stark pair of black shoes and shorts, launching arcing overhands, “heavy punches with bad intentions,” as he used to say. But the heaviness now was in his legs, one of which was heavily wrapped.

[Jake Paul, 27, beats 58-year-old Mike Tyson as the hits don’t match the hype]

In the other corner, a 27-year-old vlogger from the suburb of Westlake, Ohio, without a single discernible real-world experience or accomplishment, who was born the year Tyson bit Evander Holyfield’s ear off. In 2017, Paul released the track, “It’s Everyday, Bro,” in which he championed his burgeoning internet following with lines like this: “It’s everyday bro, with the Disney Channel flow, 5 mill on YouTube in six months, never done before.” And don’t forget this immortal couplet:

“And I just dropped some new merch and it’s selling like a god, church.”

All week, Paul did his best to sell the merch of this so-called fight, a Netflix production hyped by guttural braying that was presumably meant as a bro’s companion piece to the Tom Brady roast. “I’m here to make $40 million and knock out a legend,” Paul said. In fact, he couldn’t convincingly beat a stiff-kneed old man who was twice his age and had five fewer inches of reach.

During the prefight news conference, a Dallas reporter asked Paul, “You’ve said you want to be taken seriously as a boxer. When can we expect you to start fighting legitimate contending fighters in your given weight class?”

“Dumbass,” Paul muttered back.

There was just one true sentiment uttered in all the prefight hype and it came from retired boxer turned commentator Tony Bellew, who crashed the affair as a stunt, and yelled into a portable microphone that Paul should try fighting a great-grandfather next.

The only thing to take seriously was Tyson himself, who hopefully got a fair payday for facilitating the nonsense, and who talked in the weeks leading up to the fight of how good the training had been for him. Paul’s reputation as a killer fighter was “manufactured,” as Tyson pointed out - he only pulled on a pair of gloves four years ago. Perhaps Paul deserves some credit for bulking up and training himself into a somewhat capable amateur, but then, what else does he have to do with his days? Safe to say, Tyson wasn’t too threatened by this Disney clown, and figured the old reflexes could carry him safely through.

“The deadliest weapon on the planet is manufactured, and that’s a nuke!” Paul whinnied.

You couldn’t trust any of it. Half a dozen states declined to allow wagers on this so-called bout because there weren’t two professional fighters in it. There was one long-retired champion working on his waistline, and a stuntman who until recently was a poor man’s popped-collar Justin Timberlake from his Mickey Mouse era. Asked before the match whether Paul could take a punch, Holyfield just shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen him get hit,” he said.

Win or lose, bloodied or unbloodied, at least Tyson inserted some substance into the proceedings. At their weigh-in, he was so heavily built he looked formed by tectonic plates. Then here came Paul, in all of his meaty bro-ness - ape crawling across the stage to meet him, and stepping on his foot. Tyson openhanded him across his cheek, hard enough to snap Paul’s head sideways, “slapping the taste out of his mouth!” a broadcaster howled. Was it for show? Or was it a natural reflexive response to such visceral garbage?

By the time they entered the ring after midnight, the bout seemed utterly bogus compared to the genuinely tense fighting on the undercard. At least those were worth the time spent watching: a quality WBC welterweight championship fight ended in a split draw between reigning champ Mario Barrios and Abel Ramos, and the rematch between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano was a fascinating, bloodily staggering affair; in a single round they exchanged a shocking 170 punches.

Then Paul made a gaseous entrance between jets of air, in a pair of shorts that Netflix was reliably informed was sewn with 380 diamonds and cost $1 million. Tyson stalked in wearing his usual unadorned black, looking grim, and lumbered heavily and agedly to his corner. He would throw just 97 punches all told, landing just 18.

Still, those few were satisfyingly flush. They were rare instances of real power over pixels.