With a 30-year age gap between them, Jake Paul and Mike Tyson seemingly had a friendly boxing match rather than a one-sided beatdown. And now one commentator has claimed that the lack of action might have been part of the fight’s rules.
NFL Hall of Famer and sports commentator Michael Irvin stopped by the It Is What It Is podcast after the match and shared his thoughts about what he saw in person. He went on to make a claim that he had heard through the grapevine: Tyson’s contract allegedly forbidding him from landing any uppercuts on Paul.
“They had no intentions to really scrap at all,” the Dallas Cowboys legend claimed. “If you look through that, I didn’t see one patented uppercut by Mike Tyson. What if Mike Tyson hit him with an uppercut? Then I heard some people talking about they put that in the contract. He couldn’t [do a] body [shot] and then uppercut. Like, how can you put that in a fight contract?”
“You got all these people out here, and he couldn’t body him and do that patented uppercut,” he continued. “Now you taking away Mike Tyson’s best gift, which was that uppercut? Man, that’s a big lie to me, man… You do what you do best. If they take that away, you ain’t that dude no more, and they took that away.”
Hip-hop’s DJ Whoo Kid chimed in with a similar unconfirmed claim that he heard from others. “Legally, they each cannot go at each other hard,” he floated on social media. “If Mike Tyson hit Jake Paul, Jake Paul will die.”
“I think because of Mike Tyson’s age, he would kill Mike Tyson. So the rules were that they gotta chill,” he added of the alleged stipulation. “That’s what I heard. That’s what I heard. Jake Paul had to chill.”
The purported contract clause is so far just hearsay. After the fight, Paul admitted to reporters that he took it easy on Tyson as he didn’t want to cause serious injury to the 58-year-old former champ.
“I wanted to give the fans a show, but I didn’t want to hurt someone who didn’t need to be hurt,” the YouTuber-turned-boxer said.
Paul’s next opponent remains to be seen, though he wasted no time in throwing down the gauntlet with MMA star Conor McGregor.
