sport news Boxing MUST start taking itself seriously. This Mike Tyson freak show proves ... trends now
Kevin McBride never fought the Mike Tyson of old, just an old Mike Tyson. That being the broke and broken guy he punched into retirement 19 years ago, but whose name came to define his own in that way all journeymen dream.
I gave McBride a call the other day, a couple of hours after we all heard the strangest of things — the announcement that the ‘baddest man on the planet’ will fight a YouTube influencer 30 years his junior in July, when Tyson will be 58 and Jake Paul will still be a clown.
‘I just had a notification on my phone about it,’ McBride said down the line from Boston, where he relocated a while back from Ireland. ‘I’m sure there’s a few bucks in it for them both, but I was a bit surprised.’
We might add here that McBride, 50, isn’t one of those who feels any great animosity for the bout, which is an area where we differ. Hell, he says, if Tyson wanted to avenge his last professional defeat, he’d be all over that contract before it left the printer. But there was something else he said that captured what it once meant to face Tyson.
‘My god, you want to know my last thought before getting in the ring?’ he asked. ‘It was, “What are you doing here?” I knew he wasn’t going to be the same Tyson then that he used to be. But I grew up watching Tyson, I saw how he smashed people. Hurt them.
Jake Paul will fight boxing legend Mike Tyson at the AT&T Stadium in Dallas later this year
Netflix released a teaser clip showing Paul and Tyson squaring up to announce the fight
‘I needed hypnosis before the fight. It’s funny, we wanted to make sure I smiled at him every time he hit me. In the week before the fight we even went to watch Cinderella Man, the film about the underdog boxer, just so I could get my head right.’
There was more, too. Packie Collins, McBride’s trainer, once told me the psychology extended to a little lie on fight night. When it took Tyson an hour to get his hands wrapped, Collins let his man know it was because he was ‘bricking it’ and shaking in his dressing room. What Collins neglected to mention is that it was actually because Muhammad Ali had turned up for a chat.
Let’s not forget, all of this was so McBride could fortify himself for a Tyson who by then had lost meekly to Danny Williams, because old auras die slowly. But McBride had his big day — he knocked out the former undisputed heavyweight champion of the world in the sixth.
And what a prize that was. Tyson retired from the sport immediately afterwards; McBride only won twice more in seven fights and quit in 2011, but would for ever be known as the boxer who finished a great. ‘Good enough for me,’ he said and it was a nice laugh he sent down the phone.
The point here is that Tyson wasn’t just a fighter, he was a state of mind. A colossus. A nasty bloke in life and the ring. A giant who stood only 5ft 10ins tall in his black boots. A man whose destruction of Frank Bruno in their 1996 rematch could be foretold when our British hero crossed himself on the way to the ring like a man who would have sooner chosen the noose.
That was then. Now, with this ‘comeback’, Tyson is
