I didn’t watch the Tyson/Paul Netflix fight on Sunday, but I did watch people watching the fight. That was weird. I’m not a huge boxing fan, but I will make an effort to see the big fights. I didn’t make the effort with this because it was just a bullshit marketing exercise.
It must have worked, though, because I was walking through the city on Sunday when it was happening, and I saw half a dozen different sets of people gathered around their phones to stream it.
The most interesting thing to me? Only one group, a bunch of 20-something guys, looked remotely like the audience for a boxing match.
Everyone else could have been a randomly selected subset of TikTok casuals. Two of the groups were all women, all Gen Z. I don’t know much about Gen Z but I’ve never taken them for fans of bloodsport. I’m not sure they’d even know who Mike Tyson was. That dude in the old YouTube clips who bit that other dude’s ear off?
So, I guess the fight's success —in streaming terms, it was massive—was down to YouTuber Jake Paul. I don’t know what this means. Perhaps it exp,ains Trump? I dunno.
These days I mostly just watch the world go by and I go, “Huh? What?”
shakes fist and yells "get off my lawn" lol
I kinda watched it? I went out and mowed and did stuff. Caught the women's fight and in my extremely non experienced opinion thought they made the wrong decision, but whatever, what the hell did i know. It was bloody brutal though. Far out. I suffered the "wth?" moments when my feed buffered like i was trying to download a picture on the internet in the 90s. I almost threw something at the tv every time a blatant cross promotion came up, like a shot of the guys from cobra kai, or the even more blatant seat warmers dressed up for squid game "season 2 coming in whenever".
Funny you mention the ear thing. I always mention the rape thing, then the ear thing, when trying to explain who he was to the z's.
I watched it, but fully get that it was a strange exhibition. I watched it because I wasn't doing anything else and it was easily available.
Having it on Netflix is the big difference. Those lads would otherwise have gone to a pub for the big screen, a few beers and hopefully a lotta bets amiright? The rest of us just wouldn't have bothered.