By Koffi Raphael
The opening salvos ahead of this weekend’s boxing exhibition between Mike Tyson and Roy Jones Jr. have been fired on social media, as the two ring icons exchange jibes while bragging that the fight is set to ‘break PPV records’.
Tyson and Jones will attempt to defy their respective ages when they roll back the years on Saturday inside the Staples Center in Los Angeles for their eight-round exhibition, but what was initially considered to be little more than a pugilistic curiosity appears to have generated significant public interest.
Reports online suggest that the fight has already broken pay-per-view presale records which, according to a source posted by Jones online, means that the vintage contest between the two fifty-somethings is trending towards becoming the “most anticipated PPV fight of the decade”.
Now, this might be slightly misleading given that the current decade is still just 11 months old and a significant portion of that was derailed by the ongoing impact of the coronavirus pandemic. However, for this claim to be true would mean that it would need to outsell February’s rematch between Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder which garnered 1.2 million global sales – a figure thought by most to be out of reach for the Tyson-Jones showdown.
It is more likely that the fight will outsell previous events to have taken place on broadcaster FITE, if not quite hitting the mark established by the premium UFC and boxing events of recent times. That hasn’t stopped both Tyson and Jones from launching into promo mode, though.
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