NSMA Hall of Famer Jerry Izenberg Writes on Tyson-Paul

So, they paid him $20 million. Was it worth it? Go ask him. Personally, I don’t want to hear his answer. Questions like that probe too deeply into the secret part of a man’s motivation. Of course, we will get a trillion answers from the chest-beating geniuses who know all the answers and post them on social media.

But they don’t know. They rarely do. Neither do the celebrities who mugged the cameras on Friday or the real people in the nose-bleed seats who couldn’t see the punches with the Hubble Space Telescope from their vantage point.

Not that there were a lot of punches to see.

But I know this from experience. Thinking back after the farce that was the Tyson-Paul fight I recall a sad night in a decrepit dressing room in a rarely used armory in Paterson, N.J.

A single light bulb hung from the ceiling in a tiny locker room. Joe Louis, retired and broke, was there to referee a wrestling match. We talked about the bad beating he took from Rocky Marciano that ended his career in October of 1951. Louis was a well-worn 37, Marciano, 10 years younger in the prime of his career.

``Father Time beat me. Marciano was the most skillful bovver. I saw enough openings that I could have won the thing. But each time my eyes saw them my fists were just too late... Nobody had to tell me I was too old. I knew it before I hit the floor.’’

It was a candid description of the dilemma every great fighter realizes too late. Fighters do not get old in the gym. It always happens in the ring. Boxing is a business for young men. It wasn’t what Jake Paul did. The only beating Tyson took was self-administer.

You could see in the heaving of his chest each time the bell rang as he shuffled back to his corner. You could see it in the absolute lack of aggression. Perhaps like Louis against Marciano it was the search to write a check in his mind that no bank could cash.

There are some who say that Jake Paul got into Mike’s head by not being intimidated. After all, Paul did legitimately win the fight. But what really got into Tyson was 58 years of wear and tear. He made a lot of money but as the late Willie Pastrano, the former undisputed light heavyweight champion talked about the end of his career:

``It’s hard to get up in the morning to run when you are wearing silk pajamas. ‘’

That wasn’t Mike’s problem. At age 58 it was too many years in the ring and too many years out of it to come back. Boxing is, after all, the only sport where experience erodes and fades and never wins a foot race with the calendar.

The money he was paid is issnobody’s business but his. He earned it long before that night. It wasn’t Jake Paul who put all those people in the seats at Texas Stadium.

If you really wonder how so many could be gullible, I refer you to the writing of H.L. Mencken, the acerbic columnist from the old Baltimore Sun, who summed up the ticket-buying rubes who are the silent partner of major scams:

``Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.’’

Don’t knock Tyson. He owed nobody anything. They bought the tickets, hoping to see an impossible comeback or a trainwreck of a disaster. They saw absolutely nothing other than proof that no 58-year-old man will ever run a four-minute mile, dunk a basketball in an NBA game, or steal home in the World Series.

They should have learned that from a fellow named Evel Knievel. In 1973 he failed to drive a rocket-propelled motorcycle over Idaho’s Snake River Canyon. The event was massively promoted. It seemed as though every little kid talked their parents into buying tickets for the closed-circuit spectacle. I remember writing there were so many pre-puberty kids in the theater seats they could have elected an American president if they had the vote.

Tyson-Paul was a once-and-out fraud.

Maybe.

Jake Paul has a brother who boxes.