On Nov. 15, when YouTuber/social media celebrity/boxer Jake Paul makes the walk to the ring at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, for his farce of a boxing match against 58-year-old Mike Tyson, he will be 27 years, 10 months old.
When Tyson was 27 years, 10 months old, he was 41-1 with 35 knockouts, he had already:
• Become the young heavyweight champion in history at 20 years, four months old.
• Gone 10-1 in world title fights.
• Won the undisputed heavyweight title.
• Defeated future Hall of Famer Michael Spinks in 91 seconds.
Tyson is among the greatest heavyweights in the sport's illustrious history.
But he's 58 years old and he's fighting a guy more than 30 years younger. Of course, that begs the question, why?
What, the Dodgers weren't able to get 58-year-old Greg Maddux out of retirement to start Game 4 at Yankee Stadium Tuesday with an opportunity to sweep the World Series?
The answer to why this is happening if money, of course. Paul and Tyson will sell a lot of tickets. People love a freak show and that is what this will be. I imagine the people who will be there will be the same who rubber neck their way past a traffic accident and make the delay even longer.
Brett Davis/Imagn Images
Greg Maddux is 58 years old but the Dodgers didn't reach out to him even though they needed a starter Tuesday for Game 4 of the World Series against the Yankees.
Tyson is so beloved now that it's easy to forget how bad he was at the end of his career. In his final two bouts, losses to Danny Williams on July 30, 2004, and to Kevin McBride on June 11, 2005, he was slow, listless and only a shell of the guy once known as "The Baddest Man on the Planet."
Nearly 20 years later, it's not like he's found the Fountain of Youth.
Al Bernstein, the Hall of Fame boxing broadcaster, worked Tyson's final two fights
"That Mike Tyson was much younger and still actively participating as a heavyweight," Bernstein said.
Now, he's fighting a 27-year-old who wouldn't be a pimple on Tyson's ass if both were 27. Still, we're acting like this is a real fight and has some significance.
I'll give Jake Paul credit for surrounding himself with good boxing people. I'll give him credit for championing other boxers, notably Amanda Serrano, who faces Katie Taylor in a rematch on the undercard. And I'll give him plenty of credit for creating visibility for his fights.
But he's not a fighter anywhere near Tyson's talent and never will be. Bernstein has seen him and is unimpressed.
"At the end of the day, if Jake Paul was fighting as a professional against only professional cruiserweights, he would probably be 7-3 against these lower-level cruiserweight-type people," he said.
We sit at an odd point in boxing history. There are a huge number of highly talented fighters -- Oleksandr Usyk, Terence Crawford, Naoya Inoue, Artur Beterbiev and Gervonta Davis, to name just a handful -- as well as some elite young fighters working their way up.
But from a business standpoint, the sport is a mess. Few outside of the hardest of the hard-core fans care about it or even think of it.
Top Rank has a deal with ESPN and it's the only regular linear television of boxing in the U.S. at this point. Everything else is streaming.
Promoting has become almost non-existent. Fighters aren't made available to the media on a regular basis. Promoters have to give away scores of tickets to put people in the seats to make it look good for television.
Few, if any, promoters are willing to spend their own money to put on significant fights. They rely on Turki Alalshikh, the powerful Saudi executive, to fund the bouts.
If Alalshikh doesn't put the money forth, chances are the fight won't get made.
And when Alalshikh does pay, he often overpays by such a great amount that the boxers have no incentive to meet the press and try to build interest in their fights.
Netflix is reportedly interested in getting into live sports, and on Christmas Day, will televise an NFL game between the Kansas City Chiefs and -- I'm predicting it now -- the 2025 Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers.
It wouldn't shock me if when the UFC renegotiates its new broadcast deals that Netflix will be one of its partners.
But why would Netflix want to get into this boxing circus? The Chiefs-Steelers game will probably draw more fans on Christmas Day than the combined total viewers of 100 boxing matches it might put on.
Taylor-Serrano 1 was an incredible moment for the sport and showed what could happen with women's boxing when the right fights are made and are promoted properly. But on the undercard of Tyson-Paul, the rematch is going to receive precious little attention as Tyson and Paul will suck all the oxygen from the room.
The Tyson-Paul fight means nothing but it's going to take the attention from a fight that means everything.
Nothing good can come out of Tyson-Paul. How long can a 58-year-old man go? What if he gets seriously injured?
It's an absolute farce of a fight.
And if the people at Netflix get a taste of how bad things can be in boxing, this fight may even have poor long-term implications for the sport.
Michelle Farsi/Most Valuable Promotions
Jake Paul has only fought one "real" boxer in his career, and he lost.