It was a circus in a way only a marriage between a goofy boxing match and the marketing-minded Dallas Cowboys can make it happen.
On Friday night, content creator/boxer Jake Paul squared off against legendary fighter Mike Tyson. The hype – because this is, after all, boxing involving a YouTube star and 58-year-old man – oversold it all, of course.
And while millions of people watched on Netflix, that didn’t much work, either, as streaming problems blocked the audience from watching the entirety of the semi-match, which featured a huge crowd at dark-curtained AT&T Stadium and mostly saw an exhausted Tyson walk around the ring for eight rounds on his way to a Paul victory.
There were also fights in the stands. And Cowboys star Micah Parsons offering to box Paul. And Michael Irvin announcing his push for Deion Sanders to become the Cowboys’ next coach. And Pacman Jones getting arrested. And Cowboys owner Jerry Jones sitting high above it all, admiring the craziness that is his billion-dollar creation.
Because this was in a very real way a “Cowboys event,” also in attendance to dutifully add to the glitz were the world-famous Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. Before the fight, the DCC did their thing, performing their signature kick line to the tune of “Thunderstruck.”
And Netflix glitched again.
We’ve seen the description of incident – with video now going viral with over 1 million views – going something like this: “One of the cheerleaders kicked a Netflix camera during the pre-fight ceremony.
Um, not exactly. That creates the impression that the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders got in the way of the cameraman, when it fact … and just a bit dangerously … the cameraman got in the way of the Cheerleaders, resulting in a mini-collision that in the end only adds another chapter to Jerry Jones’ Cowboys Circus.
