American Boxing on the Ropes: Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson Is Only Big US Show in 8 Month Span

When the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson circus clears out of AT&T Stadium Friday night, American boxing fans will have to wait until February of next year for the next significant US boxing show featuring main event American fighters.

That’s pretty damn sad, especially considering that the last US boxing show featuring main event American fighters (and run by an American company) was way back in June when Gervonta “Tank” Davis and David Benavidez were featured in a pay-per-view twin bill.

We can squabble over what’s considered a “significant” boxing show and why it’s important to have American companies running shows with headlining American talent. What can’t be disputed, though, is that the biggest and the best fighters in American boxing have become shockingly low-file.

Gervonta Davis, Terence Crawford, David Benavidez, Shakur Stevenson, Ryan Garcia, Devin Haney, and Sebastian Fundora, for example, had just one fight in 2024. Many top names had zero fights. Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, a Mexican who usually fights twice a year in the United States, is still, arguably, the biggest draw in the sport, but the returns on his increasingly poor matchups have been diminishing for awhile.

In that same vein, American boxing promotions have just been treading water this entire year, turned into mere flotsam and jetsam in the current created by Saudi Arabia’s full-on bid to take over control of the sport.

It’s actually alarming to see how quickly boxing and its American power brokers bowed to Chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority Turki Alalshikh, either grabbing at lucrative but handcuffing “partnerships” with the “Kingdom” or simply falling aside to let the Saudi sportswashing boxing initiative steamroll the terrain.

As I wrote in a piece for FightHype.com, American boxing’s docile resignation is embarrassing, especially when considering that the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson silliness will go down as the only truly “big” all-American show of 2024:

“That should be absolutely humiliating for American boxing businessmen, who have done nothing this year but feed bogus rumors of upcoming fights to media and grab at Saudi Arabian payouts.

Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul is a joke. And that’s fine. Boxing has always had fluff fights and celebrity nonsense swirling around its perimeters. But Tyson-Paul is not on the perimeter. It’s bigger than anything ‘real’ boxing has produced this year and, in the vacuum of US boxing doldrums, it’s way more significant than it should be…

More off-putting than the exaggerated importance of something like Tyson-Paul is the absolute impotence of American boxing.

2024 has been a lost year for American boxing and the once-powerful, boxing-dominant trio of Top Rank, Golden Boy, and PBC have taken a knee in the face of adversity quicker than Ryan Garcia after he took that Tank Davis gut shot.

And, really, all it took to put boxing in hospice care was some Saudi guy waving cash around.

Oscar Da La Hoya’s Golden Boy has embraced selling itself out to the Saudis and is, per my sources, looking to ditch their failed Ring Magazine property to their new overlords as well (if they haven’t done so already) [Editor’s Note: They HAVE].

Top Rank, figureheaded by the crotchety Bob Arum, is not as whorish as Oscar and company, but is still begrudgingly taking a knee to Saudi interests, even allowing Saudi point man Turki Alalshikh to make fights for contract players without their consent.

PBC’s downfall may not be Saudi-related, but it IS a sign of these times where there seems to be no fire lit under any of these boxing company asses anymore.”

With Top Rank’s ESPN deal expiring next year and PBC underperforming in the first year of their Amazon Prime Video deal, there couldn’t be a worse time for US boxing to drift into melancholy and sloth.

Yet, here we are. We got here pretty damn quick, too. And things can/will get worse unless/until American boxing bossmen start showing some brains and some gumption in the face of a hostile takeover of the sport that has, thus far, been shockingly un-hostile as almost everyone has just sort of rolled over for Saudi money.

At the end of the day, however, if these Saudi payouts are digging a hole for American boxing and, specifically, American boxing self-determination, it’s only because American boxing handed them the shovel. Having a lazy and muddled US boxing scene with a stifling business model made the takeover infinitely easier and there just doesn’t seem to be much resolve for pushback.

Time will tell if there’s a late-rounds comeback for a battered and bloody American boxing scene.