Mike Tyson was the biggest star from the boxing world at Barclays Center on Saturday night.
The former champion was in attendance for the Ryan Garcia-Devin Haney bout in Brooklyn and visited with Garcia prior to the 25-year-old’s victory over Haney, in which he knocked him down three times.
It all comes in advance of Tyson’s upcoming fight against YouTube star-turned-fighter Jake Paul on July 20.
Tyson has recently made news for both a training video that he posted, in which he looks like a 57-year-old trying to get in shape and not a boxer preparing for a fight, as well as his defense of taking the match despite his age and the fact he’s more than three decades older than Paul.
The fight is scheduled to take place at AT&T Stadium in Dallas.
“Everybody, even most of the athletes, they’re jealous,’’ Tyson recently told Reuters. “That’s whack. I say in your prime you couldn’t draw a million people, man, [so], why are you talking? You couldn’t sell out an arena. Who, at 58, could sell out an 80,000-seat arena?”
Tyson last fought in an exhibition against another retired boxer, Roy Jones Jr., in 2020.
The 27-year-old Paul has won nine of his 10 professional bouts.
His only loss came to Tyson Fury’s brother, Tommy, more than a year ago, before winning his next three fights.
Paul’s next test will be Tyson.
“Why do you think he wants to fight me and not anybody else?” Tyson said. “Everybody wants to fight him. All the boxers want to fight him. But if he fought them, the only people that will come are the people that like him. The other guys, their parents might not even come watch them. That’s just keeping it real. They’re too boring for their children to watch. It’s like watching grass grow.”
