Thomas Siniecki, Media365: published on Saturday November 16, 2024 at 1:23 p.m.
Faced with a modern character and with a lot of money at stake, the boxing legend lost. But not really.
Few really liked the idea, which was very commercial, but everyone jumped on it anyway, at least out of curiosity. The return of Mike Tyson at the age of 58, for his first professional fight in almost 20 years, was certainly marked by a defeat on points and unanimously by the judges against the influencer Jake Paul, but above all it had the deserves to place one of the greatest boxers and athletes of all time in the present. That of MMA and social networks, which sets back the noble art just as much as it must use it.
Lustyk: “Teenagers discover him and his image is not damaged”
The essential platform Netflix understood this well by broadcasting this event, which was a real tidal wave of audiences around the world. For former champion Shawn Porter, now a TV consultant, the benefit is immense for both men. And it's even crazier for Jake Paul, who has nothing to do with a real, very high-level boxer but has 60 million online subscribers on his various personal accounts: “He's in a position that doesn't exists for almost no young boxer, he has hundreds of thousands of millions of people watching him, even more than at the Games Normally, in our first five or ten fights, there is no one in the stadium, he. There's no such audience. He's a beginner who has real professional exposure.”
Without him, Mike Tyson would not have been able to come back either, because he had to find an opponent who would not put him in danger either, whatever the Brooklyn myth says. The rules have also been modified for the occasion, whether it be the duration of the rounds or the thickness of the gloves. As expert Jean-Philippe Lustyk (for L'Equipe) explained a few hours before the fight, the dimension therefore went far beyond the strict sporting framework: “Teenagers discover him, after hearing about him through his masterful knockouts and historical They see him fit, 103 kg, and passionately loving this sport while preparing, he took care of himself. It is a way of returning to the light, for himself but also for his family and this young person. generation. His image is not tarnished and we talk about boxing. Everyone dreamed of seeing him.
