All the snippets of Tyson looking like his old self are remarkably short, maybe a second or two. The rest of the time, he looks old and tired.

I’m reminded of Tyson’s surreal one-man show from a decade ago, Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth, when he breaks into a few seconds of awe-inspiring shadow boxing — and then can’t catch his breath to keep talking.

Mike’s health problems have gotten progressively worse in the last 8 months, and that open workout was…rough. Jake is wearing the extra weight well, and Mike looks defeated at every press appearance.

Still holding out hope, but I would find any other result nearly miraculous with one exception:

Tyson is deliberately sandbagging us.

With the likes of Oleksandr Usyk and Tyson Fury sitting atop the HW division, and the ghosts of the Klitschko brothers still fresh in everyone’s memories, I don’t much see the demand in the present boxing market for a, “Great White Hope,” the quota’s been more than filled.

I suspect it’s more the nostalgia to see Tyson work again than anything else. Everyone knows he held back against RJJ, what might it look like if he didn’t? The mystery is just too enticing, and with the added bonus of potentially seeing Jake Paul finally KO’d I’d say this sells phenomenally well.

a) A glorified sparring match

or

b) Fixed

Then this could actually be fascinating to watch. Despite his advanced age (57), Tyson still has astonishing speed and power and if you rewatch his recent fight with Roy Jones Jr. from 4 years ago it’s fairly obvious that he was pulling his punches and, “playing,” at times, not taking advantage of openings he created, particularly on the separation where his Peek a Boo style is most deadly — which makes sense given the advanced age of both boxers.

Tyson weighed in at 220lbs. for his fight vs RJJ, and Jake Paul generally weighs in at ~185lbs. At higher weight classes older fighters remain competitive much longer, as proven by Big George Foreman during his second Heavyweight title run, which began a decade after his first retirement and lasted a whole additional decade, taking him into 1997. This took the champ’s professional career to the ripe old age of nearly 49 where he managed to lose a Majority Decision in his last fight, against a 26 year old future champ with a 29-1 record, on a 4 fight win-streak named Shannon Briggs. Briggs himself remained competitive well into his 40′s, with 2 championship wins.

Jake Paul is no Shannon Briggs, he doesn’t have the experience or the weight, but he does have an impressive skillset for a guy who only started boxing 6 years ago. Granted, it is mostly against tomato cans, grapplers, or fighters he can weight bully. Notably his one loss came from Tommy Fury, a professional boxer and fellow young cruiserweight who managed to win a Split Decision over Paul, giving a good metric as to his genuine boxing abilities (capable of hanging with a semi-professional/early professional boxer).

The point being, this has the potential to be a real fight, and a competitive one at that, for the nearly geriatric Tyson. To those discounting Tyson due to his age, I would argue you haven’t sat down and really looked at the facts.