As Jake Paul’s bout against Mike Tyson dawdled on into the wee hours of Saturday morning, the internet came aflame with accusations that the YouTuber-turned-boxer was stringing the fight along.
Though Paul, 27, won Friday night’s marquee contest at AT&T Stadium by unanimous decision, there’s been no shortage of chatter contending that he could have knocked down Iron Mike, 58, long before the bell rang on the eighth and final round.
“Paul carried Tyson for the final 4 rounds and almost didn’t want to knock him out,” Bill Speros, sports columnist with the Boston Herald wrote on X. “Tyson basically stood there and took the beating.
“Glad he got his $20M and his last shot,” Speros further opined, citing previous reporting from outlets such as CBS News about Tyson’s payout for the fight. (CBS reports that Paul’s payout of $40M was double Tyson’s.)
Others shared his sentiments.
“Jake Paul is carrying Mike Tyson through this fight,” Robert Griffin III, the NFL quarterback-turned NFL analyst wrote on X.
“He saw he hurt Mike with the 3 jabs in a row in the 2nd round and pulled all the way off the gas. He could have ended it there and in every round since. Smart business move by Jake Paul. Gives all his sponsors more air time.”
Paul admitted after the fight, he eased up on Tyson after seeing the former heavyweight champion tiring.
‘Yeah definitely,” Paul said. “Definitely a bit. I wanted to give the fans a show but I didn’t want to hurt someone that didn’t need to be hurt.”
Some viewers felt Paul’s restraint was a damnation of the sport as a whole.
“Jake Paul carried Mike Tyson for 8 rounds and knew knocking out Iron Mike would be a very bad look,” one user wrote on X. “Jake Paul is not serious about being a champion. He needs to step his game up or stop with the novelty act matches. The public won’t lean into the hype anymore.”
(The public would and did — 70,000 fans attended in-person at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas; hundreds of thousands more watched through Netflix, despite painful buffering issues.)
Magic Johnson, for his part, was disappointed to see how far one of the GOATs of boxing had fallen off.
“Just sad smh. I cut it off because I couldn’t watch anymore. It’s sad to see Mike Tyson like this because I went to every Tyson fight. This fight tonight was not great for boxing,” he said via X.
Dave Portnoy gave his two-cents, adding, “Credit to Jake Paul + Mike Tyson for pulling off one of the great cons of century. I shoulda put 10 million on Jake. Not cause he’s good but cause he fought a senior citizen. I would say everybody involved should be ashamed but I’d take the money it too if I could.”
