In 1910, the year of the historic Johnson-Jeffries title bout, the artist George Bellows exhibited a painting he called Both Members of This Club. Like Bellows' best-known work, Stag at Sharkey's, the painting is an intense, erotically charged depiction of a prize-fight at Sharkey Athletic Club, a venue across the street from Bellows' residence in New York City. Unlike Stag, it depicts a fight seemingly nearing completion, with one competitor visibly falling under his opponents' blows: and, more significantly, one of the two fighters (the one who appears to be winning) is black.
You could be forgiven for seeing, in the title of this picture, a sort of paean to pugilistic brotherhood: these two men, so unequal in the world outside the arena, are equals within it - indeed, the racism that divides them is eliminated to such a degree that the man who, outside, would be required to perform deference to his so-called superior can, instead, rough him up with impunity, to the visible delight of the well-dressed crowd. But such a reading ignores not just the toxic atmosphere surrounding the Johnson-Jeffries fight (the event which gave us the phrase 'great white hope'), but also the irony intended by Bellows in the title, an irony you can only appreciate if you understand the legal status of boxing in New York at the time it was painted.
In his article for the Syracuse Law Review, 'Jim Crow & the Regulation of Boxing in New York State', Albany Law School Government Lawyer in Residence Bennet Liebman outlines the murky legal status of prize-fighting in the years prior to the establishment of the first State Athletic Commission in the Frawley Law of 1911, just one year after Bellows exhibited Both Members. It is a history of official illegality and unofficial circumvention, which pivoted on the distinction between private and public. The 1900 Lewis Law, supported by Theodore Roosevelt, had outlawed public boxing matches. If, however, members of an athletic club wished to engage in a bout with their fellow club members in attendance, this was their own private affair.
And this created the loophole exploited by clubs like Sharkey's, which would swear in fighters as 'members' for the duration of their bouts, present them as such to their audience - and rescind their membership as soon as the fight was over. Far from being an ode to warrior equality, the title of Bellows' painting is a bitter acknowledgement of hypocrisy and exploitation. On paper, there is no division between the 'club members' beating each other to a pulp in the ring and those who watch them do so, grinning with delight; but the reality is that their membership ends at the ring ropes and with the final bell. And, beyond his merely expressive skills, the reason Bellows' painting has endured is that it captures a truth about boxing in the United States: that it is a sport which, shielded by the merest pretence of Corinthian athleticism, has always been a spectacle of exploitation and exclusion, in which the privilege of membership in the club that is America depends not so much on merit or virtue but on how well black and working class bodies can thrill the white and well-fed faces in the crowd. No fighter's career has embodied that truth more than Mike Tyson: and the circumstances of his most recent bout, an undignified shuffle around the ring with a vacuous YouTube celebrity, tell us nothing good about the state of membership in Club America today.
Like every great black boxer since Jack Johnson, Tyson represented a challenge to white audiences that went beyond his technical superiority. Each fighter has embodied that challenge in a different way, depending on their times: before Tyson, for example, Muhammad Ali confronted racism with a clear moral force that chimed with the age of the Civil Rights movement and black liberation, refusing to fight in Vietnam, changing his name as a result of his engagement with Islam, and entering legend by reclaiming the title he was stripped of in his epic fight with George Foreman in Kinshasa, where his rope-a-dope strategy saw him transition from a dancing trickster into the embodiment of the MLK-era maxim that you had to learn to take a punch to win.
Michael Gerard Tyson, however, came up not in the Civil Rights era but Reagan's America, an epoch of vicious reaction, of the Rambo and Death Wish sequels and 21 Jump Street, an era in which white anxieties about race were now embodied in the monstrous figure of the untouchable street thug, against whom law and decency were powerless. And no thug seemed more unstoppable in the white imagination than Tyson, who went 37-0 in a five year streak from 1985 until his shocking loss to James 'Buster' Douglas in 1990, most of those wins by knockout, sixteen of them in the first round. I can't speak to what Tyson meant to black communities during that time, but I can tell you that many white people feared and hated him, and were desperate to see him defeated - if not by a new Great White Hope then by another black man who could be deemed in some way to embody the alleged virtues we thought Tyson scoffed at. I remember the excitement in the UK when one of the men anointed for that task was our own Frank Bruno, a gentle giant (who would, years later, reveal his struggles with mental illness) who would nevertheless, we let ourselves believe, have the reach and strength to overcome Tyson's brutal punching power and restore the Heavyweight Title to the country that gave the world the Queensberry Rules. Tyson won by TKO in the fifth round.
This desperation to see him defeated was a key element in why so many of us were so fascinated by Tyson. He bought his way into the club by exploiting that fear, eschewing the flamboyant antics of an Ali in favour of a grim, silent stare across the ring at his opponent. Tyson's trainer Cus D'Amato schooled him in the exploitation of fear, both his own and that of his opponent, and during that first incredible run of pro fights, you can see that fear in the eyes of his opponents as, having been sent to the canvas by one of Tyson's devastating strikes, they find themselves having to decide whether or not to get back up and risk taking more or stay down for the count.
But Tyson's fears went deeper than just those he confessed to feeling about his opponents pre-fight: prior to his discovery and training by D'Amato the softly-spoken Tyson had been a target for bullies, and had to fight to defend himself on the streets long before he ever did professionally. To some degree those early fears never left him, and the fame boxing brought him added a new one: the fear of what would happen when he was no longer the unstoppable force, when the audiences who clamoured to see him - many of whom, he knew, were hoping to bear witness to his downfall - would finally see someone club him to the canvas, and watch him fail to find his feet before the referee called ten.
That those fears lay at the root of the ugly behaviour Tyson exhibited during his glory years does not absolve him for that behaviour. He indulged in drugs so heavily that he had to wear a prosthetic to pass piss tests, he brawled with other fighters in the street, and abused his first wife, Robin Givens. And in 1992, with his star fading after the loss to Douglas, he was convicted of the rape of beauty pageant contestant Desiree Washington, and sentenced to six years in prison (of which he served less than three). However much sympathy we might extend Tyson for his troubles, and however much we might praise the humbler, more reflective man he has become in recent years, that rape conviction ought to serve as the terminus.
(That it did not at the time, like the title of Bellows' painting, says more about the ugliness of boxing than it does about that sport's capacity for redemption. Tyson could still fight, could still draw crowds and buys on pay-per-view, and so he was once more declared a member of the club, a privilege which would only seriously start to be rescinded after he was disqualified for biting Evander Holyfield's ears in their second fight. Even then, some venues were still willing to give Tyson a chance, and it would only be after a run of four losses and his refusal to leave his corner for the seventh round of his fight against Kevin McBride that he would find his name definitively crossed out of the rolls. Or so it seemed.)
So why, then, when I contemplate the recent spectacle of Tyson's bout with Jake Paul, do I find myself feeling sorry for him? Well, despite having just written six paragraphs about the man, I don't really even like Tyson all that much. It's just that, in the great tradition of the antihero, I simply despise Jake Paul much, much more.
Why do I hate Paul more than a convicted rapist? Well, for one thing, the only difference between Paul and Tyson on that score may be the word convicted. Paul has already been accused of sexual assault by two different women, and given his praise for confirmed rapist and wife-beater Donald Trump, who Paul has described, in a statement which shows what a sickening orgy of idolatry American evangelicalism has become, as one of 'God's angels' and a 'saviour of the world', I'd say it's a safe bet there will be more. Plus, Paul's father Greg is a huge transphobe, and in my experience there's no stronger predictor of someone being an absolute danger than opposition to trans rights. Despite his nickname of 'The Problem Child', it's fairly clear from everything Greg says about his offspring that Jake is very much a daddy's boy, and hence no fan of bodily autonomy. Hell, let's face it: the man just engaged in an act of elder abuse that was livestreamed on Netflix. That doesn't inspire much confidence in what he gets up to behind closed doors.
But Paul's romp with Tyson disgusts me not just because Paul is a horrible person, a man who cultivates the tattooed and bearded look of the racist freaks who move cocaine out of Fort Bragg, but because Paul's seeking this fight is, in its own way, an application for club membership. Despite a pro career which has consisted largely of fights with other YouTube celebrities and washed up MMA fighters, Paul desperately wants to be considered a legitimate fighter, and has used the once-feared Tyson as a prop for his narcissism. It doesn't matter that nobody who actually gives a damn about boxing was convinced by the spectacle of him winning on points against a 58-year-old man; it doesn't matter that the women's match on the undercard, between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano, is being lauded by real fans as the true main event of the evening: it doesn't matter that saying it in 2024 doesn't mean anything like the same thing it meant in 1989, Jake Paul can say he beat Mike Tyson and to him, that's all that matters. He and Iron Mike are now, according to the record books, both members of this club.
But Jake Paul, the son of a wealthy realtor who grew up in a neighbourhood of suburban mcmansions where, in the words of one of his fellow YouTubers 'all you have to worry about...is how mean the chihuahuas are', was already a member anyway. Where Tyson's father walked out on him and his mother before he could even walk, Daddy Greg supported his little boy's bid for vacuous fame every step of the way. For Tyson, boxing was a lifeline that saved him from the streets and, in all probability, an early grave; for Paul, it's a new revenue stream, a chance to diversify his brand, and, perhaps most importantly of all, a way to feel more like a man.
And in pursuit of that feeling, Paul tempted Tyson not just with money, but the chance to add another professional match to his record. Like the stuffed shirts at Sharkey's, he held out the opportunity to bathe in the spotlight to a man who held none of the advantages that he grew up with, for his own sordid gratification. I was going to end this essay by comparing Paul to one of the most visible figures in the crowd in Bellows' painting, the grotesque, inanely grinning man who seems enraptured by the battle going on before him, but I realised this would be unfair - unfair, that is, to the man in the picture who, whatever else, at least has the decency to be enjoying the combat vicariously. No, there is a better figure with which to compare Mr Paul.
Jake Paul grew up in a mansion, doted on by a parent who facilitated his introduction to the wider world. At some point in his life, Paul discovered combat sports and was enraptured by the sight of men in battle. And he now uses his fortune to pay some of those men to go a few rounds with him, because it makes him feel strong and tough and good about himself, and increases his level of testosterone.
Jake Paul is neither of the men in the ring in Both Members of This Club. He isn't even one of the men in the crowd. Jake Paul is John du Pont.
But then, even that comparison is unfair, really. After all, du Pont didn't need us to watch.
