Mike Tyson was doomed from the start. Imagine the optics of a legendary Junior Olympian and world champion pummeling a YouTuber like Jake Paul—hard to come out of that looking good. People would be saying, “Congrats, Mike, you just knocked out a guy who unironically vlogs his breakfast.” Winning was a PR disaster waiting to happen. But losing? Well, that’s just a tragedy with a payday. At least then, Mike could pocket the cash and cling to some scraps of dignity—though watching a titan like him get decked by a guy who made his career pranking strangers would sting more than a right hook.

Still, the real comedy gold wasn’t the fight itself. No, it was all the suckers who put their hard-earned cash on Tyson, thinking the universe still made sense. Watching their hopes (and bank accounts) get KO’d? Now that was the real entertainment. And maybe Mike knew.

As the saying goes, “we’ll never truly know what happens behind closed doors”—especially when those doors are locked with NDAs. Mike Tyson’s camp reportedly had everyone sign on the dotted line, and Jake Paul’s team followed suit. So, was the fight rigged? Who knows. Maybe Mike and Jake were just following in the grand tradition of legally silencing people—Donald Trump did it with Stormy Daniels, and Bill Clinton had his own NDA drama. At this point, boxing might just be taking pointers from politics: less punches, more paperwork. Whether the punches were fake or real, we can only hope the payouts weren’t.