Tyson vs. Jones Jr + Jake Paul vs. Nate Robinson sold over 1 million buys on PPV

By Boxing News - 12/02/2020 - Comments

By Allan Fox: Mike Tyson vs. Roy Jones Jr and Tube star Jake Paul vs. Nate Robinson combined to bring in over 1 million pay-per-view buys last Saturday night in their card at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California.

Former heavyweight champion Tyson, who last fought in 2005 before last Saturday, says he plans on doing more exhibitions. He wants to fight every two months, and he already has 58-year-old Evander Holyfield volunteering to face him next.

We don’t know at this point whether the pay-per-view buys were generated more for Tyson-Jones or Jake Paul in his true professional fight against former NBA slamdunk champion Robinson.

Did Jake Paul bring in most of the PPV buys?

These two may have saved the day for Tyson, as there was a tremendous amount of interest in Jake Paul vs. Robinson on social media leading up to the fight, and it was a much more entertaining match.

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If Tyson is going to continue to sell his exhibition matches to the boxing public, he will do well to make sure Jake Paul is on all the cards, as that would help bring in a lot of buys. Without Jake, Tyson may not bring in nearly as many buys because he would be counting on the older boxing fans to purchase his events.

Without major changes to Tyson’s exhibition matches’ look and feel, he’ll likely get diminishing returns with fewer fans purchasing the cards each time.  The fights have to look real to get fans interested, and last Saturday’s Tyson vs. Jones Jr match looked unreal and not interesting to watch.

Jones’ nonstop clinching played a large part in the exhibition fight with Tyson being so boring to watch, but it wasn’t just him. Tyson repeatedly missing with his punches, and mainly aiming them at Jones’ body looked very, very odd. Some fans complained that Tyson was purposely trying not to hurt Jones.

With a social following of over 7 million, the 23-year-old Jake Paul may be the one responsible for bringing in most of the PPV buys. The combination of Jake and his trendy YouTuber brother Logan Paul talking about the event on social media to their millions of followers might have been the reason for the high number of buys.

The numbers are incredible for a card that had very little substance in terms of compelling fights. The 54-year-old former heavyweight champion Tyson (50-6, 44 KOs) and 51-year-old former pound-for-pound Jones Jr (66-9, 47 KOs) fought to an eight-round draw in the main event.

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Tyson vs. Jones lacked drama

The criticism boxing fans had about the Tyson-Jones Jr fight is that neither of them appeared to be trying to hurt each other. It looked like they were playing, which is fine if fans weren’t paying $50 to watch it on PPV, but it was disappointing because it had a professional wrestling feel. It didn’t seem real and was more like a theatrical production with actors playing a part.

Many older boxing fans remember Tyson during his career, which ended 15 years ago. But the younger fans have never seen Tyson, and they likely weren’t the ones that purchased the card.

Although Roy Jones Jr had been active up until 2018, he was done as a major fighter since 2004. Jones Jr had done nothing since then to keep his popularity up with boxing fans, as he lost every time he was in an important fight in the last 14 years of his career due to his poor punch resistance.

“A lot of people didn’t believe it would happen, but our concept was really different, which was not to shoot this like it was a boxing event,” said Triller co-owner Ryan Kavanaugh in talking about the Tyson-Jones Jr card.

We shot it more like a movie and we had 21 cameras in there. We shot it in what I’d call a movie-esque, Tarantino-style lighting if you will.”

Well, Kavanaugh’s comment about wanting the Tyson vs. Jones Jr event to be “more like a movie might explain why it didn’t look like a real fight and appeared like it was two actors, neither of which made their exhibition look authentic.