It is only moderately useful context for one of the drearier sporting events in recent memory that, by his own telling, Mike Tyson nearly died six weeks before his fight with Jake Paul, which finally glitched and lurched and went the whole bleak distance late Friday night, was first scheduled to happen. This was in late May, when what was reported as an ulcer flare-up left Tyson vomiting blood in an airplane bathroom and then in a hospital. “I lost 25 pounds in 11 days,” Tyson told New York magazine. “Every time I went to the bathroom it smelled like tar. Didn’t even smell like shit anymore.” Tyson told New York that he had “like, eight blood transfusions. The doctor said I lost half my blood.” The fight was delayed from late July to mid-November.
It is rude but not really inaccurate to say that Tyson looked like someone who’d had a recent near-death experience, or like someone who had turned 58 back in June, on Friday night. He did and he did, and none of that qualified as a surprise or even really a disappointment. Tyson had retired in 2005 and endured all manner of bad physical and financial health and personal tragedy since; with the exception of two exhibitions, in 2006 and 2020, he hadn’t shown any indication that he wanted to fight at all. He was pretty definitive about it after that last loss, to Kevin McBride: “I don’t have it anymore,” Tyson said then. “I’ve got the ability to stay in shape, but I don’t have the fight and guts…I don’t have this in my heart anymore.” In the last two decades, Tyson remade his public image and seemingly himself; he has a cannabis brand and a podcast and a meditation practice. He is jarringly earnest, sometimes to kid reporters.
Whether Tyson wanted to fight on Friday or not, it was immediately clear that he barely could. A previously unannounced lower-body injury and the training disruption that necessarily follows getting half your blood replaced and the fact of being 58 meant that Tyson had no legs; his opponent, who came to fame as a viral shithead but has become a decently competent fighter and highly successful fight promoter, had natural advantages both prosaic (his reach) and parodic (Paul was eight when Tyson lost to McBride). The bespoke two-minute rounds were short, but felt much longer. CompuBox had Tyson landing 18 punches over the course of the fight. “There was a point where, you know, I was just like, ‘OK, he’s not really engaging back,” Paul said after the fight. “And so, I don’t know if he’s tired or whatever. And I just have so much respect for him, and that like violence, war thing between us—like after he slapped me [at the pre-fight weigh-in] I wanted to, you know, be aggressive and take him down, knock him out and all that stuff. But that kinda went away as the rounds went on.”
Every number related to this fight is large, and to be regarded with some skepticism. Netflix said that more than 60 million people were watching the glitchy, wobbly live broadcast at its peak, or at least watching it buffer; Paul claimed twice that number of viewers after the fight. “We crashed the website,” he exulted, which is probably the closest thing to a verifiably true claim here. Estimates on the fighters’ purses are estimates, but have settled around $40 million for Paul and $20 million for Tyson, which is around what he earned for knocking out Michael Spinks in 91 seconds back in 1988. The announced gate of $18 million was roughly twice what the Canelo Álvarez/Billy Joe Saunders middleweight title fight brought in at Jerryworld back in 2021. This is all worth mentioning only because of how meaningless it is.
Which is to say, because of how Netflix it feels. There is a certain amount of unreality built into everything to do with Netflix, which has made a practice of outlandish viewership claims—the streamer keeps its own stats, and has shown no qualms about looking the general public in the face and insisting that every living human on Earth has watched Bird Box at least twice. If that tic fits within the broader corporate practice of Announcing Various Large Numbers either secure in the belief that they cannot be disproven or simply to demonstrate that they can say whatever they want, it still doesn’t quite explain the uncanny and mostly awful stuff that Netflix produces. There are some comparisons that almost work, although they mostly aren’t to filmed entertainment; at bottom, Netflix’s original series and films have more in common with Boeing’s ongoing gambit of building airplanes that function at the absolute bottom boundary of airworthiness.
Most of the stuff that Netflix makes is somewhere between not good and actively bad, but that is true of most film and television. It’s more that it so often feels different, so airless and alien and stilted. Netflix produces movies that are shaped like movies without every really feeling like them, series that are demonstrably expensive but which nevertheless look glaringly cheap and unfinished. The frames are alternately glaringly bright or suffocatingly murky; the color red does not, in some crucial but hard-to-name way, look like itself. There are technical reasons for this, having to do with various house rules, but there are also more abstruse and existential ones. The faint whiff of the algorithm, of high-level corporate strategy and Big Data fuckery, floats through so much Netflix product like the smell of burnt plastic. Somehow all of this resolves, over and over again, into a pained-looking Mark Wahlberg or a zonked, smirking Gal Gadot squinting under a too-gray sky before something murky and CGI-aided happens to an airplane or car. Everything more or less could happen in a movie, and is happening in something that is more or less a movie, and all of it feels somehow not like that at all.
This is not the difference between some salty couch cushion of a Papa John’s pizza that’s been sitting in the back of a hot car for 45 minutes and a similarly sized pie pulled bubbling out of a pizza oven in Naples, although it is not always much less vast. It is something more like the difference between the stuff that can legally be sold as cheese and what must legally be sold as “cheese food product”—it’s a little bit about the ingredients and a little bit about the production process, but also there is an essential and unmissable difference that comes down to its purpose. There’s a place for this other kind of thing—sometimes you want pizza, and sometimes you want Domino’s; you’re better off having a cheesesteak wit than with comte—but a diet too heavy in it will leave you both queasily full-feeling and malnourished.
This difference was easy to find on Friday night’s card. The undercard fight between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano and the main event between Tyson and Paul were the same sport played by the same rules, but were also instantly identifiable as very different things. This isn’t just a matter of superior ingredients leading to a superior product, although there is that. It is not even the difference between a bout in which two fighters are trying and one in which both are just sort of trying to put the other over. It’s hard to name it, and earnestness doesn’t quite capture it. One feels like sports; the other feels like content.
Boxing is a cynical business, and always has been. While Paul has more acumen as a maker of fights than a fighter of fights, the former talent does seem very real and should continue to make him very rich. But what was most striking about the main event—which looked like boxing without ever really seeming convincingly like it, which featured recognizable stars but negligible-to-negative star quality, and which felt stilted, calculated, and flat where the fights before it felt like fights—was how well it fit in on Netflix. Those (significant) technical issues aside, there’s no reason why Netflix couldn’t make a play for broadcasting more live sports. It is the biggest and wealthiest player in its field, and so it would be foolish to count it out. But what was missing on Friday was the same thing that is absent all throughout Netflix productions, a missing ingredient that all the money in the world hasn’t yet been able to buy. Netflix, just by nature of what and how it is, might struggle to broadcast sports effectively. Stuff like Tyson/Paul, on the other hand, is right in its wheelhouse.
