Cake Paul
In a move described by many as “fucking stupid,” YouTube star Jake Paul has offered to fight Mike Tyson. In a move described as “also fucking stupid,” Mike Tyson has said yes.
Jake Paul has vowed to one day become the heavyweight champion of the world, which was clearly a lifelong passion as he spent the early part of his career making videos on YouTube. After all, who can forget the iconic montage in “Rocky” where Burgess Meredith exhorts Sly Stallone to post more frequently and gain more followers?
Not to be deterred, Paul has parlayed his internet fame into successful fights with former MMA champ Anderson Silva (retired and twenty-two years Paul’s senior), Ben Askren (retired, twelve years older), Tyron Woodley (retired, fifteen years Paul’s senior, several weight classes below him) and Nate Robinson (twelve years Paul’s senior and retired, with the important caveat that what he’d retired from was basketball.)
Having sucessfully beaten all the older, smaller fighters and NBA players he could get his hands on, Paul managd to secure a fight against Tommy Fury, the less-successful brother of heavyweight champ Tyson Fury and the first still-active professional boxer that he had faced. Paul lost.
I’m not saying Jake Paul is completely incapable as a fighter — as someone who is twelve years his senior and several inches shorter I’d better watch my mouth as I’m exactly the sort of ass he’s kicked before — but he’s now getting ready to face Mike Tyson.
For his own part, Tyson was the youngest man to ever win the heavyweight championship, at the age of twenty, and for a period in the late eighties and early 1990s, he genuinely seemed unstoppable. His personal demons got the better of him, perhaps inevitably as the biggst of those demons were yes men and cocaine, and he ended his pro career ignominously in 2000 when he refused to answer the bell for his seventh round against an Irish cab driver. It was a sad ending to a once-legendary career, and it was also twenty-four years ago, meaning that Mike Tyson will be fifty-eight years old when he fights the 27-year-old Jake Paul.
On the right side of a thirty year age gap and a notable height advantage, this would seem like an easy win for Paul, but it’s important to remember a few key things about Mike Tyson, many of which can be summed up by remembering that he’s Mike fucking Tyson.
Always short for a heavyweight fighter at 5'10", Tyson grew up asthmatic but with the natural, pitbull physique of a power lifter. In boxing, this meant that he was always worried that his lungs would let him down, and he resolved to use his natural strength to end fights as quickly as he could. He trained obsessively under Cus D’Amato, perfecting D’Amato’s signature “peekaboo” technique which had carried Floyd Patterson to the heavyweight title in the late 1950s. The difference between Patterson and Tyson was that Tyson coupled sound defensive principles with seemingly boundless agression and a frightening amount of power. Even as a man who finished his career as a shadow of his former self, Tyson’s knockout-to-win percentage stands at 88%. Put another way, he won fifty professional fights, and forty-four of them by knockout. Twenty four of those came in the first round of the fight.
All of this is to say that there’s a chance that Tyson, at fifty-eight, will be too old to do much damage and Jake Paul may carry the day. But raw strength is one of the last things to leave an athlete, and there’s a non-zero chance that we’re going to see Jake Paul get killed.
I’m not kidding. I’m certain that Mike Tyson, pushing sixty, still hits harder than most human beings you can think of. He definitely hits harder than the welterweights and basketball players that Jake Paul has been practicing on, and footage of the two men training shows that Tyson still looks fast and defensively tight while Jake Paul looks like he’s getting ready for an aggressive game of swingball. As one Redditor commented on that clip, Jake Paul is in training for the hardest fight of his life, and Mike Tyson is in training for the easiest.
I really don’t know how I’ll feel if Jake Paul dies in the ring. It’s a situation he worked very hard to get himself into, and although I don’t specifically wish him ill, I don’t watch his videos and I get the impression he isn’t a particularly likeable guy. John Donne might have reminded us that any death diminishes us all, but I feel worse about some poor orphan in Gaza getting blown up than I do about some idiot from YouTube who deliberately put his brain and skull in punching range of the man ESPN ranked as “the hardest hitter in heavyweight history.”
Jake Paul being killed or badly injured would, however, take us further down an uncomfortably dystopian road. I’m honestly not sure that Tyson won’t do something medically catastrophic to Jake Paul, and I can’t be alone in feeling this way, and the fight is going ahead anyway. This all comes at the same time that tech billionaire Peter Thiel has thrown his weight behind the Steroid Olympics.
Officially known as the “Enhanced Games,” you should already have got the drift from the phrase “steroid olympics.” It’s a planned series of events where athletes are allowed to take all of the performance enhancing drugs they like, just to see what happens.
Incidentally, what will happen is probably nothing of athletic note. At the top level, either everyone is on dope already (see: cycling) or else the top competitors are so close to the dopers that it makes little difference. Usain Bolt is a prime example. Of the twenty fastest times ever recorded over the 100m, eleven of them have question marks for doping, and the other nine are Usain Bolt. That’s how fucking quick Bolt was, and nobody on performance enhancing drugs could beat him. Even if somone had, the margins would have been in the fractions of a second, meaning that the Enhanced Games isn’t going to see anyone run the hundred meters in five seconds, or dead lift a thousand kilos, or in any other way shatter current records.
The Enhanced Games could, however, do irreparable damage to the competitors in the same way that Mike Tyson could do irreparable damage to Jake Paul. We’re not learning anything new in any of these scenarios — it’s a bad idea for YouTubers to fight Mike Tyson and it’s a bad idea to let people pump themselves full of weird chemicals for a brief shot at a world record and at the expense of their long term health. We know these things already, we don’t need to gather the real-world data. We are, however, taking giant leaps towards straight-up killing people for our entertainment.
Personally, I think this is probably something we should avoid. Although, if we’re going to just start maiming people for our enjoyment, I’d like to see it introduced into some of the less obvious areas. My preference would be for “Is It Cake?”
If you haven’t seen it, “Is It Cake?” is the Netflix show in which people bake ultra-realistic cakes that look like other things, and contestants have to guess whether or not what they’re looking at is a cake. There are whole minutes of entertainment to be had in the show, which is unfortunate, because it lasts half an hour.
Under my proposed amendments, “Is It Cake?” will take the lessons we’re learning from the Enhanced Games and apply them to confectionary whimsy. You think that bowling ball is actually a cake? Let’s see how confident you are when we have to drop it on your head. Is that a bear trap or is it a cake? Step in it and let’s find out.
Obviously, the prize money will probably have to go up a fair amount.
Alternatively, we should all just probably quit while we’re ahead. Jake Paul might be an arrogant YouTube dickhead, but that doesn’t mean we should all cheer while he gets punched to death. And we definitely don’t need to feed the God-complexes of people like Peter Thiel by allowing them to goad the impressionable into drug-enduced heart attacks just to see if it can add a few inches to the long jump.
I still stand by the cake thing, though.