Colin Cowherd Podcast - Jim Gray Previews Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul

a legend, anything can happen. Also that night, a historic rematch between the Brave Bomber Katie Taylor and Amanda The Real Deal Toronto, the last time they met in the ring, history was made, Women's boxing was catapulted in new hypes. Though, these are the fights the world's been waiting for. Don't miss these epic showdowns. It is live from AT and T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. Watch Paul versus Tyson Friday November fifteenth, eight pm Eastern five BM Pacific live on Netflix.

You can also follow the road to the fight by watching Countdown Paul Versus Tyson, a three part documentary series beginning November twelfth, only on Netflix. I am going to interview Jim Gray for about twenty to thirty minutes coming up on Mike Tyson, his career and the fight with Jake Paul, and after that, I'm going to have kind of my preview, my guess on what happens. I've watched these two fight a lot, and we'll talk about that.

But first, Jim Gray, well, he's the longtime host of Let's Go with Bill Belichick, Peter King, and Max Crosby. Multiple Emmy Award winning broadcaster, Jim Gray, and I thought I would start with this. You know, I was very lucky out of college. I got a job in Las Vegas. You and I may have touched on this before. I covered Mike Tyson, like right at the semi beginning of his career, not in the cat skills, but his first

foray into Las Vegas, and he was fascinating. He was pivoting from custom motto to Don King John Horn, if I recall, was in his corner. It was a tumultuous, fascinating time. And I would go to his workouts at the top ranked gym, which is not that far from my work, which is the NBC affiliate in Las Vegas. And again at this point, Tyson was an enigma, fascinating, he was all things boxing. You just it was like nothing we'd seen. It was a hurricane. You followed him

longer than I have. So what am I to make of this fight and his return?

anything that we've ever seen. It's all over the place, you know, from great heights of tremendous greatness to depths of despair and destruction. And so when you say you know this guy has not fought, you know, he threw in the towel in the seventh round, But Kevin McBride did that fight on showtime, and before that he had lost to Danny Williams. Couldn't get off the canvas. So as far as a competitive fight, we're coming up on nineteen twenty years twenty years, nineteen years ago, since that

took place now, he fought very very well. We did a fight with him in COVID and I broadcast that fight. I believe I broadcast that fight with mar Ronalo and Snoop Dogg. This was before Snoop was a commentator everywhere for sports. You know, he's obviously a very famous rapper and musician. And we did a fight in the Staples Center with about twenty people there against Roy Jones Junior.

And Jake Paul was on that card. Jake Paul fought that night against Nate Robinson, the former slam Dunk champion, who was a little he could jump out of the building, you remember him, call it, and he knocked him out and that was kind of the birth. It was the first or second fight in his in his boxing career,

a YouTube guy, and he knocked him out bad. And I didn't know Jake, and I was only supposed to do the post fight interview for Tyson and for Roy Jones Jr. And they asked me to go up in the ring and I just said to him, this man is hurt, this man needs medical attention. Don't be a jackass, be gracious, don't be whatever it is. That's made you famous. And he looked at me and he was really calm, and he was very gracious, and he was very he

had the proper decor him. Got a text from him about four or five days later thanking me just for talking him. You know, he wasn't off a ledge, but just for being you know, for trying to help him. But I don't know Jake. And now Mike Tyson, you know, he is facing a guy when he say, how do you assess this? He's fifty eight years old, he's in fantastic shape. I mean, he's just been terrific. Now he had a bad ulcer that caused cancelation of this fight

and was hospitalized. And so you know, when you're at this age and you're getting hit in the stomach and you're trying to fight against a kid who's thirty one years younger, you know, anything can happen in here. And the guy's you know, the guy's dedicated his life the last four or five years to try and be, you know, a terrific boxer. He's not skilled, he's not of that ilk. He's not anything that anybody's going to ever say, you know, uh oh, in terms of professional fighter, but in terms

of a boxer, his skills have improved now. Having said that, on top of it, Colin and I know this is long winded. I don't think you want to get hit by Mike Tyson at any point in your life. I don't care when. I don't care how old he is. This guy is menacing and he is in fantastic shape. And to get hit by him at any point. I've seen what he's been doing with his sparring partners. Seen what yeh, and it's menacing? Is he iron? Mike? No, you want to get hit by that. Ever, I don't

care if you're twenty seven, seventeen or fifty seven. No.

in the stomach by a mule. Okay, So that guy's a professional fighter who had a lot of fights, who won belts in all kinds of divisions and was terrific going all the way back to when he was robbed in the Olympics in Soul, Korea. So Roy Jones Junior knows. So I kind of had the opposite feeling, not to be disagreeable with you, I kind of thought Mike and Roy put on a great performance in the middle of COVID that was interesting. It's not supposed to be what

they were, so yeah, who is what they were? No, Mike Tyson isn't going to walk into the ring and just look at the guy and he's gonna get knocked out. I don't believe that. I think that Jake Paul, if he's smart, he's probably gonna try and avoid Mike Tyson for four or five rounds and see if he gets tired. Yeah, and then see what happens. If he plays nice, it might be a nice exhibition. If he doesn't play nice, I think Mike's gonna try and you know, knock him out. Yeah.

seriously and being dedicated and running every day. So I look at Jake Paul and I think I don't know how gifted an athlete he is, but I think he can take a punch. I mean, I mean, the only thing I thought was avoid Mike for the first two rounds. That would be my strategy if Mike punches himself out anxiety. He's older. But I mean, I mean, do you think Jake Paul in the ring? Could it hurt Tyson?

don't agree with that at all. I think that he's attracted new eyeballs to the sport, that he's gotten fans who would have never participated, never paid attention, and he's gotten them to pay attention to him. USA Boxing has put him on board. Don't know if that's good or bad or what that means. But they see something in him that can help the sport, and the sport you don't want to say it's on life support because it can't kill itself. They've tried, they've tried, and it always

survives and it always has an audience. And if you look back over the past wee twenty five years, Colin, if you look at the highest paid athlete over the past twenty five years, at the top of the list in many of those years, you're going to find a boxer, whether it was Floyd Mayweather, Manny Pacquiao, or now Canelo Algorisk making more than all these guys who play soccer, more than all these guys who play in the NFL, in the NBA, and they don't have a single a

single endorsement. So we're talking about all being earned on the field of play in the ring in this instance. So boxing on its big nights still attracts a major audience, a worldwide, major audience. So I think what Jake Paul is doing is attracting people who would not be watching the sport otherwise because it's not mainstream because paperlevision has taken over, HBO left the game and that was very destructive for boxing because it took one hundred and fifty

to two hundred million dollars budget out of it. Now, Showtime, where I was for thirty seven years, left boxing after thirty seven years and the network closed down of sports, and so there is another one hundred and fifty million. When you take three hundred million dollars out of a sport that's in the United States, it's impossible. It's impossible for that to be replaced. And ESPN doesn't do it. With Top Rank they've gotten out, Fox has basically gotten out.

Top Rank is still involved, but the fights are minimal on ESPN and the Zone hasn't caught on in this country, so there is no outlet anymore. So the sport is suffering and it's in peril for the twenty twenty eight Olympics here because the federation is in such disarray. So right now it's not on the docket. Hopefully that will get corrected. So what Jake Paul is doing is helping

the sport and people. I don't say people should get behind it because that's a personal choice, but fans of boxing should should not be naysayers of Jake Paul.

who was nothing. He took nothing and made it into something, and he's getting a whole lot of attention. I don't know exactly what he does or doesn't do on YouTube that attracts his attention, because I'm not following him, and that's not you know, that's not my area of expertise or knowledge. But whatever he's done is put him in this point where he's able to go out and make a ton of money, and so God bless him. I applauded.

look at what Sean White has done for years. None of this when we were growing up, would have ever even been considered anything. You look at somebody on the mountain. And I grew up in Denver, so I was on a ski mountain. You know, every week from when I was four years old on you saw somebody doing something like this and they were a freak of nature. Now it's what they do. It's mainstream, it's snowboarding, it's all of these things, skateboarding. So will they get into this.

I think they're in the business of trying to attract eyeballs, and they have hundreds of millions of subscribers, and this fight will be watched by a ton of people because it's not pay per view. If you have a subscription to Netflix, you're going to get exposed. And who in their life who's a sports fan, who's a sports fan, doesn't want to say that they saw Mike Tyson fight.

And for all of this younger generation who didn't, who've been told by their fathers and their grandfathers about what a great sport boxing was, and how this guy took everything by storm, and how he was one of the most famous people on the planet, how he was the only guy who attracted an audience after all Lee, even though Larry Holmes was a great fighter, and there were a lot of great fighters, and we had Hagler and Hearn's,

but they were in different weight divisions and lower weight divisions. Here was a heavyweight champion who captivated the world and then his life, you know, was played out in front of Barbara Walters and Robin Gibbons and beating up Don King and going to jail and coming out of jail and fighting again and biting a guy's here. I mean,

just so much has happened. So Netflix says, you know, this guy's a captivating character who's rebuilt himself, who has paid his debt to society, and who is in movies and he's likable now and he picked himself up and he's better tomorrow than he was yesterday. And so I think that's the business that they're in. And if that's Mike Tyson and that's Jake Paul and that can do it, great, If that's a roast with Tom Brady, great, If that is an NFL game, you know, I think they're going

to be involved. And by the way, the rights for this, for how many people they're going to get to watch, this is gonna be a heck of a lot more, a heck of a lot less in terms of what they have to pay for, a heck of a lot more eyeballs than some garden variety NBA game on Thursday night.

a little more mobile. I always thought Mike his movement was pretty good when he trained, when he really had his best trainers, I thought his movement was really really good. When Mike didn't wasn't in shape, or didn't train as well, he kind of lost his jab. He was like a He was like Adam Dunn. A lot of home runs, a lot of strikeouts. There wasn't a lot of nuance

to it. But I do think Mike, he'll have some limited mobility, will it look I have a feeling it'll look a little like George Foreman's later fights.

he was training over the Raiders facility. I went to watch him train, and it's impressive for you know, he was he was also running sprints, so his movement looks pretty good, and you know it was slowed a little bit by the hospital visit. But he's come back now and he looks terrific. We had him on on the broadcast yesterday on the radio show with Belichick, and he

took off his shirt and it was unbelievable. I mean, it's it's hard to believe that, you know, a fifty eight year old guy can look like that, and so, you know, I don't want to say, you know that just because he looks good. Bruce Selbyn, you know, it was an unbelievable specimen, you know, Oh yeah, it was an un you know, and then they came into the ring and they got clovered.

a moment left. They're just different than us. You could go get Rory McElroy at seventy five and say eighty, give me your three wood and he could hit it. He just wouldn't want the heat for four rounds, right. I think Mike is gonna have moments that we're gonna go. I just I like Mike in this fight. I do, how about you?

feed it to him when to eat his children. Threatened to kill me one day in an interview postfight Colin, I'm gonna kill you and I'm gonna kill Don King, and then thirty seconds later he kissed me on my cheek, and I'm still trying to figure out what was more disturbing. So you know, I'm not objective here. I love Mike. When I got into the Boxing Hall of Fame, he came and did my induction and so you know, I want I want to see Mike win. I want to see Mike do well. I want nothing but the best

for Mike, and so do I think he can win? Yes?

Do I hope he wins? Yes? My real hope is that he's not hurt and that he's able to perform well, give the fans what they want, and that everybody walks away, you know, happy with what they've seen, and that Jake Ball, you know, feels good about the opportunity that he gave gave to Mike to make a bunch of money at a point in his life where he probably didn't think any of this would be available, and that he's able to go on with his career and further the sport.

That's my hope. Intellectually, I don't think anybody just walks into the ring and beats Mike Tyson. Emotionally, I'm nervous. I'm nervous for him, but.

I'm twenty four years old, I'm in Vegas and it was the fastest growing city. And you know, I don't gamble. I'm a small town, rural kid. And I followed Tyson and I saw a couple of fights. Hagler, Hearns Live. The greatest fight I've ever been to I saw. I just I just feel like it was a different life. But I will say this, Mike Tyson fights in his prime. It's the only sporting event I've gone to that makes me nervous. Interesting it super Bowls don't, Final Fours don't.

There was something about the energy of it that if you've never been to a big fight, and this will be a big fight, there is of all the stuff you've covered, I always felt boxing felt different.

there is nothing like it anywhere. The only thing that remotely compares to me, and I've been lucky enough to be at fourteen of them, is the opening ceremony of the Olympics, when the torch is lit. That's the only feeling of anticipation that compares to a big prize fight. And big prize fights happened a lot more than every four years, so once twice a year you get that feeling. And there's even like we had it for Deontay Wilder

and and Tyson Fury in their matches. Oh I went to you know, when he came in in that carriage and they're playing whatever the song was, it was pretty you know, there's nothing like this feeling and the anticipation and everybody's standing up and they got their phones now in their cheir and then they're singing and it's it's pretty wild, and I think we're going to have that at Texas Stadium. I'm sure they'll be whatever fifty thousand plus people in the stadium, which is a huge crowd.

It's cavernous, So it's going to probably not have the same feeling of like the MGM Grand Garden or T Mobile or you know, a smaller a smaller venue maybe perhaps outside at the we call it the Punch Bowl

the old Stuff Hub Center down in Carson. But I think that that feeling, Colin, that feeling is going to be there for this, just because hey, he's Mike Tyson and it's getting so much publicity there advertising this on the NFL, on Fox, on NBC during Sunday Night Football, Monday Night Football, every time you turn on ESPN, you know, they're running these ads and Netflix, you know, with all of these millions of subscribers, you know, on a Friday

night in the middle of the fall, I think November fifteenth, I don't know what college football it's up against, but I think that this fight is going to attract a tremendous amount of attention, and we just hope that you know that it's entertaining. And again, I just don't want to see Mike get hurt or Jake, I don't I don't want to see him get hurt either, you know, I just want to see, let's have some fun with this. I hope that that's the spirit that it's created in.

I think that Mike is now at a point. He says that old iron Micha will never be back the guy who's vicious, mean, who you know, has a screw loose that he doesn't want to go back there. But he says, I don't have to be at that point internally to be able to beat this guy. So be interesting. What do you think Do you think that there's gonna be a huge audience for this?

ever seen. I took my wife to Connor McGregor, Mayweather, I said, you and she loved it, so they're they're there. I tell I've been so lucky in my life and now I do more, uh, you know, opinion than actually reporting. Right, we all know that I've transitioned to a more of an opinionist years ago. But if you if you told me I got three events a year, one of them would be a big fight. I saw six Pacquiao fights, you know. I whenever I was near Vegas or in

Vegas and he fought. I went to Pakiao fights and and got great seats and paid for him. Sometimes I didn't care. I just I like these events all be watching. I'm fascinated by it.

it's it's been. It's it's been a terrific, terrific professional existence and I've loved every minute of it. And the fighters are unlike any other athletes Colin and it's not even close. They're in there by themselves. They put it

all on the line of themselves. It's all dependent on them. Yes, they do have good trainers, and they do have good managers, and they do have good people around them, but at the end of the day, they're naked by themselves, in there wearing a pair of shorts with a couple of gloves on, and it's only up to them. They have

to make their own adjustments on the fly. They have to, you know, overcome all sorts of obstacles, and you know, it's always pretty interesting to me, you know, the level of criticism that a fighter can take for what it is their performance is in loss and in victory. It's astonishing to me because there's not a person on the planet who's doing what we do or who's paying for a seat. They could last in there for ten seconds, yet they have all of the answers outside of it.

You know, unlike all of us who've played football, basketball or baseball growing up, you don't play boxing. You don't play boxing. You play boxing, you're going to end up with no teeth in the gutter on the street. You don't play it, you better perfected, Jim.

I think he agreed to two minute rounds. I think that's an advantage for Tyson. He can come out swinging. I think if these if it was ten three minute rounds, I would take Jake Paul but I think the advantage for Tyson is a shorter fight and shorter rounds. Specifically, you've watched UFC fights, even the best fighters in their prime, You can get gas by the end of these rounds, right, and UFC has longer rounds. Obviously, the three rule changes for the fight, and you can tell me who you

think they benefit. The boxers will wear fourteen ounce gloves instead of ten ounce gloves, probably an advantage for Jake Paul, bigger gloves for Tyson. The rounds are two minutes instead of three. That's then advantage for Tyson. And the fight only goes up to eight rounds instead of ten or twelve. Again, I think that's an advantage for the older fighter. My money would be on Tyson. If it gets to round five or six of eight, then check out the betting odds.

I'd probably go Jake Paul. I don't think Mike will have for very long anyway, a ton of mobility. I think he'll move pretty well in the first couple rounds. And again, Tyson at his best, at his prime, had a jab. Many of Tyson's later fights he was a cleanup hitter. He was just swinging for the fence and that could be effective enough. You know, Jake Paul. I think if I was Jake Paul, I would be more nervous than if I was Mike Tyson facing Jake Paul.

So I think I think Jake Paul is going to be pretty reluctant, is going to kind of stay away for a round or two. Micha will be the aggressor. What you hope is Mike doesn't punch himself out early being the aggressor. If I was Jake Paul, you know my feeling would be I'm the younger athlete. I'm going to push this thing to five or six rounds and move around. But I also think Jake Paul is going to have some anxiety early. Now Jake Paul may look at it and think, well, that's what Tyson thinks. I'm

going to go right after him. I'm going to go right after Tyson. Stun him, get him back on his heels, work him up, piss him off, get Mike to be a little untethered. That's possible. Longer goes. I think everybody would take the younger kid. But you know, Jake's only twenty seven years old, so you're in your athletic Prime from about twenty six, maybe about twenty five to thirty one thirty two, So you know, Jake's in tremendous shape. But and I've always taken his boxing career. He's ten

and one seriously. I watched him fight Tommy Freury, Anderson Silva, Tyron Woodley, Nate Robinson was the big knockout. His only loss was a split decision to Tommy Fury, who's not a great fighter.