It says something that several US states have banned betting on Friday’s fight between boxing’s Mike Tyson and attention’s Jake Paul. You cannot place a bet in New York, for example, or a wager in Colorado, where gaming commissioners are treating the event as something akin to an exhibition. That is despite the fight’s official stamp of approval by the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, but then anything goes in Texas.
The fight is dressed up as a professional boxing bout, but it is easy to see why some inside the sport feel uneasy. The two outcomes of a genuinely brutal contest would be: a 27-year-old gym jock beats up a sickly 58-year-old grandfather; or one of the most ruthless boxers of all time knocks out an out-of-depth YouTuber. Either way, the optics aren’t great.
