‘The fight is the party’: Mike Tyson reminisces about glory days of boxing ahead of Jake Paul fight | Boxing

Tmadness rolled through an anonymous breakfast bar in Arlington, just outside Dallas, shortly after six o’clock Tuesday morning. Sleepy diners stared at a bank of television screens lit up with images of two contrasting men on the early morning NBC news. Ahead of them, a suave anchorman promised that Friday night’s manufactured scrap in North Texas between “58-year-old boxing icon Iron Mike Tyson and Problem Child Jake Paul” will transport us “back to the glory days of boxing.”

As if we needed any more convincing, the screen was filled with the bearded face of Paul, “the 27-year-old YouTube sensation,” who praised the owners of the Dallas Cowboys for sharing his vision of staging “the greatest game in history of boxing” at their AT&T Stadium just 10 miles down the road from where we sat drinking our lukewarm coffee.

We didn’t hear the ghosts of Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Sonny Liston and Muhammad Ali howl in agony. Instead, if they had been forced to hear the babbling insanity of the world in 2024, they might have laughed.

Twelve hours later, at the Toyota Music Factory in Irving, a 20-minute drive from Arlington, Tyson and Paul staged a public workout to kick-start this surreal fight week that will culminate in celebration on Netflix. Tyson was said to be “brutal” as he backed his cornerman against the ropes. The trainer wore a body guard which absorbed the blows, while Tyson showed decent head movement as he threw some relatively quick combinations. But it’s easy for a former world champion when no one fights back.

Tyson looked tired after that activity, and it’s hard to know how he’ll manage 10 two-minute rounds against a man 31 years his junior. Paul is a rookie pro, but Tyson looked somber as he waited to be interviewed in the ring.

A black towel was draped around his bare shoulders as a young woman turned to face the crowd. “Texas, you better get taller than that,” she yelled. Sweat poured down Tyson’s sad old face as he waited patiently.

“Mr. Mike Tyson, it’s so different when you’re on your phone or watching it online, witnessing this,” the woman enthused as she praised his short workout. “It’s something spectacular that I don’t think any of us have ever seen before.”

I remembered the last time I had been alone with Tyson and his trainers in a gym in Las Vegas in 1991. It was a closed sparring session and before I interviewed him he was working with Jesse Ferguson. When they had fought five years earlier, Tyson said he had tried to drive Ferguson’s nose into his brain before knocking him out.

The same unhinged malice in Tyson remained in 1991, and it was unsettling to watch him rip left hooks into Ferguson’s hanging middle and long right cross to the jaw with serious intent. The force of these punches sprayed the air with sweat and water, as if Tyson had hit a small geyser hidden inside his sparring partner’s skull. Feeling some of the sticky wetness on my face, I pulled back to a safe distance.

Tyson seemed intimidating, but his best years as a fighter were already behind him. The fighter I saw that afternoon was not a patch on the world champion who in 1988 obliterated the former great Michael Spinks with a display of fury and skill that, for the 91 seconds it lasted, captured boxing’s magnetism.

Thirty-six years after this career high, Tyson was asked what he had learned about himself since he began training for Paul. The former Baddest Man on the Planet paused and then said, “That I’m tougher than I thought I was because when I agreed to this fight and started training, I was like, ‘What the hell was I thinking? ” But I have completed the process. The fight is the party. All the hard work is done.”

Tyson was reminded that Netflix has 282 million subscribers and he is expected to fight in front of the biggest crowd of his career on Friday night. He was asked if he ever thought a night like that would mean him fighting Jake Paul.

He shook his head dejectedly and spread his hands wide. “Never in a million years,” Tyson said in his soft, lilting voice.

Tyson was asked about his family and, perhaps a little hard of hearing these days, mumbled, “Say that again, please.”

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Finally, he cracked a little joke that any aging father could relate to: “To my kids, I’m nobody … they take me for granted. They talk a lot of crap to me that no one else would.”

But he smiled as he suggested that on Friday night “they will find out that their father is very special.”

Tyson, who understands the historical stature of Johnson, Louis and Ali, and his own lesser place in the heavyweight pantheon, was asked what it would mean if he could beat Paul. Admirably, he didn’t deserve to answer the question.

“All I can say is ‘Thank God,'” Tyson said.

He was long gone when the same woman introduced “the disruptor, the man who has revolutionized boxing in four years … the most influential figure in boxing today … it’s the Problem Child, Jake ‘El Gallo’ Paul!”

Wearing a red rooster wig, as a tribute to his nickname in Puerto Rico, where he now lives, Paul cut an absurd and thick figure. After his leaden workout, he said, “I feel really good, sharp, powerful and explosive. It’s going to be a short night for Mike.”

But he admitted his mother, who is obviously old enough to remember the terror Tyson once spread through boxing, was worried. “She’s nervous. She doesn’t like watching Mike Tyson throw punches because she’s a little scared.”

The YouTuber dressed as a rooster turned to his mother and said: “But mom, I promise you, I was built for this, I was meant for this. I, Jake Joseph Paul, will knock out Mike Tyson on November 15 . It’s written in the damn history books.”