Jake Paul beats Mike Tyson in Netflix’s record-breaking boxing event
ARLINGTON, Texas – Jake Paul defeated boxing legend Mike Tyson by unanimous decision to win an intergenerational heavyweight battle in Texas on Friday, but the fight failed to live up to the massive hype surrounding it.
The bout between the 27-year-old social media influencer-turned-prizefighter Paul and the 58-year-old former heavyweight champion Tyson was streamed live on Netflix and played out in front of a sold-out crowd at AT&T Stadium in Arlington.
Fans were left disappointed as Tyson struggled to generate any offense against his younger opponent, landing just 18 punches to Paul’s 78.
“First and foremost, Mike Tyson—it’s an honor to be able to fight him,” said Paul.
“It was as tough and hard as I thought it would be.”
Tyson, wearing a knee brace, never posed much of a challenge after being wobbled by some left hands in the third round but did enough defensively to avoid taking serious damage. After the fight, he admitted to having a leg injury.
“I can’t use that as an excuse. If I did, I wouldn’t be in here,” Tyson said.
“I knew he was a good fighter. He was prepared, I came to fight. I didn’t prove nothing to anybody, only to myself. I’m not one of those guys that live to please the world. I’m just happy with what I can do.”
Tyson, widely regarded as one of the most prominent heavyweight champions of all time during his peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was competing in his first professional fight in nearly 20 years. When asked if he would return to the ring, he was non-committal, saying “It depends on the situation.”
Meanwhile, Paul (11-1) said he could now fight anyone, possibly even Mexican boxing star Canelo Álvarez, after headlining the mega event that attracted a star-studded crowd and 72,300 fight fans to the home of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys.
“This is the biggest event, over 120 million people on Netflix. We crashed the site. The biggest U.S. boxing gate, $20 million, in U.S. history, and everyone is next on the list.”
According to the Financial Times, the bout was available to all of Netflix’s 280mn subscribers at no extra charge, a departure from the expensive pay-per-view or premium TV packages that have long been associated with professional boxing.
For Netflix, the boxing megaevent aimed at attracting younger male viewers and subscribers. In January, Netflix signed a $5bn, 10-year deal with World Wrestling Entertainment’s weekly Raw programme in the US, by far the group’s biggest foray into streaming live events.
The immense pressure on the platform, however, led to an outage that affected approximately 85,021 users in the United States by 10:35 p.m. ET (03:35 GMT Saturday), according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collecting status reports from various sources.
Downdetector indicated that the outage primarily impacted users in major metropolitan areas, including New York, Seattle, and Los Angeles, with some scattered reports from other regions.
