While Rogan recognizes that Tyson isn’t your average 58 year old, he’s still worried at how ‘Iron’ Mike will hold up against an opponent 30 years younger than him.
Like many people out there, Joe Rogan is feeling conflicted about Mike Tyson’s return to the ring on Friday, November 15th to face a much younger Jake Paul in a professional boxing match.
The 58-year-old legend was forced to pull out of their original July engagement due to what is being publicly reported as an ulcer. According to Tyson, he’s fully healthy and has been training again for weeks now. But will he be able to hang with the 27 year old Paul, who is promising to knock “Iron” Mike out?
“58 is 58, no matter what you’re taking and what they’re doing for you,” Rogan said in a new JRE podcast with actor Russell Crowe. “You’re still 58. But 58-year-old Mike Tyson is not 50-year-old Mike Jones that lives down the street, it’s a different kind of human being. He can still knock your head into another dimension if he can catch you.”
“The thing is, can he catch a 28-year-old guy who’s at the top of his career who is winning legitimate boxing matches? I mean, he’s beating former UFC world champions like Tyron Woodley. Jake had that very good fight with Tommy Fury who’s a legitimate boxer, that was a very good fight. And he just beat up Mike Perry who was a bare knuckle champion.
“He’s a real fighter, he can fight and if Mike Tyson and him are fighting and Mike can’t catch him? Then it’s hard to tell.”
We’d counter that Paul hasn’t been winning legitimate boxing matches. Tyron Woodley is not a boxer. Mike Perry also never competed wearing boxing gloves before facing Paul. Both were 170 pound fighters competing at 200 pounds. Tommy Fury? He’s a reality TV star who had faced just two opponents with more than two wins, and he still beat Paul. None of these fights are legitimate. Jake Paul is a sandbagger, and he’s sandbagging once more against a 58-year-old Tyson.
“When Mike is hitting pads he looks great, but it’s hard to tell when someone is hitting pads,” Rogan added. “If he can do that for eight rounds, great. But can he do that? I don’t know, he had to pull out of the first fight because he had an ulcer.”
Rather than take the fight seriously as a competition, Russell Crowe looked at how it was pushing Tyson back into a former life.
“I was quite enjoying the second phase of Mike’s life,” Crowe said. “I was terrified of him as a boxer. He was terrifying. Even when I met him backstage at a stadium one time at a fight, I was like ‘I’m still terrified of you.’ Then that guy he started becoming where he became more exploratory and he was looking into what the meaning of life is and having a smoke every now and then? I was like, I’m enjoying this Mike, I’m liking the evolution.”
“What bothers me with this whole thing is that he’s got to kind of slide back into that warrior and I’m just not sure that he needed to do it.”
Tyson himself has lamented having to welcome back the mean, angry Mike that often ended up ‘in handcuffs.’
“It’s unfortunate that I have to fight and be that guy. I wish I could stop that guy,” he said in a recent interview. “That guy haunts me. I wish that guy died. But he’s here to stay … He wants to come back every second of my life, it’s so easy for him to come back.”
Tyson vs. Paul goes down November 15th for free to those with a Netflix subscription. And if you’re near Arlington, Texas, maybe try to get your hands on one of the 80,000 tickets to watch the fight live from AT&T Stadium.