Last month, Netflix made a curious announcement: it would live stream an exhibition fight between the YouTube-prankster bro turned professional boxer, Jake Paul, and the near 60-year-old weed mogul, convicted rapist and former heavyweight champion of the world, “Iron” Mike Tyson.

It was all part of a move into “sports-adjacent programming”, Netflix explained, along with an expensive acquisition of World Wrestling Entertainment’s weekly package show Raw (US$5 billion for 10 years).

The fight will take place on July 20, at the capacious AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. For some purists this blasphemy will herald the great purging of the Earth in a rain of blood and fire – a fatal convergence of our shallowest instincts that shepherds the righteous to Heaven and triggers hellfire for the rest.

It’s also possible the fight will simply prove dull and anti-climactic, with Paul prudently keeping his distance and tiring the old man before landing a couple on his temple. Then life will continue much as it did before – albeit with handsomely adjusted bank statements for each fighter.

Jake Paul is 27 years old, and was thus still a decade from conception when Tyson became, at 20, the youngest-ever heavyweight champion in 1986. In fact, Paul wasn’t born until January 1997 – five months before Tyson fought Evander Holyfield in Las Vegas, and chewed off part of his ear.

With prodigious shamelessness, Paul earnt global infamy and great sums of money, first on the short-video service Vine, and then with a YouTube channel begun in 2014. With older brother Logan – and later an entourage of insufferable “content makers” – Paul accumulated billions of views with his frat-boy pranks, gross-out stunts and the worst rap music you’ve ever heard.

Paul’s gift was for unrepentant obnoxiousness and it proved extravagantly profitable – an ecosystem of videos responding to Paul’s soon emerged. There was money in being despised, in offering oneself as a smug villain. The shadows lengthened when in 2017 Logan travelled to a Japanese forest, notorious as a place of suicide, and filmed himself joking about a corpse he found strung from a tree.

Jake Paul’s unlikely boxing career began as a publicity lark – an amateur bout with another “YouTuber” in 2018. Paul proved, however, to be both better than most expected and also surprisingly committed to the gruelling training discipline. He turned professional in 2020 and, while he’s not fought any great talent, his pro record is currently 9-1. “I think he’s a decent boxer,” British heavyweight champ Tyson Fury said last year. “A lot of people think he’s just a YouTube person who doesn’t know how to box, but I’ve actually seen him training and I’ve actually seen his fights, and I think he’s decent. He’s like a novice professional.”

Paul’s talent may be only modest for now; more attractive to promoters is his profile. And if purists consider his career a desecration, there are still millions of people willing to pay good money to either (a) enjoy the novelty of it, or (b) watch “The Problem Child” get punched to the mat.

Such is the state of boxing these days that its most famous and popular practitioner might be a man who reached its pinnacle almost 40 years ago and has been effectively retired for 20.

If Muhammad Ali was admired for his balletic grace, Mike Tyson was regarded for his ferocity. Short for a heavyweight, Iron Mike looked even shorter – his bodybuilder’s physique played a trick of perception. He was a 178-centimetre tightly compressed coil that would spring murderously, and in the late 1980s he glowed with a terrible aura.

“The psychic blast of his presence was the first blow landed,” Norman Mailer wrote about him in 1988, after Tyson defeated Michael Spinks in 91 seconds. It was said of Tyson that he could beat only those he could intimidate, but at the beginning of his career he seemed to intimidate plenty.

Tyson was a strange and damaged man, brutalised by a violent childhood, whose identity seemed highly unstable. However, as a teenager under the tuition of coach Cus D’Amato, who also served as a de facto father, Tyson harnessed his furies. For a time, there was a transmutation of every beating, mugging and drunken parental strap – memories of abuse were channelled into artful violence. Methodical aggression and blind fury are different things, though, and Tyson often lurched between the two. In Evander Holyfield he met a man he couldn’t intimidate, and so he tried to cleave his ear with his teeth.

There was cocaine and lithium. Mania, depression and rage. He bubbled, he boiled. He seethed with a sense of victimhood and paranoia, not all of it imagined. He tilted between grandiosity and self-loathing; he both fulfilled and rebelled against the media’s caricatures. He could speak about his “murderous intentions” but would confess his vulnerability and regret at being misunderstood.

“He is a compelling character, and he’s one of those fellas who gets you to feel that he’s misunderstood but, when you get into it, he is what he is, which is a thug and a bully and a misogynist,” the influential English fight promoter Frank Warren told The Guardian in 2022. “He’s very homophobic when he’s cursing somebody or he’s shouting at them.

“He was an unbelievably exciting fighter – menacing, devastating – but that lasted a very short time, and then he just pissed his career away. He didn’t live the life he should have led. You could sit with him right now and you’d think this guy’s totally been misunderstood, he’s a good bloke. I’m telling you, he’s very manipulative.”

We remain nostalgic for Tyson’s career, and one curious thing to me is the comfortable place Tyson holds in popular culture today. In a 1989 biography of Tyson, written by former professional boxer José Torres, Tyson spoke of beating his then wife Robin Givens: “She really offended me and I went BAM,” he said. “She flew backwards, hitting every wall in the apartment. That was the best punch I’ve ever thrown in my entire life.”

In the same book, Tyson is quoted as saying: “I like to hurt women when I make love to them … I like to hear them scream with pain, to see them bleed.”

In 1992, Tyson was convicted of raping 18-year-old college student Desiree Washington and served three years in prison. Last year, another woman filed a lawsuit alleging Tyson raped her in the early 1990s.

And yet in 2009, he made a cameo in the hit film The Hangover, and also appeared in the 2011 sequel. He hosts a popular podcast and is a regular guest on the late-night shows. There was the Adult Swim cartoon, featuring Iron Mike as a warm-hearted private eye. He appears alongside Sean Penn in 2023’s Asphalt City (originally titled Black Flies). His one-man stage show was produced for television by Spike Lee. He’s offered large sums for exhibition fights. He’s feted, indulged.

I make no argument as to whether this is right or not; whether Tyson should be subject to extrajudicial punishment. But it’s strange how the cultural laws of cancellation work, and it’s mysterious to me how this man has enjoyed an exemption from them.

Less mysterious is Netflix’s conviction that Iron Mike remains, all these years later, a crowd magnet and money maker – and a man more popular than his opponent. Here lies “sports-adjacent programming”. 

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