Chael Sonnen isn’t buying when Mike Tyson is selling.
The former UFC middleweight championship contender accused Tyson, the former boxing heavyweight champion, of faking his training video for an upcoming fight against Jake Paul at AT&T Stadium on July 20 in Netflix’s first boxing event.
Tyson, 57, posted a video Wednesday to show off his first day of training in preparation to take on the 27-year-old Paul, who is 9-1 since he began boxing in 2020.
The former “Baddest Man on the Planet” is shown throwing a few hard combinations into a trainer who is wearing pads and at the end says, “It’s day one, the fun has just begun.”
The 46-year-old Sonnen, who went 31-17-1 in MMA, isn’t taking what he saw from Tyson seriously.
Tyson, who is 50-6-2 professionally, last boxed and won an exhibition match against Roy Jones Jr. in November 2020.
“In the future, if you’re ever going to spend five seconds hitting mitts, as a way of making the audience believe you’re doing a training session, make sure you splash water on your face and T-shirt first,” Sonnen wrote on X on Thursday.
Sonnen, who is famous for his two title bouts against UFC legend Anderson Silva and his propensity for trash talk, was also critical of the age difference between Tyson and Paul.
He likened it to MMA’s Vitor Belfort boxing Evander Holyfield in 2021 during an appearance on the PBD Podcast.
“Vitor Belfort, who has never boxed, put him away so fast. So, this [Holyfield] is an Olympic gold medalist you’re watching,” Sonnen said. “Vitor, who has never done it [boxing], put him away so fast that it ended Vitor’s [boxing] career.
“They would not book him again. They labeled him like an elderly abuser. ‘How dare you? How could you do this?’ Vitor never got another fight… He [Paul] will get teased for taking this [Tyson] fight.’”
The bout also received criticism from former UFC champion and current analyst Michael Bisping and MMA fighter and one-time boxer Dillon Danis.
We will find out this summer if Sonnen is right or not.
