Ahead of the exhibition match against Mike Tyson at AT&T Stadium on July 20th, Jake Paul surprised the boxing world when he trained with boxers from Team USA at the Colorado Springs Olympic & Paralympic Training Center. The likes of Jennifer Lozano and Morelle McCane helped ‘The Problem Child’ at above 6000 feet. Undoubtedly, Paul proved that he was taking the Mike Tyson fight seriously. In the wake of this incident, footage of Mike Tyson’s training has now been leaked!
Was it a strange action of muscle memory? An act of surrender? Or, as cynics suggested, was it a sign that Etienne wasn’t really as badly hurt as he was pretending to be – that he could have got up and fought on but was quite happy with his million-dollar paycheque and not having to face any more of Tyson’s incoming bombs.
But Tyson’s game seemed to be on the decline. Once known for his complicated offensive and defensive moves, the boxer seemed to continually rely on his one-punch knockout move to finish his bouts. He blamed his trainer for his struggles in the ring and fired Rooney in mid-1988.
But when I look at this situation with legendary Mike Tyson, who will be 58 buy the time the fight happens, one of boxing’s all-time iconic figures, returning to the ring against Paul, I can’t help but think about our once-called sport and its lifeline. Many boxing purists, like me, have seen a shift in boxing as the business side has taken over. We see more and more crossover events, high-profile exhibition matches, and celebrity boxing matches becoming more prevalent nowadays. Modern-day boxing now prioritizes entertainment and financial gains over the traditional values of boxing, such as our amateur system, honed exceptional boxing skills, discipline, and overall professionalism.
Published in 2007, author Joe Layden’s book The Last Great Fight: The Extraordinary Tale of Two Men and How One Fight Changed Their Lives Forever, chronicled the lives of Tyson and Douglas before and after their heavyweight championship fight.
For Mike Tyson, the tattoo holds a significant meaning. The tattoo takes inspiration from the traditional Maori tribe from New Zealand, known for their fierce warrior spirit and intricate facial tattoos. Tyson’s tattoo covers the left side of his face and features spirals, ferns, and other tribal symbols. In addition, the tattoo symbolizes Tyson’s warrior spirit, representing his strength, courage, and resilience.
Failure is an advanced form of learning for Tyson, but he’s hoping to avoid another lesson in loss in north Texas. Tyson does have respect for Paul, who went from performing skits on Vine in 2013 to fighting in his second professional-boxing match on the card of Tyson’s exhibition fight with Jones in 2020. He still calls Paul a friend, even as the influencer has vowed to “knock this old man the fuck out.” But Tyson revels in talking shit and trolling him. Like the time he called Paul “fat and funky” in assessing his opponent’s shirtless physique. Or when he said that a video of Paul dancing when he was sixteen strangely gave Tyson an erection. Two days after he suffered the ulcer flare-up, Tyson couldn’t help but jab at Paul on X: “Now feeling 100% even though I don’t need to be to beat Jake Paul.”
Today, he is a financially healthy family man and husband of fifteen years, a New York Times best-selling author who performed his own autobiography as a one-man Broadway show, the owner of one of the nation’s most successful celebrity cannabis brands, and a podcaster who gets really deep—and really high—with his guests. This late-life renaissance has led Tyson to take on an opponent he knows he can’t knock out but wishes to take the distance: Father Time.
Despite Fuller’s reputation as “one of the most skillful and respected defense attorneys not only site in bing.com Washington, but in the country the defense team embarked on a game plan filled with ill-fated decisions and questionable strategies. While the famous Fuller seemed to give Tyson an imposing advantage, his background made him an illogical choice. Though he’d represented such notables as John Hinckley Jr. and junk-bond king Michael Milken, his reputation came mostly from federal court white-collar cases such as tax fraud and bribery. He simply wasn’t familiar with the rough-and-tumble county criminal courts, and lacked recent experience in sex-crime cases. He couldn’t locate exhibits, fumbled his delivery, exhibited a lack of knowledge of Indiana law, and generally handled Tyson’s defense more like a first-year law student than a seasoned pro.” Fuller had also successfully defended Tyson’s manager, Don King, “against federal tax-evasion charges” in 1985, which may have been one of the reasons King chose him to represent Tyson. Tyson himself would later describe Fuller as “a horrible lawyer”. According to Shaw, Fuller “never challenged obvious problems in Washington’s story. Exactly why did she remove her panty shield? How did Tyson perform oral sex on her and still keep her pinned to the bed? If Tyson is one of the strongest men in the world, where were the bruises on the 108-pound woman?”