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In what may not be his most popular take ever, combat sports insider Ariel Helwani, who worked on the Netflix broadcast of the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul fight has said people should not be complaining about anything that took place Friday because they didn’t pay for it. Helwani acknowledged that people do, in fact, pay to stream Netflix, but that this broadcast wasn’t like an old-school pay-per-view where you had to pay directly for it to watch.
Additionally, Helwani took major exception to anyone who said they were “conned” by the fight. Helwani addressed all of this on the latest edition of The Ariel Helwani Show.
“There’s two things that kind of get under my skin when I see the aftermath,” Helwani started out. “Number one, it’s the people who, never talk about boxing, don’t watch boxing, don’t care about boxing, don’t have a DAZN subscription, aren’t watching Top Rank on a Saturday or Friday night, aren’t watching PBC on Amazon, and I see them saying, ‘we need to stop being conned by this, we need to stop falling for this, we need to stop giving this our attention so that boxing can clean itself up once and for all’.
“You don’t watch boxing to begin with. You don’t give a sh** about boxing. And you weren’t conned by anything. The only thing that you did was convince yourself that Mike Tyson was going to show up as the 1987 version of himself and turn back the clock and shut up the guy that, for whatever reason, you can’t stand.”
Helwani vehemently disagrees with the takes that people didn’t get what they tuned in for. His believe is that people had an expectation just for the Tyson-Paul fight and if they were let down, it was their own fault.
“You’re the sucker,” he said. “You convinced yourself of this. No one conned you, no one told you that he was going to turn back the clock, and no one told you that this was the best of boxing. Because if you stuck around for Barrios-Ramos, if you stuck around or showed up early for Taylor-Serrano, you would have seen the best of boxing. And the issue with boxing over the years has been put one fight at the top and nothing on the bottom. This card didn’t do that.”
Helwani pointed out that the second battle between Taylor and Seranno will go down as the most watched women’s sporting event in U.S. history. “That’s incredible,” he said. “But spare me the, ‘we were conned again’.
Where Helwani went next may not sit well with some as he tried to make the point that most people have Netflix anyway and didn’t go out and purchase it just for this fight. “You know why you weren’t conned?” Helwani asked. “You didn’t pay a cent for it. It was part of your Netflix subscription. If you would have paid $70, and Dana White said it himself, you have a leg to stand on. This was essentially free. No one told you to sign up. You all had it already.”
Where Helwani went next may be something he wants to rethink. For those watching social media the night of the fight it was clear people struggled to maintain a quality connection. While reports say over 800,000 people filed reports about troubles, it is fairly obvious the number of people affected was way more than that.
Similar to how Netflix has handled it, Helwani made it sound like it wasn’t a big deal and who cares anyway, since you didn’t “pay” for it.
“And so, this idea that you were conned, this idea that, oh my God, the stream, this and that, yeah, of course that was annoying, but you didn’t pay for it,” Helwani attempted to rationalize. “It was all on the house. It was all extra added value.”
“You got great fights beforehand, and you got what you should have expected in the main event.”
