I was one of those people who stayed up until midnight to see the fight on Netflix between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson. I should have known it could be seen the next day at a more reasonable time. There were two other championship fights on the undercard before the main event. I was not alone as 70,000 people packed the Dallas Cowboys Stadium to view the fight up close and personal while 60 million people watched around the world. There were so many viewers that it caused a buffering problem during the fight. Netflix got blowback on that issue.
It was a moment of nostalgia for me because watching the fights on Friday nights when I was a kid was one of the few things that my father and I did together. It was something else as well. I wanted to learn what went into making a good boxer as that was a skill I was trying to learn. My neighbor, Mushy Mushlanka, was my teacher. He was very adept at the sport and therefore feared by many. I was told later in life that he was an amateur champion in New York, but I could never confirm that. Back then the Friday Night Fights were sponsored by Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer. That’s how vivid my memory is of those moments.
Given all of this, why was I so disgusted by watching the Netflix Special? I had to compare what I was seeing to an important childhood memory. It didn’t seem like a fight. It seemed like a form of entertainment with a flashy background and up to date technology like we experience during halftime entertainment at the Super Bowl. Sure, there were the same beautiful women walking around the ring between rounds announcing the round, continuing the tradition of sexual objectification of women.
It was entertainment, plain and simple. There seemed to be no skill involved including in the undercard, two women fighting each other, and two men fighting each other for a hyped-up prize of a championship in the offing. But even the main event was two men fighting toe to toe to win. The boxer who could give and take a punch the best would win.
The big draw was to see if age made a difference in the fight game, so we had Mike Tyson at 58 and Jake Paul at 27 there to prove that it does. Jake Paul won. I was sad to see that Tyson had lost more than a couple of steps and he depended on his constant movement toward Paul that was a winning style in his past, but not at age 58. That’s not the way I want him remembered. Paul was a class act and at the end of the fight bowed toward Tyson before the verdict declaring the winner. No one should have been surprised when the ringmaster’s extended voice announced that the winner was Paul.
Will Leitch of The New York Times summarized my feeling in a guest essay when he wrote, “it was not a boxing match, or nothing new, but a faint reminder of something they once vaguely recall enjoying.”
But there is another aspect that might be occurring in this most-watched TV fight of the century.”
I think that Tyson may have agreed to the fight JUST TO SEE IF HE COULD DO IT. Paul was an influencer who became a boxer. The odds were 2 to 1 that Tyson was the underdog. It was the fighting equivalent of Evel Knievel jumping across a wide canyon on a motorcycle. No one was sure who would win which created the desired tension.
There is an undercurrent psychological mechanism that connects many people to their actions. I used to go on a run during the hottest day of the year and the coldest day of the year when much younger. When others questioned my sanity, they asked, “Why?” My response was always that I wanted to see if I could do it. It’s the same with members of the polar bear club who dive into the ocean on New Year’s Day. One of the favorite episodes of Seinfeld was when he attempted to see how far he could go when his gas tank registered empty. We were tense as we watched to see if he could do it.
The 70,000 people who watched the Paul/ Tyson fight and the 60 million who viewed it across the airwaves created a positive distant memory for me, to see which one would do the impossible and win. I believe that each boxer did not do it for the money, but to SEE IF THEY COULD DO IT. It had nothing to do with boxing skill. It had everything to do with age. The tension was which would win, age or skill.
Robert Browning put it best. “Ah but man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for.” This is interpreted as a person should try even those things that may turn out to be impossible to achieve anything worthwhile. Our primordial emotions are calling us to be undaunted in anything that is worthwhile in the quest to make a better life for ourselves and others. Here’s the twist. Choose a challenging relationship that seems hopeless. And before you give up, why not try the impossible to heal the relationship? You choose with two guidelines…a situation that is seemingly impossible and worthwhile. That’s what a heaven is for.
Stated another way in the Gospels, “With mortals this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:26)
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