The 42 Reporting from Dallas

Gavan Casey is reporting from Dallas, Texas on Katie Taylor’s bout this weekend, you can follow all the build up to the fight on The42. 

JAMBO’S BBQ SHACK in West Arlington describes itself as “the best BBQ on the Bankhead Highway” and who am I to argue?

I’m very much a stranger to this part of Texas as was laid plain to me when I was trying to pay for my brisket on Tuesday afternoon.

The card machine prompted me to choose between euro and dollars and truth be told, I’ve never really understood what I’m supposed to do in that situation so I bottled it and asked the Texan waitress if the restaurant would have a preference.

She responded, “Ummm, I dunno. What’s euros?”

Texas is not a world of its own but a galaxy full of them.

Friday night will take us to nearby ‘Jerryworld’, or ‘The Death Star’ as it’s less affectionately known: the Dallas Cowboys’ state-of-the-art AT&T Stadium, opened by the NFL franchise’s outspoken owner Jerry Jones in 2009, is currently the subject of ridicule on a national scale.

The way in which the evening sun beams through the giant stadium windows routinely blinds NFL players as they attempt to catch the football, and one such comical instance involving a Cowboys receiver on Sunday has sparked serious debate as to whether The House that Jerry Built could use a pair of curtains behind each endzone.

Jones’ response to the issue on Sunday was to slam the front door. “Well let’s tear the damn stadium down and build another one!”, said the 82-year-old. “Are you kidding me? Everybody has got the same thing. Every team that comes in here has the same issues. I’m saying, the world knows where the sun is. You get to know that almost a year in advance. Someone asked me about the sun. What about the sun? Where’s the moon?”

There were no half-measures, either, when the Cowboys’ star receiver CeeDee Lamb was asked by the Dallas Morning News on Monday if the stadium needs curtains. “Yes, 1,000 per cent,” was Lamb’s reply.

Their record standing at 3-6, and with quarterback Dak Prescott now ruled out for the year, the Cowboys’ season is effectively already over ahead of their home meeting with cross-state neighbours the Houston Texans on Monday night.

As such, there is only one show in town over the coming days, and irrespective of what happens between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul in Friday night’s main event, it will be considered by most Dallas residents to be only the second biggest sporting disgrace to take place at AT&T Stadium in 2024.

The extent to which Friday’s boxing bill, whose chief-support bout is a rematch between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano, has actually captured the public’s imagination is debatable.

The city and its surrounds are saturated in promotional material and yet, whereas the stadium can cater to 100,000 fans with standing room on the pitch, the sounds are that they’ll be lucky to break 60,000 tickets. (It’s worth noting that this kind of turnout would still return a massive gate, and likely the biggest ever for a boxing event outside of Las Vegas).

On the ground here for the most part, there is a near-ubiquitous awareness of the event but it ranges in enthusiasm between indifference and morbid curiosity. Neither of these sentiments would necessarily compel somebody to buy one of the remaining tickets from which they’d require the Webb Space Telescope to see the goings-on in the ring.

Anyway, isn’t car-crash television exactly what Netflix is for in this day and age?

And that is surely the broad appeal of this main event between a former-Disney-star-turned-YouTuber and a 58-year-old former heavyweight champion who neither looks nor sounds like he belongs in a boxing ring: sometimes we can’t help but slow down and stare at the wreckage.

It would take something far more powerful than the Webb Space Telescope to locate my interest as to what will happen when these two men try to punch each other in the head but considering the sheer peculiarity of it, I can understand why people would be driven to watch and find out.

It should be stressed that this fight is not a symptom of boxing’s ails but rather a rare example in which the most exploitative of sports is actually being exploited itself.

Jake Paul and his MVP Promotions company is running this show in conjunction with Netflix. Mike Tyson was permitted by the Texas State Athletic Commission to box eight, two-minute rounds in which both men will wear 14-ounce gloves as opposed to the conventional 10-ounce padding for heavyweights. ‘Boxing’ has, for the most part, been omitted from this equation.

Paul and Tyson could equally have invited Vladimir Putin for a game of nods and volleys and Fifa would have been powerless to prevent them from charging people at the door.

So, when a portion of Netflix’s 280-odd million global subscribers tune in to watch the main event at around 4am Saturday morning Irish time, the questions should not be for the sport of boxing to answer but for everyone else.

Many people in Ireland will flick on their Netflix app about an hour beforehand to watch Katie Taylor face Amanda Serrano in their long-awaited rematch. Some might even feel uncomfortable in doing so. The extent to which one will be able to detach Taylor and Serrano’s 10 rounds of pure boxing from its freak-show surrounds is subjective.

Did Jake Paul back Serrano to the hilt in an effort to legitimise his own infiltration of professional boxing or because he truly admires her as an athlete? The only logical conclusion at which I can ever arrive is that it was probably a bit of both, which feels infuriatingly like a cop-out.

But it’s tough to make the case that Paul has ‘exploited’ Serrano when it’s understood that he’ll pay her somewhere in the region of $8 million on Friday, which is between seven and eight times as much as the Puerto Rican was paid to fight Taylor in their memorable Madison Square Garden main event two years.

Taylor’s side of the coin will be worth over $6 million, which is just under three times her pay for their original bout.

And that’s where the buck stops with Taylor-Serrano II: they ran away with the circus, they weren’t conscripted.

To have expected them to turn down this opportunity in the hope that they would eventually land another main event somewhere for significantly less pay is to ask a lot of a couple of prizefighters in their mid to late 30s — although it doesn’t make anyone wrong to ask.

The contention against them is that they are legitimising an event which is beyond reproach, and that by playing second fiddle to Paul and Tyson they are damaging the cause towards which they have each worked tirelessly for two decades.

The argument in their favour is that by attaching themselves to this event and trading leather on Netflix, their inevitably high-quality bout will only elevate the female code in the eyes of a broader, more passive global audience than would be typical for a boxing event.

Whatever their respective personal sentiments, if indeed they’ve scrutinised any of these factors at all, Taylor and Serrano would be within their rights to feel it’s time to collect from a sport that owes them a debt more expensive than gratitude.

Depending on your persuasion, you can always ex out of the Netflix app and roll back over to sleep as soon as one of their arms is raised in the wee hours of Saturday morning.

Soon afterwards, there will be a car crash just off the Bankhead Highway in Arlington, Texas, and you may wish to steer clear of it.

Written by Gavan Casey and originally published on The 42 whose award-winning team produces original content that you won’t find anywhere else: on GAA, League of Ireland, women’s sport and boxing, as well as our game-changing rugby coverage, all with an Irish eye. Subscribe here.