Takeaways from Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight: Paul won; everybody else lost

The anticipated Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson boxing match finally happened on Friday night at AT&T Stadium in Dallas, Texas, and it was Paul walking away with a unanimous decision victory.

The judges scored the fight 80-72, 79-73, 79-73 in Paul’s favor.

Paul will take his win and add it to his career resume, and he will always have the claim of beating Mike Tyson to fall back on, but it was far from an exciting fight or impressive bout.

Here are four takeaways from Paul’s win. 

Jake Paul won, but so what?

Jake Paul came into this fight with absolutely nothing to gain no matter what he did in the ring.

If he wins, he did what was probably expected and beat up a 58-year-old man in what was basically a sideshow circus of an event. 

If he loses, he lost to a 58-year-old in what was basically a sideshow circus of an event.

Neither is a positive for him or his career and probably outweighs whatever clout you might otherwise get from having “defeated Mike Tyson” on your professional boxing resume. 

In the end, he did the former and there was really nothing overly impressive about it. Given how much Tyson struggled to move, how exhausted he looked by the second round and just how unfit for a professional boxing match he looked, it is kind of staggering that Paul did not finish him off sooner. 

It was one-sided. But it was not impressive. 

Mike Tyson had no business doing that

There is probably a reason those social media videos of Tyson training were only bits and pieces and a few seconds in length. He just no longer has the endurance or legs to hang in a legitimate boxing match at this point in his career.

And there is no shame in that. The man is pushing 60 years old. The human body is not meant for this sort of thing at that age. Truthfully, it isn’t meant for that at any age, but that is especially true when you are approaching your sixth decade on the planet. 

Tyson’s only chance in this fight was going to be to knock Paul out as quickly as he possibly could, and if it went beyond two rounds he was going to struggle to keep things competitive.

That is exactly what happened, and when Tyson could not finish Paul off early the remainder of the fight was simply survival mode for Tyson.

At his peak, he was the most powerful, exciting and feared boxer in the world. 

He is a long way from that peak and showed it on Friday. 

Netflix was not ready for the moment

The only positive that comes out of this for Paul and Tyson is that many people did not see how disappointing it was, mainly because Netflix was unable to keep up with the demand and continued to have streaming and buffering problems throughout the fight.

It was not just unwatchable because it was a bad boxing match.

It was literally unwatchable because Netflix could not even show it to us. 

This did more to hurt professional boxing than help it

There was a time when professional boxing, specifically the heavyweight division, was the ultimate sport in the United States. That time has come and gone as the sport has been eroded away by controversy, scandal, a lack of big-name superstars and the rise of MMA. 

If you had any delusions of this fight bringing the sport back into the mainstream, you were gravely mistaken. 

It fell far short of the hype and really did more to make a mockery of the sport than help it.

A 27-year-old man at the peak of his athletic career beat up on a 58-year-old man years after he last fought in a sanctioned match. They used 14 oz gloves compared to 10 oz gloves for heavyweight fights, they were only two-minute rounds, the streaming service picked to broadcast it did not work, and it seemed to be more of a social media event and payday for everybody involved than anything to revitalize the sport. 

Jake Paul won.

Everybody else lost.