Well, it’s official; I can’t have nice things, even when the nice things aren’t very nice.
Pictured above: the only punch Mike Tyson actually threw in that entire Goddamned fight. I’m a writer, y’all, even if I’ve more or less given up on books, and I could have written ten thousand different versions of that fight and not one of them would involve both corners begging their fighters to get more aggressive with the other person, and not one of them would have involved a fight where Mike Tyson barely threw a fucking punch the entire time. I swear he went entire rounds without throwing any punches.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist and I’m not going to genuinely suggest that that fight was fixed, but I will say that it sure looked like neither guy was super interested in actually winning it. I thought Paul looked genuinely scared in the first round, when Tyson actually did come out aggressively and hit him a couple of times, but after the second … nothing. Tyson turtled up and chewed on his gloves, and what the hell was the deal with that, and Paul danced around and occasionally threw a few punches. As shaky as Tyson’s legs looked, I can’t believe there wasn’t at least one knockdown at some point. Neither of them looked like they were fighting to win, and the crowd was noticeably pissed at the end of the fight.
I’m back to my “never ever care about sports for any reason” viewpoint, in case anyone was wondering. It’s just never worth it. Thank God I only spent time and not money on this.
(Not true. I could have made that money back. I’ll never get the time back. I will always have to remember staying up way too late for this terrible, boring, anticlimactic fight.)
I don’t like Mike Tyson. Mike Tyson is a rapist. I don’t like rapists.
Like a whole lot of people who generally don’t care about sports in general or boxing in particular, I’m planning on at least attempting to watch the Tyson/Paul fight tonight. Why attempting? Because who the fuck knows when the thing is going to start, and Tyson in his prime kind of specialized in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it-sorry-that-guy’s-dead-now fights that you could miss by going to the bathroom at the wrong time. I don’t really want to watch the entire undercard, which could be a couple of hours, so I’ll mostly be relying on the Internet to give me an idea when the actual main event itself is going to start.
I am, I admit, more than a little conflicted about it, and I’m mostly writing this post as a way of thinking out loud rather than making a unified and coherent argument. Generally when I find out someone I was previously a fan of has turned out to be any of many different varieties of sex pest, that guy is removed from my consciousness as thoroughly as I can. Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis, and Bill Cosby, to pick two fairly recent examples and one not so recent, are all dead to me. To hell with all three of them. I don’t vote for politicians who are sex pests and in fact default whenever possible to voting for women precisely so that I don’t do it accidentally.
It is entirely possible that this entire post, and a lot of the “thinking” that I’ve been doing about it over the last few months, is about me searching for a way to justify watching this fight. To find a way that oh, this one doesn’t count. And maybe that’s all that’s going on. I’m not sure that that has to be a problem, to be honest! We already had a Netflix account; any tiny percentage of however much my wife spends a month on Netflix has already been earmarked to Tyson without my approval or consultation. I think I might be having a different conversation were this a pay-per-view type of event or something that Netflix was demanding a surcharge for. I am not a fan of Tyson’s; recognizing that he is either the best boxer or the second-best boxer who ever lived depending on how you feel about Muhammad Ali (Tyson has said multiple times that Ali would win if they were both in their prime) is merely stating a fact and not a fan’s opinion. Other than playing hours upon hours of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! as a kid I’ve never engaged in any particular “fan” activities toward the guy. I don’t think he’s a good guy, and I don’t want to be like him, and I don’t want my kid to look up to him or want to be like him or think he’s a good guy.
What I want is to watch him beat the piss out of Jake Paul, a loathsome human being, and someone who is a loathsome human being now, as opposed to a rapist who went to jail for his crime, served his time, and for the most part has kept his nose clean since then, and who has definitely not been accused of any further sexual misconduct since leaving jail.
Just because I want to see him punch Jake Paul’s nose around to the back of his head doesn’t mean that I want to take part in literally anything else that he does. And, you must admit, Mike Tyson is kind of uniquely qualified to be the guy who punches Jake Paul’s jaw clean off of his fucking smarmy face. There is no one else who it would be more satisfying to watch do that. It is possibly true that this is because I can’t name any other boxers!(*) But still.
But Tyson also hasn’t done the kinds of things that we want perpetrators of sexual violence to do in order to obtain “redemption,” whatever exactly that thing is. There’s been no attempt, to my knowledge, of any attempt at restitution, or an apology, or even admission of guilt. And there may have been more than one victim, which wouldn’t be surprising at all. There’s also his whole relationship with Robin Givens, which (I don’t think?) involved sexual violence but certainly was abusive.
But again: did his time, has stayed out of trouble since then, and I’m not directly supporting him by watching this fight, and I think he sucks as a person, and and and and and I’m not sure any of it really matters because I so badly want to see Jake Paul beaten until he’s two-dimensional so maybe I’m just letting my standards slip this one time because these are kind of unique circumstances, I’m not perfect either, goddammit, and my wife’s watching it with me and she’s even a whole-ass woman! So there!
I’m gonna be so pissed if Paul wins.
(And, not that I’m the first person to say this, but I feel like it’s worth repeating: while he’s definitely going to make an asston of money with this fight, it’s not the best career move for Jake Paul, if we’re willing to call his boxing a “career.” If it’s a fair fight, he’s going to get the shit beaten out of him, and if he wins, half the audience (including me) will be screaming that the fight’s fixed and the other half will not be impressed because Tyson is nearly fucking 60 and the young strong guy is supposed to win a fight with a guy who is nearly sixty years old.)
(*) Okay, I can, and some of them might even still be alive, but none of them are as mean as Tyson. Watching George Foreman turn this guy into hamburger and then grill him up would simply not be as much fun, I’m sorry. Foreman is nice. Relatively speaking.
Anyway. Are you watching? Are you also morally conflicted about it, or at least pretending to be on the Internet so you can go do what you wanted to do in the first place?
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