Sham prizefighting goes by many names these days—crossover boxing, celebrity boxing, influencer boxing—but it’s been around a long time. In the 1940s, a retired Jack Dempsey, folk hero of the Roaring Twenties, struck a path on the comeback trail by taking on a string of wrestlers. In 1975, George Foreman traveled to Toronto to flatten five tomato cans, one after the other, in a single night, in a bid to restore his confidence after Muhammad Ali had shattered it in Zaire. A year later, Ali went fifteen execrable rounds with the wrestler Antonio Inoki in their bewildering mixed-rules mash-up in Tokyo. The twenty-first century saw the breakout of celebrity boxing, featuring D-listers who were, according to one promoter’s pitch, on the prowl for their sixteenth minute of fame. Featuring the likes of Tonya Harding and Joey Buttafuoco, the Fox television series Celebrity Boxing was a ratings hit in 2002, some of the episodes going neck and neck with The West Wing and Fear Factor.
What has changed recently, however, is our attitude toward what can be described with the umbrella term “gimmick boxing.” When twenty-seven-year-old YouTuber-turned-boxing-agitator Jake Paul and fifty-eight-year-old boxing alpha Mike Tyson linked up last November to swap punches in their live Netflix spectacle, it was as close anything has come in our anemic, discombobulated democracy to being a come-together cultural moment; hate it or love it, people were watching. With more than seventy thousand spectators present in the stands of the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium, the fight saturated the media ecosystem and lured Wall Street and Madison Avenue, with companies like energy drink brand Celsius and credit score tracker Experian latching onto the event as sponsors—unusual developments in contemporary boxing, given its shrinking public profile and haphazard business model.
The floodgates opened in 2017. Regarded as the biggest stars of boxing and mixed martial arts, respectively, Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Conor McGregor broke pay-per-view records in an extravaganza that year, reportedly generating more than $600 million. (Only Mayweather’s long-awaited showdown with Manny Pacquiao in 2015 has performed better.) Contested under boxing rules—boxers are usually inept when kicks and grappling are involved—the fight was also held as a pro bout, meaning open betting lines and more money for “Money” Mayweather, who got to call the shots because he is inarguably the most financially successful prizefighter in history. (Mayweather, in fact, attempted to plunk down $400,000 on himself in a prop bet—KO in less than nine and a half rounds—the night before the fight but was denied.) His one fight with Robert Guerrero in 2013 netted him a minimum $32 million (not including pay-per-view upside, gate revenue, and foreign television rights), whereas McGregor, effectively an employee of the wage-gouging Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), needed nine fights across a seven-year period to earn nearly $20 million, according to court records.
The year 2017 was also a pivotal moment in the internet culture fueling gimmick boxing’s current permutation. British YouTubers Joe Weller and Theo Baker—roughly seven million subscribers between them currently—bandied punches with headgear inside an empty gym and posted it online. Like the porno set bouncer Kimbo Slice, who parlayed backyard brawls posted on the web to a pro-MMA career, Weller and Baker created an inadvertent sensation whose virality went up another notch when the YouTuber KSI called out Weller, the winner. Six months later, the two sold out an eight-thousand-seat London arena and drew a peak of 1.6 million viewers; two days later, the playback garnered twenty million views. Soon thereafter, Logan Paul, Jake’s older brother and an influencer in his own right, got in on the action by duking it out with KSI—first in 2018, then again in 2019. Suddenly Twitch streamers, TikTokers, and OnlyFans influencers with handles like FaZe Sensei, Halal Ham, and Astrid Wett were leaving their gaming chairs to duck through the ropes. KSI went so far as to establish his own boxing promotional company, Misfits Boxing, whose sole focus is to recruit from the influencer side. Mayweather, always on the lookout for ploys with low risk and high reward, immediately saw the appeal of pairing up with a heel like Logan Paul; the pair would get together in 2021 for an exhibition match that ended up generating more pay-per-views than the majority of high-level fights in recent years. To purists who accuse him of tarnishing the sport and undoing his legacy by fighting the likes of Paul and, most recently, borgata nepo baby John Gotti III, “Money” Mayweather has a simple retort: no one’s forcing you to watch. Gimmick boxing has never been more lucrative, online, and, alas, legitimate.
The rise of gimmick fights in this era has often been framed as an either-or proposition: Is it competition or entertainment? Does it bring a fresh audience to a sport that struggles to stay relevant? Or does it crowd out actually good fights from the marketplace? The answers are polarized: “The Honor of Boxing Is at Stake,” went one column in the New York Times, ahead of Mayweather-McGregor. Later, the Dallas Morning News would claim that “Tyson-Paul isn’t a gimmick fight. It’s just what boxing needs.” Others hold that the two can coexist peacefully, if separated. “We can do the two things side by side without polluting each other,” then-president of Showtime Sports Stephen Espinoza told the New York Times in 2021. “The danger is when you start mixing and matching events, and trying to present one as the other.” But it’s likely too late for such binary thinking. To the extent that the gimmick fight has permeated (polluted?) boxing at large—and it has—we’re already in a place where it can be difficult at times to tell the difference between the two.
Two Trucks Crashing
That boxing is “always, it seems, on the very threshold of oblivion, has not prevented it from having become a multimillion-dollar business,” Joyce Carol Oates once wrote. The sport is, despite its minority status, unique among professional athletics in being capable of generating in a single night tremendous economic activity, even bordering the GDP of some small nations. (Not for nothing, the first sport to reach a million-dollar gate was boxing, with Dempsey against Georges Carpentier in 1921.) Accurately gauging the health of the sport requires going beyond boxing’s 1 percent and traversing its lower depths, where the poverty is appallingly obvious. Once integral to the sport, the regional live fight scene barely exists today. Take New York, long considered a prizefighting epicenter for much of the twentieth century: there were only sixteen fight cards staged in all of New York state in 2023, with just thirty-eight in 2006. In 1927, by contrast, there were more than nine hundred boxing shows staged in the state. “It’s not a 90 percent drop, it’s a 98 percent drop,” noted Don Majeski, a fight agent and matchmaker for over fifty years. “That’s an extinct species.” In the way that college freshmen today are reportedly having trouble reading an entire book, viewers of boxing lack the knowledge they would have received otherwise in a more vibrant ecosystem. “They don’t know what a good fight is anymore,” Majeski said. “I think [it’s because of] the loss of parochialism, where you would have regular shows in New York, regular shows in Los Angeles, regular shows in Philadelphia, where you have local fighters fighting.”
Far from liberating the sport from the constraints of premium cable, the streaming apps have only hastened boxing’s enduring marginalization.
The regional fight scene’s decline corresponds to that of the sport’s usual delivery systems. After years of regular national programming on radio and then network television, boxing aligned itself with cable in the 1980s. By the 1990s, premium cable titans HBO and Showtime distributed the biggest fights by pay-per-view. With the sport more profitable than ever for the promoters and fighters, it was hard to see that the often-exorbitant paywall marginalized boxing as a relevant media offering. (Without the largesse provided by a television contract, promoters were also hard-pressed to run club shows in which they must bear all the financial risk, including rent, fighters’ purses, hotels, travel fees, and medical insurance.) Over the decades, boxing became known by that patronizing appellation: niche. HBO and Showtime both parted ways with the sport in the past six years. Today, ESPN remains the only cable network currently televising boxing in America. The company is reportedly uninterested in renewing its programming contract with its chief supplier later this summer, which means boxing could soon be bumped off the medium that has carried it for more than three decades.
Boxing now primarily resides, like so much else, on the streaming apps. Far from liberating the sport from the constraints of premium cable, the apps have only hastened boxing’s enduring marginalization. With the possibility that subscribers who were otherwise more interested in Sex and the City or Game of Thrones might tune into a card, cable had offered a chance for a special talent to transcend the strictures of the hardcore fan base. (See Gennadiy Golovkin, the feared puncher from Kazakhstan, who spent his prime toiling on German club shows until he found fame with the broader public on HBO.) The majority of fights these days land on DAZN, the UK-based service, whose limitations as a strictly sports-centric platform that appeals mainly to a European base—snooker, soccer, and cricket are a few of their key offerings—are obvious, especially from an American standpoint. In the à la carte style of streaming, in which one opens and closes the app according to the duration of a desired event, the likelihood of someone with no affection for boxing stumbling onto a match is nil.
Gimmicks have thrived in the disarray. DAZN, desperate for brand awareness, streamed the rematch between Paul and KSI in 2019, the same year it was busy plugging itself as the nerve center for the sport’s most consequential fights; Showtime, the last member of boxing media’s old guard, backed four of Jake Paul’s early fights before bowing out of the sport. But gimmick boxing took its most lurid and perhaps characteristic turn in 2020, when Covid-19 forced high-profile boxing to a complete standstill and a video-sharing app called Triller (a TikTok manqué) decided to branch out into promotion. Led by a disgraced Hollywood boy wonder named Ryan Kavanaugh whose boutique film studio went spectacularly bust in 2015, Triller targeted an ambitious match for its initial foray into the sport: a fight between Tyson and Roy Jones Jr., one of the biggest stars in boxing throughout the 1990s, on pay-per-view. What Kavanaugh had in mind was less a fight card than a Super Bowl-style hootenanny for the homebound populace, stacked with musical performances by the likes of Lil Wayne and DaBaby, along with light shows and fireworks. The undercard would feature former 168-pound titlist Badou Jack and rising lightweight Jamaine Ortiz, as well as Jake Paul in his second pro fight against ex-NBA player Nate Robinson.
Nothing came of Tyson and Jones’s fistic overtures nearly two decades ago, but now here they were in their fifties, ready to whale away at each other’s paunches. Still, it wasn’t entirely clear how this fight was going to be contested—exactly what Espinoza warned would be a danger to the sport. Set for Los Angeles’s Staples Center, the fight was classified on paper as an exhibition in accordance with the California State Athletic Commission, or CSAC. (Unlike any other professional sport, boxing has no central governing body, so individual states oversee the regulations, medical protocols, methods of adjudication, and the decision to sanction a fight as a legitimate contest or exhibition.) That meant eight two-minute rounds, instead of the traditional three-minute ten or twelve for a main event; twelve-ounce boxing gloves, as opposed to the widely accepted ten ounces for heavyweights; and no judges at hand, since this was not a competition. In an exhibition, a win was beside the point, to say nothing of the sport’s ne plus ultra, the knockout.
This is not to say that knockouts can’t happen under these bowdlerized terms. In 2006, a retired Tyson embarked on a “world tour” in an attempt to shore up his mounting debt. First up, a four-round exhibition in Youngstown, Ohio, on pay-per-view with his former sparring partner Corey Sanders. In front of a six-thousand-seat venue only two-thirds full, the match played out like a sparring session. A flabby Sanders wore a shirt and headgear; Tyson also kept his top on but ditched the protection. In a sport in which the brain is the frequent target of harm, even exhibitions can be subject to the harshness of a pro fight: Tyson dropped Sanders in the opening round. But Tyson knew to keep his more violent impulses at bay, as he demonstrated later in the fight when he held Sanders up from falling after connecting with a right hand. (The fans would start booing the lack of action midway through the fight; the promoter could not shake off the negative feedback, and in the end, Tyson’s expedition never moved on to its next leg.) The referee is key, offering reminders that this is all a gag whenever it gets heated; depending on the commission and the understanding between the fighters, the length of the referee’s leash varies. Mayweather managed to score three quick knockdowns during his exhibition with twenty-year-old Japanese kickboxer Tenshin Nasukawa in 2018 before the fight was promptly waved off in the first round.
Andy Foster, the gregarious head of the CSAC, was intent on keeping the Tyson-Jones matchup classified as an exhibition. “We can’t mislead the public as [if] this is some kind of real fight,” Foster told Boxingscene.com. “They can exhibit their boxing skills, but I don’t want them using their best efforts to hurt each other. . . . This isn’t a record-book type of fight. This is not world-championship boxing right now. It’s not what this is. People shouldn’t be getting knocked out.” The referee’s job, Foster went on, “is going to be to put the ice back on without having to kill the whole thing.”
While Foster’s comments sounded sensible enough, Kavanaugh was none too pleased to have his marketing angles undercut, finding it ludicrous to be told he couldn’t sell knockouts when Tyson and Jones were, in their heyday, two of the best at producing them. In true showbiz fashion, the native Angeleno groaned to the trades. In a Variety interview titled “Ryan Kavanaugh Insists Mike Tyson-Roy Jones Jr. Fight Will Be ‘Like Two Trucks Crashing,’” Kavanaugh excoriated Foster, accusing him of trying to seek attention. He also threatened to move his business to other states, where he figured he would run into less resistance.
Kavanaugh wound up doing exactly that not even a year later. Following the outright triumph of Tyson-Jones, which reportedly sold well more than a million pay-per-views (bringing in more than $80 million in revenue), he arranged for a pro boxing match between forty-eight-year-old boxing great Oscar De La Hoya and forty-four-year-old former UFC champion Vitor Belfort to take place in De La Hoya’s hometown of Los Angeles. But after contracting Covid-19, De La Hoya pulled out of the fight with a week to go, leaving Kavanaugh scrambling to find a replacement. Fifty-eight-year-old heavyweight legend Evander Holyfield agreed to fill in, in theory ending a ten-year retirement. The choice did not come out of the blue: a few days prior to his getting the nod, Holyfield filed an arbitration suit against Triller for $5 million in unpaid wages. Holyfield was already signed to the app on the understanding that he and Tyson would fight for the third time; when Tyson did not show any interest, Holyfield pivoted to another opponent, only for Triller to stall.
Kavanaugh, by the looks of it, had thrown Holyfield a bone to negate the threat of a lawsuit. There was one problem: the CSAC refused to license Holyfield, for either a professional fight or exhibition, on account of his advanced age and the short turnaround time. In a huff, Kavanaugh relocated the entire card to Florida, a state notorious for its lenient commission. A few days out from the fight, reports circulated that the Florida commission had approved Holyfield-Belfort as a professional fight. Fans and pundits were aghast. Holyfield looked severely diminished while hitting the mitts during a public workout and slurred and garbled his speech. Kavanaugh added to the confusion by telling the media that he would leave it to Holyfield to decide whether he wanted the fight to be counted against his record. In contrast to California, the promoter could wait until right before the opening bell in Florida to make that decision.
In the end, the fight proceeded with the understanding by the public that it was a legitimate affair. What followed was one of the more debased moments in the sport in recent memory. With “special guest” Donald Trump in the commentary booth, Belfort stopped a woebegone Holyfield with a fusillade of unanswered punches not even two minutes into the opening round. Incredibly, the farce did not end there. A few days later, the Florida commission confirmed reports that Holyfield-Belfort actually took place as an exhibition and not a pro fight as Triller’s advertising and press release had indicated. If the public had been hit with a bait-and-switch, the people, it seems, had the last laugh. For all Kavanaugh’s hoopla and hoodwinking, the card was likely a financial flop. Whereas Tyson-Jones was reported to have notched anywhere from 1.2 to 1.6 million in pay-per-view buys—a figure that, if at all accurate, would rank it above the vast majority of boxing pay-per-views in the past decade and a half—Holyfield-Belfort reportedly struggled to reach even 150,000 buys. Trump’s fee alone was $2.5 million, according to his personal financial disclosures.
No need to dwell on the bad when there is always the next hustle to play up. Immediately after the fight, Belfort called out Jake Paul, with Kavanaugh pledging to hand the winner $30 million. Paul could only roll his eyes. “Let’s be honest,” Paul told the media. “We know they don’t have that money to put up.” Indeed, a month later Triller defaulted on staging a lightweight title bout between Teofimo Lopez and George Kambosos Jr. that the company had bid over $6 million earlier in the year. Beating out two powerhouse promoters, Triller’s eye-popping move to legitimize itself in the eyes of hardcore fans ended with the company forfeiting the $1.2 million deposit.
In its bald-faced maneuvers to skirt regulation, Triller was simply following the well-trodden path of malfeasant promoters before it, perhaps differing only in degree of clumsiness. But no one in recent years has exerted so much effort to blur the exhibition–pro fight divide. Mayweather, to his credit, has always been blunt about viewing his exhibitions as a “fun” means to pad his wallet and keep himself in the headlines. Misfits, the influencer boxing promotional company headed by KSI, makes no pretense about its aims.
Triller did demonstrate, however, a couple of things that any well-connected and committed huckster could adapt for himself: One, that in boxing, a little persistence toward bending the rules can eventually yield favorable results; and two, a truly successful gimmick needs two big names, not just one. As Paul put it after Belfort called him out, “Vitor is not that big of a name. . . . I’m trying to get bigger with each of these fights. I’m trying to get more of a challenge”—someone more like a fifty-eight-year-old Mike Tyson.
The Tyson Haul
As with the commission in Florida, the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation is thought to be one of the more permissive and lax regulatory bodies in boxing, routinely under fire for blatant cronyism and procedural mishaps. In 2018, it sanctioned a pro bout featuring a sixty-two-year-old whose last recorded fight was in 1986 and who would be knocked out by his much younger opponent in the first round. No wonder then that it was Texas—not California, not Las Vegas, not New York City—that wound up getting the nod to host Tyson’s reentry into the ring against Paul, some thirty-one years younger. The press release announcing their fight intentionally left out any indication as to whether it would be contested as an exhibition. In Texas, the finer details could be worked out later. About a month after the initial announcement, in early April, Tyson went on Fox News and informed viewers, in no uncertain terms, that the fight was indeed an exhibition. But Tyson immediately followed up by saying—and here the lines started blurring again—that their tête-à-tête would not adhere to any of the conventional “laws” of exhibitions. “This is a fight,” he promised. A few days later, with the same outlet, Paul revealed his team had submitted a request to the commission to change it to a pro fight. “Full face shots,” he said. “It’s an all-out war.” Before the end of the month, it was approved.
Paul revealed his team had submitted a request to the commission to change it to a pro fight. “Full face shots,” he said. “It’s an all-out war.”
For nine months, the public was informed that this manufactured feud, sanctioned as a professional bout, would result in something awesome. When Tyson slapped Paul at the weigh-in, the violence finally seemed tangible. Best to forget then that only two years ago—and four years since he looked sprightly against Jones—Tyson was spotted at the Miami International Airport in a wheelchair, holding a walking cane. (It was his sciatica flaring up again, he later said.) Forget, too, the prison sentence for a rape conviction involving an eighteen-year-old, and the domestic violence allegations. May as well forget The Bite. The Baddest Man? That was all old hat. Now the public knew him for that cameo in the 2009 hit Hollywood comedy The Hangover. He was a weed farmer with a podcast, keeping up with the millennials, as avuncular as grizzled pop culture idols get these days.
Training montages of Iron Mike tearing up the pads with feverish combinations, doled out to the masses in shrewdly edited fifteen-second clips, helped soften the collective distrust. Here were six generations of demographic richness to work with, the analysts contended straight-faced. Unfortunately, it was that easy. Paul’s target audience, after all, was literal children. “Many people [in the sport of boxing] tout that we’re an eighteen- through thirty-four-year-old male demo, but [we’re] really not,” Nakisa Bidarian, Paul’s mouthpiece, told Sports Business Journal. “The product is aging, the stars are aging, the audience is aging. [Paul] really represents Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Not a lot of people focus on Gen Alpha, but that’s the next wave of consumer that matters.”
If those clips worked wonders on the tykes, they had a similarly stimulating effect on those who could recall watching Tyson in his prime. The boxer of yore was still there in those familiar gestures: the peekaboo stance, the exaggerated slips and dips, those chopping hooks. That’s when the transmogrification began. Suddenly, it seemed as if a moral forbade Tyson, former ruffian of Pitkin Avenue, losing to an online brat from the Ohio suburbs. True, Paul had already overachieved. Most of his life was spent hatching prank videos to post on YouTube, until he discovered he had heavy hands five years ago and started applying them to emeritus members of the UFC. Ben Askren, Tyron Woodley, and Nate Diaz may have been abysmal boxers, but they were world-class mixed martial artists at one time. Paul was beating them handily, starching a few of them and pretending like he was more than a scalp collector of retired MMA fighters. But this was Tyson now, and there was no denying his cosmic allure. “I’m getting ready to watch this Tyson vs Jake Paul fight like I’m watching someone cast a spell that I hope actually works. And I don’t really believe in magic,” Joe Rogan wrote on X. “But I want to believe.” Wouldn’t you, in the hour of judgement, want to be on the side that believes?
An unscripted glimpse at Tyson’s bare backside in the dressing room seemed a kind of atavistic rite that only fueled the belief of his supporters, somehow. Once the action started, however, there was no mistaking the crowd’s scorn for what was ultimately a desultory do-si-do. If Tyson had any chance of upsetting the upstart, the thinking went, he had to do his work early, before his body betrayed him. Charging after Paul with a few aggressive sallies in the opening round, Tyson appeared determined to do just that. The problem, of course, was that he had nothing left afterward. For the rest of the way, Tyson traipsed painfully slowly around the ring like an overripe Boris Karloff. Paul appeared to ease off his advances after sending Tyson into a scary, spastic shock in the third round, seeking to oblige the oldster by practically ushering him to the final bell. In the waning seconds of the eighth and final round, the boos reached a lusty crescendo when Paul broke out of his fighting stance to perform an “all hail” bow to the fistic icon turned frazzled has-been. Really, what else could anyone expect Paul to do but show his utmost gratitude? Paul’s guaranteed take for convincing Tyson to join in on his latest hijinks was a reported $40 million (Tyson’s haul was said to be $20 million), bestowed by Netflix, which streamed the live event to its quarter-billion-plus subscriber base without charging extra fees.
Afterward, the streamer’s own apparatchiks struggled to spin the evening positively. One elected to lightly condescend to the viewers. “Hopefully people aren’t too disappointed, but he’s fifty-eight years old. What did you expect?” said retired boxer Andre Ward, a former super middleweight champion who was the show’s lead booth analyst. Of course, Ward did not seem to have any qualms continually playing up Tyson’s chances to the media in the pre-fight hype. That Ward—a two-division champion, the last American male to win an Olympic gold medal in boxing, and a Hall of Famer—was lending his credibility to a snoozer that he’d tacitly admit had been nothing more than a poorly veiled ruse spoke to the sport’s shortcomings. Regarded as one of boxing’s most skilled if underwhelming fighters from the late aughts up until 2017, when he retired undefeated, Ward had never glimpsed a fraction of the revenue that Paul and Tyson had produced on that single night. After a career anchored in an imperious persona, Ward in his retirement apparently felt that there was no dollar too ignoble to accept as a talking head.
But the joke was on boxing. While overpromising and underdelivering, Tyson-Paul was certainly the most viewed boxing match of 2024, likely surpassing, at least in visibility, the two blockbuster heavyweight title contests between Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk, which took place in Saudi Arabia. Their first pay-per-view fight reportedly generated 1.5 million purchases globally; Netflix’s metrics are proprietary and not audited by a third party, but the streamer’s claim of sixty million Tyson-Paul viewers, even accounting for exaggeration, vastly outstripped the viewership figures for Fury-Usyk. At the box office, the fight drew a reported $18 million in ticket revenue, doubling what Canelo Álvarez, regarded as the biggest boxing star in North America, did at the same venue in 2021. “You’d have to go back to the eighties to get a live audience that big that wasn’t a Super Bowl,” said Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos. Despite its staggering letdown in the ring, the fight was a bona fide attention-grabbing success.
Tyson-Paul was also a gambling bonanza for sportsbooks, with some declaring it the most wagered on sports event in their company’s history. Bettors who had nurtured their habits during the pandemic were not going to miss out on this action, no matter their ambivalence (or ignorance) about the sport itself. Since betting on sports was legalized in the United States in 2018, the commercialization of the once-outlaw hobby has been relentless: commentary during televised games is peppered with aperçus of gambling odds, and commercial breaks are filled with spots from betting apps touting parlays with deviously long odds and offering free credit to anyone who opens an account. David Purdum, who covers gambling for ESPN, told me he believes that if you include the number of people who bet using offshore accounts, 95 percent of the sports betting in the United States likely takes place online. From the Gold Rush to Google, from scratch-offs to slots, Americans are pumped up on “lottery libido,” to lift a phrase from Sports Illustrated’s Richard Hoffer, always angling for that long-odds jackpot. “People in the U.S. love to bet on novelty events, from the color of Gatorade dumped on the winning Super Bowl coach to the over/under on the National Anthem,” Purdum said. “They also love a narrative. Tyson-Paul had a little bit of both.”
While the maelstrom of bets on both fighters was further evidence that Americans will gamble on anything as long as lines are offered on it, the furor also suggested to the world that this was a real fight. BetMGM reported that Tyson-Paul had four times as much money wagered than any MMA or boxing match in the previous seven years. It helped, too, that gobsmacked talking heads expressing shock at the volume of bets coming in gave implicit cover to the sham. At the same time, the murky circumstances surrounding the fight’s classification—was it on the level?—actually warded off some markets, with bets not accepted in seven states, including New York.
The decision to sanction Tyson-Paul as a pro bout paid off in spades.
The decision to sanction Tyson-Paul as a pro bout paid off in spades. The largest bets were placed on Paul, the favorite, with one bettor in Michigan putting down $1 million. While betting site Polymarket reported that one of its users placed a $3.6 million wager on Tyson (the same user won $11 million betting on a second Trump presidency), the underdog was favored by a bevy of small plays by the squares. That so many bets came in for Tyson caught some sportsbooks off guard, with one risk manager at a Vegas institution telling ESPN that it was “pretty surprising to see how many people are still willing to take a shot on Mike Tyson at this age.” But who were they kidding? These weren’t boxing connoisseurs, likely not even fans, but the believers of those fifteen-second clips, the ones who figured sports talk radio vet Dan Le Batard might be onto something when he said that despite the boxer’s advanced age, “I would not want a human being of any kind to fight Mike Tyson. I would like Mike Tyson’s chances, quickly, against anybody.” When I spoke to CSAC’s Andy Foster recently about why he was so adamant about standing his ground on keeping Triller’s Tyson-Jones as an exhibition, he pointed to one thing: sports betting. “I don’t want to mislead the public, that’s first and foremost,” Foster said. The New Jersey Casino Control Commission and other gaming control boards had called him and asked whether the bout was a real fight. “I said, ‘No, it’s an exhibition,’ and they were cool with it. In sport we have to have some degree of integrity,” Foster continued. “I want people to go into something with their eyes wide open if they’re going to take bets and gaming places are going to open lines.”
Sluggers at Stupidweight
The ingrained structural problems of boxing are not lost on those with the most influence, though attempts to enact meaningful change usually either backfire or are flat-out ineffectual. On March 11, concerned with the surge of gimmick fights in recent years and how their ambiguous designations were confusing the betting public, the Association of Boxing Commissions, a nonprofit coalition of various state commissions committed to fighter safety and standardizing boxing’s balkanized regulations, sent out a stern communiqué advising its partners that professional fights need to adhere to a specific set of ironclad rules. Per the ABC, a professional boxing match has nonnegotiable criteria, and any bout charged as a professional venture needs to adhere to them, lest the fight be a “sham.” And a sham fight, the ABC stated, “is fraught with evils, such as the risk of mismatches, gambling manipulation and dangers to participants. The term ‘professional boxer’ is one which is held in high esteem for those few athletes who compete in the sweet science and follow all the rules set forth.”
The timing of the release was clearly occasioned by Tyson-Paul. But it makes one question why the organization did not speak out before then. After all, it was a well-known fact that Tyson-Paul would have two-minute rounds (the ABC calls for three) and that fourteen-ounce gloves would be used (instead of the ten ounces typical for fights contested at 147 pounds and above). The response was also a complete about-face. The head of the ABC, Michael Mazzulli, was on the record with USA Today in a November 11 article saying Tyson-Paul was “absolutely” a “real fight” because there would be judges.
When I pointed this out to Mazzulli, he said he had trouble recalling that interview. After a few back-and-forths, he said, “Everyone can go back on their opinions.” But since all the “evils” he mentioned in the release were public knowledge well in advance of the fight date, why hadn’t the ABC piped up earlier? Had there been internal backlash? Or pressure from other commissioners, perhaps? Mazzulli denied that that was the case, saying he and the board of directors had a change of heart after seeing how Tyson-Paul played out. “After the fight, I was like, ‘Jeez, we really need to distinguish the difference,’” Mazzulli said. “I think it’s safer for everybody. It rectifies a wrong for me.”
What happened after Tyson-Paul, of course, would make it difficult for any organization ostensibly committed to safeguarding the sport to stay silent. A rash of conspiracy theories proliferated online, all more or less espousing the view that Tyson-Paul was rigged. Despite Paul’s post-fight insistence that he had let Tyson off easy—“I didn’t want to hurt someone that didn’t need to be hurt”—the predominant view, incredibly, was that Tyson had taken it easy on Paul. Armchair sleuths combed every frame of the fight for clues to buttress their close readings. The speculation was not endemic to anons. Michael Irvin, the Pro Football Hall of Famer and current analyst for networks like Fox, claimed he had heard that Tyson was contractually barred from throwing the uppercut. “You taking away Mike Tyson’s best gift, which was that uppercut? Man, that’s a big lie to me.” In response to the burgeoning scuttlebutt, MVP, Paul’s own promotional company, issued a press release reminding naysayers that “rigging a professional boxing match is a federal crime in the United States of America.” Why, it read, would they want to enmesh their benevolent streaming partner in the crosshairs of the DOJ?
There is reason to be skeptical regarding the latest decree from the ABC, a largely toothless organization due to boxing’s inherent fragmentation. Unlike the NBA, NFL, MLB, or even pro pickleball, there is no overarching organizational structure (as in a league) in pro boxing, just a bazaar of rival promoters looking after their own fief, often in the form of an exclusive contract with a media platform. Joining this unruly fray are the sanctioning bodies, the parasitic alphabet soup outfits responsible for ostensibly articulating a pecking order in the weight classes and who “earn” their keep by charging a percentage of a fighter’s purse in a title bout. Only in boxing does a champion pay a tax for his title. Only in boxing are you routinely confronted with illogical inanities, such as having four champions per weight division.
In the end, all the ABC can do is offer recommendations and hope that its opprobrium has a discouraging influence on scofflaws. It cannot adjudicate matters for other states nor can it levy out punishment or fines. Would a state be willing to lose out on the economic jolt from an event like Tyson-Paul over a quibble about glove size? Time and time again, even the most stringent commissions have shown that, despite having “health and safety” in their mission statement, they will bend to suit the economic interests. The streaming platforms also see the power of gimmicks: Netflix reportedly wants to expand live sports programming. Tyson-Paul helped bring in nineteen million new subscribers (and unprecedented ad revenue) for the platform in the fourth quarter of last year—no small matter for a company that lost subscribers in 2022 for the first time in a decade and is now showing signs of market saturation. Sarandos, the Netflix executive, has made it clear in interviews that he is primarily interested in purchasing rights to singular events. “I don’t want a season of football,” he told Variety. “I want the Super Bowl.” With its decentralized, de-corporatized business, boxing can more nimbly offer the kind of glitzy, funhouse-style one-offs that the suits are calling for than sports with leagues and unions.
By trivializing a bloodsport, it obscures many of the darker sides of the pursuit.
Meanwhile, Paul, the seasoned clout chaser, has not wasted time pursuing his next spectacle. This past February, Paul was on the verge of delivering Netflix a fight between himself and Canelo Álvarez, one of boxing’s elite talents, who Paul first called out to widespread chortles in 2021. The proposed Netflix deal fell through at the eleventh hour—Paul insists they had signed contracts—but that there were even negotiations to begin with was a sign of how far Paul has come along in boxing, now with one foot in the gimmick lane, the other in the pros. This March, Paul set into motion yet another scheme by dissing and calling out former heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua, who was knocked out brutally last September. This time no one was scoffing. Joshua’s silver-tongued promoter Eddie Hearn welcomed the idea, even though he was on record calling Paul’s fight with Tyson “disrespectful to the sport of boxing.” What’s more, the pitches are now flooding in unprompted: from clout-obsessed lightweight contender Ryan Garcia to UFC star Alex Pereira to fifty-six-year-old former light heavyweight champion Antonio Tarver, everyone in the combat sports stratosphere wants a Paul windfall. Even Usyk, the heavyweight champion many believe to be the greatest boxer alive today, joined the breadline by floating a fight with Paul on his Instagram in late March. The money, as everyone knows by now, is real with Paul.
Gimmick boxing is here to stay, then, so long as the culture of which it is unquestionably a part cares to keep it around—a culture in which we take our dopamine hits from ludicrous premises and daisy-chained parlays. Forget about the actual fights. We barely have the attention span for that. Baudrillard, it seems, continues to be one of our prophets. Tyson-Paul may as well have never happened. No one will ever willingly sit through those eight rounds again. But the memes will carry on in our collective simulation: the slap at the weigh-in, Paul’s bow, Tyson’s ass cheeks, all in fifteen-second digestible clips that are all that’s required to get people through the door—or into the ring.
Lost in the gimmick’s Paul-centric shuffle are the less conspicuous but more desperate callouts from those who have no business fighting, such as the cautionary case of Paul Bamba. Enamored with what Jake Paul had managed for himself, Bamba, a fitness instructor from Puerto Rico by way of New York, plunged into boxing in 2021 with the express goal of someday challenging the gimmick lodestar. Grammy winner Ne-Yo, one of Bamba’s gym clients, signed on as his manager (hard to discount Triller’s influence here). In four years, Bamba, despite being a novice with no amateur background, notched an impressive-looking 19-3 professional record, with eighteen knockouts. He died last December, six days after a suspicious win against a journeyman. Bamba was thirty-five. In a Guardian exposé published in March, investigative journalist Thomas Hauser revealed that the majority of the fights on Bamba’s record took place in jurisdictions with minimal regulatory oversight (Alabama, New Hampshire, Colombia) and were likely fixed. The results of Bamba’s autopsy have not been made public, but, according to Hauser, many friends and associates believe Bamba, who publicly admitted to having suffered a concussion in 2023, died of a brain bleed.
As a vehicle for self-esteem, boxing has few peers. Paul himself has spoken about how boxing had “reinvigorated something inside.” Bamba, who came from poverty, was reportedly also very driven. After his last fight, he laced into Paul: “You can come get it . . . you can keep doing the gimmick fights. At the end of the day, I’ve put in the work. . . . You’ve made a lot of money but you haven’t earned anything in boxing.” Yet ambition, especially in boxing, can be a double-edged sword. In some circles, complaints that gimmicks are ruining boxing are disregarded as sanctimonious posturing. But one of the unintended consequences of gimmick boxing is that, by trivializing a bloodsport, it obscures many of the darker sides of the pursuit. In the end, you’re still getting hit in the head. Because there is no barrier to entry in boxing—there is no merit-based draft, for example, as in the big sports leagues—copycats like Bamba, transfixed by Paul’s achievements but who lack his natural athleticism, will likely multiply in the years to come. The sport will turn their zeal against them. When the British sportswriter Hugh McIlvanney reflected on the ring death of the young Welsh contender Johnny Owen in 1980, he observed that Owen, despite his frail stature, never looked more comfortable than when he was in the ring. “It is his tragedy,” McIlvanney concluded, “that he found himself articulate in such a dangerous language.” The tragedy of Bamba was that he was not even articulate.