Mike Tyson finally takes on Jake Paul on Friday night having struck fear into the hearts of opponents for decades.
Tyson, 58, meets Youtuber Paul, three decades his senior, in an epic battle at AT&T Arena in Texas as the boxing great fights professionally for the first time in two decades.
It’s been a lengthy build to the meeting following one postponement, with Tyson still adamant he’ll be the decisive victor, backed by a stellar if at times controversial career that boasts 44 wins by knockout.
Iron Mike remains one of the most feared performers in history but, away from the ring, Tyson is known for his love of professional wrestling, having grown up as a WWE fan and featured in one of the most iconic storylines of the Attitude Era.
WWE forked out £2.5m to him headline the main event as the special enforcer for the world championship match between Shawn Michaels and Stone Cold Steve Austin in Boston.
The brawler himself later admitted to barely seeing a penny of that money owing to his crippling debts at the time.
Austin, of course, went on to defeat Michaels to claim the WWE Championship and, for good measure, Tyson then laid out a crestfallen HBK with a right hand in the middle of the ring.
The fighter was a hit WWE and with wrestling fans, though one man left quaking in his boots at Tyson’s grappling cameo was Eric Bischoff.
As chief of WCW, Bischoff headed up the ultimate competition to Vince McMahon’s WWE and, having snared the likes of Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, Scott Hall and Kevin Nash over to his empire from McMahon’s regularly trounced them in television ratings.
At that stage a key metric of success or failure, the ratings war came as WWE’s Monday Night Raw went head-to-head with WCW Monday Nitro – with the latter coming out on top for 83 consecutive weeks at one stage.
Bischoff was coasting, readily admitting that nothing WWE did on their weekly television left him ruffled, until, that is, Tyson appeared on the scene.
Having The Baddest Man on the Planet in their corner was a massive boost to McMahon, and Bischoff knew it: the writing was on the wall.
Asked about his thoughts on the emergence of the WWE Attitude Era that featured the Tyson run at its outset, Bischoff said: “The seminal moment, the point where I went: ‘Oh crap, we’ve got something to worry about here,’ is the whole Mike Tyson, Vince McMahon, Stone Cold Steve Austin angle.
“Everything that lead up to that I kind of let it run off my back, kind of chuckled a little bit wasn’t too worried about it.
“I wasn’t too concerned until it was so obvious to me that Vince had made a clear decision to abandon the pre-teen market and put all of his eggs in that 18-49 year-old male market, because that’s what I’d dominated for the last [few years].”
The rest was history. WWE soon turned the tide in the ratings battle and, shortly after the turn of the millennium, WCW was out of business, bought by McMahon.
Bischoff famously went on to work for his rival and joined WWE as an on-screen authority figure, while Tyson returned for future cameos on Monday Night Raw and later featured for new rival company AEW in 2020.
