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OK, folks. We get it.
No one likes to lose. No one likes to appear foolish. No one—particularly those enamored with their own opinions—likes to find out those opinions might be wrong.
So when it happens, it's a knee-jerk reaction to suggest something nefarious is at play.
Lose a game? The other team cheated. Lose a popularity contest? The results can't be trusted. Suggest an upcoming event will look one way and then it doesn't? It was all a setup.
These days, it doesn't take a long memory to recall the last time you heard such a commotion.
And here we are again.
Just when it seemed the buffering images of Jake Paul and Mike Tyson had faded into a short-attention news-cycle background, there's enough contrarian chatter still making the rounds claiming the whole thing was staged. So much so that Paul's business apparatus (Most Valuable Promotions) felt compelled to issue a statement Monday morning insisting the opposite.
"Trash talk and speculation are common in sports, and athletes and promoters need to tolerate nonsensical commentary, jokes and opinions," the statement said. "But suggesting anything other than full effort from these fighters is not only naïve but an insult to the work they put into their craft and to the sport itself."
We'll concede that using words like "fighters" and "craft" is a bit of a stretch when describing a glorified 27-year-old Golden Glover sharing a ring with a 58-year-old without a victory since the younger man was in elementary school. But just because the competition between mismatched foes was something less than compelling doesn't mean it was all planned out in advance.
Regardless of what Sylvester Stallone might think.
Oh, you remember Stallone, right?
He made a great movie about an underdog boxer from Philadelphia who got an improbable shot at the heavyweight title. And then he made a series of incrementally less great movies about the same underdog boxer fighting a wrestler, fighting Mr. T, fighting a Russian, suffering brain damage and ultimately coming back as a 60-year-old to fight another heavyweight champ.
So, when it comes to selling silly boxing premises, he's a go-to authority.
Given that resume, though, he's claiming a shaky and barely coherent high ground by being one of the voices—arguably the highest-profile of them—suggesting Tyson deserved Academy Award consideration simply because he looked more like a man close to 60 and less like the one the esteemed star of Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot worshipped in the 1980s.
The fixed-fight assertion was posted on Instagram alongside a photo of Tyson fighting Stallone's character from the final installment of the Rocky series, in which Tyson did not appear.
"I have known this unbelievable athlete since he's 19 years old and what we saw was him giving one of the great Oscar winning performances of all time!!!!" Stallone wrote. "Please, Jake, be grateful, HE SPARED YOUR LIFE! Trust me. … I remember once I bumped into him and thought I was hit by runaway BULLDOZER!!!"
The Hollywood actor is spot-on in one sense.
The young Tyson was as menacing a fighter the sport has seen since Clubber Lang. But what Stallone refuses to grasp is that Tyson in 2024 is no more capable of resurrecting generations-old performances as he is of replicating the Razzie Award he won for Worst Actor in the film that sprang from 1993's Worst Screenplay.
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It's no surprise that Iron Mike woke up Stallone's echoes with training montages that featured a more-chiseled physique than he'd displayed in years. And by the time he smacked Paul in the mouth during the final pre-fight staredown the night before, you could imagine Bill Conti's crescendo as Stallone typed a since-deleted: "You'll never see this kind of warrior again!!! Enjoy the moment!"
Twenty-four hours later, after an AARP-eligible fighter whose modern aura was built on snipped videos couldn't carry that threat beyond a couple abbreviated rounds, it was a farce.
To the Dwight Manfredi crowd perhaps.
"The kind of stuff that's coin of the realm in gyms everywhere," former HBO blow-by-blow man Jim Lampley told Bleacher Report. "To repeat it makes wannabes feel like insiders."
The reality, of course, is that expecting a 58-year-old to suddenly look like the guy who vaporized Trevor Berbick was ridiculous. And anyone who considered it a real possibility was clueless. Which means their response—upon realizing how misguided the thought turned out—is predictable. It didn't go how Stallone fantasized it might, so it had to be staged.
Yeah, OK. And maybe Tulsa King is The Sopranos, too.
