Eleven fights into his professional boxing career, a reasonable consensus seems to have formed around what Jake Paul is.
He is a dedicated, serious athlete who has come impressively far in less than five years. He has real punching power — he isn’t Earnie Shavers, but he tends to hurt guys when he lands cleanly. He is not a serious contender, and should not be given a realistic chance of winning if he were to share the ring with one of the cruiserweight beltholders. But he is a decidedly competent professional boxer now, one who can hold his own a notch or two below the serious contender level.
On Saturday night against Mike Perry — importantly, not a professional boxer, like all but three of Paul’s 10 sanctioned opponents — “The Problem Child” looked as competent and heavy-handed as ever. He has bulked up, gained strength, and continued to grow confident and comfortable in the ring. The opposition level was what it was, but it would still be fair to say Paul looked like a dangerous fighter in Tampa.
Especially if you pictured him in the ring throwing those same punches at a 58-year-old opponent.
When it was first announced, I was curious and intrigued by the idea of Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson. As I thought about it more, I remained intrigued but found myself increasingly feeling that Paul should be a clear favorite. When Tyson pushed the date back from July 20 to November 15 to recover from an ulcer, I began wondering if this fight was really worth proceeding with — even as it continues to make all sorts of financial sense.
And now, with Paul stopping Perry in six rounds in probably the most complete performance of his pugilistic career so far, I find myself worrying for Tyson.
I’m worried for his health. I’m worried that he may suffer embarrassment. And I’m worried that the old guy can’t win in November.
As a supporter of the Democratic party, this is not the first time this summer I’d had that feeling.
In fairness, it’s not that the old guy can’t or couldn’t win, in either instance. More accurately, it’s that both old guys only have/had a puncher’s chance.
And that’s not a place you’d want to be in if you’re either a fan of Mike Tyson or a supporter of American democracy.
This column will not decline into a partisan political op-ed. I’ve made my party preference known, and I’m not about to change the minds of any readers who support the opposite side or believe what their news sources of choice tell them. I can leave it at that.
But I may anger some who reside on the same side of the aisle as I do when I say that the current president, Joe Biden, did not appear to present the Democrats’ best chance of prevailing in November, and may in fact have presented its worst chance prior to withdrawing from the race on Sunday.
Age matters, whether you’re a 58-year-old trying to win an athletic contest or an 81-year-old trying to win what is effectively a popularity contest.
Could that have changed for Biden over the next few months leading up to the election? Maybe, but clearly someone convinced him that was not a longshot bet worth making.
For Tyson, there’s nothing that’s going to change appreciably in the next three-plus months in his favor. He will be 58 years, four months, and 15 days old on the scheduled fight night, whereas Paul will be 27 years, 9 months, and 29 days old.
“Iron Mike,” one of the greatest pure punchers in boxing history, has the very literal puncher’s chance.
The Texas Commission has approved the fight with two-minute rounds, and the question is how many good minutes does a 58-year-old formerly elite athlete have in him?
Twenty-two years ago, he had about three good minutes in him against Lennox Lewis, and when he failed to land a damaging punch in the opening round, it became just a matter of time until Lewis knocked him out.
Four years ago, in an exhibition bout against Roy Jones Jr., a 54-year-old Tyson had more good minutes in him than that, although importantly his opponent was also over 50 years old and was not capable of putting pressure on Tyson.
Tyson has never fought an opponent 31 years his junior before. The youngest foe he’s fought, relative to him, was Danny Williams, who was born seven years after Tyson — and who, ohbytheway, knocked Tyson out when they fought in 2004.
None of us know how many good minutes Tyson will have him in on November 15, but logic dictates his best chance of beating Paul will come early in the fight. Maybe for an abbreviated round or two, Tyson will be dangerous. Once he starts to gas, once the iron starts to visibly oxidize, Paul figures to play the role Lennox played from the second round on in 2002.
The sad truth is that when you’re 58 and exchanging punches for pay, Jake Paul can become an approximation of Lennox Lewis.
There is a huge X-factor in this bizarre matchup, however. Yes, it’s officially sanctioned as a fight, but that doesn’t mean that the boxers can’t possibly have a gentlemen’s agreement of some sort or that Paul won’t decide at some point to carry the living legend rather than load up with knockout punches.
But if Jake Paul is fully motivated to win, then for Tyson, it’s boom (for a round or two) or bust (from that point forward).
Against Perry, Paul — despite claiming he was hampered by a badly injured knuckle and an illness leading up to the fight — was utterly dominant. He did damage with a variety of punches: the cuffing right hand that produced the first knockdown, the textbook 1-2 that delivered the second, the left hook that set up the third. His jab landed throughout with accuracy and authority.
Some of his punches came in wide and served as a reminder that he began boxing at the relatively advanced age of 22 (an age by which Tyson had, incredibly, already peaked). But all of those reminders were drowned out by the sight of Paul, bulked up and just barely able to make the cruiserweight limit on the scales Friday, aggressively sitting down on his punches.
The 2024 version of Jake Paul wouldn’t last 30 seconds with the 1987 version of Mike Tyson. But he doesn’t have to worry about what that version of Tyson would do to him. He’ll be facing the 2024 Tyson. And if he’s able to land with the same authority as he did against Perry, there isn’t a 58-year-old on the planet who could take that for long.
Again, Perry is not a real boxer, and would have been hard-pressed to last 15 seconds with the Mike Tyson of 1987. One hesitates to overreact to the way Paul has looked against Perry, or Ryan Bourland, or Andre August, etc.
But if you don’t categorize Paul as a real boxer by this point, you’re just being stubborn. He’s a real boxer who is less than half Tyson’s age.
For whatever parallels there are between the situation Tyson faces and the one Biden was facing, the real-life connection that exists among these four names is between Tyson and Trump. They have a shared history — Trump brought several Tyson fights to Atlantic City, and though the then-businessman claimed not to have a direct financial interest in Tyson, he was ringside in Tokyo for Tyson’s historic loss to Buster Douglas, hoping to play host to a Tyson-Evander Holyfield fight soon after.
Holyfield lost the opponent he wanted that night at the Tokyo Dome. And conventional wisdom says Trump lost the opponent he wanted this past weekend.
(And if you’re looking for one more connection tying these various boxers and politicians together, Holyfield and Trump were on the receiving end of the two most famous ear injuries in history — or at least since Vincent Van Gogh.)
Here’s the main lesson I take from what’s happened in recent weeks in politics that may apply to what awaits the boxing world:
Biden had, by any objective measure, a poor performance in the presidential debate in June, which caused those around him to reassess the situation. After a few weeks passed, the decision was made that, in his diminished state, the best course of action was to pull out.
It’s widely believed the Biden camp pushed for such an early debate specifically to allow time for something like this if the debate proved disastrous.
Tyson will have a training camp coming up. Maybe it will go smoothly. Maybe he’ll feel as good as he did four years ago when he was preparing to box Jones and there will be no reason to view the idea of fighting against Paul any differently than he did when he first signed for the fight.
But the training camp also allows everyone around Iron Mike a chance to assess and reassess. If his body is betraying him, if he can’t see the punches coming as well as he thought he could, if he isn’t responding to getting hit the way he hoped to, well, there’s still time to change course.
If Tyson gets through camp in fine shape and the fight comes off in November, it will be a massive spectacle and I have no doubt that I will be watching. Maybe through the spaces between my fingers, but still, I will be watching.
But there’s no shame in coming to the realization that you aren’t what you used to be, that the risk-reward ratio isn’t on your side, and that the prudent move is to withdraw. The stakes are much lower on November 15 than they will be on November 5 — but not for Mike Tyson. For him, these are as high as stakes can get.
Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with more than 25 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, Ringside Seat, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory and currently co-hosts The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X or LinkedIn, or via email at [email protected].
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