IN HIS classic 1967 work, The Society of the Spectacle, French Marxist theorist, Guy Debord, has this to say: “The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Its sole message is: What appears is good; what is good appears.”

Watching the spectacle of a 58-year-old Mike Tyson’s attempt last weekend to convince himself and the world that he is still someone to be taken seriously in a boxing ring was more than painful — it was dreadful.

There he was, in front of 60,000 spectators (mugs) at the Dallas Cowboys’ Stadium in Texas — laying waste to not only his legacy, but more importantly his dignity. That his opponent in this spectacle of cringe was 27-year-old social media influencer, Jake Paul, merely heightened the sadness involved in what was a slow-motion car crash.

Tyson claimed to be undertaking this fighting for every reason under the sun apart from the actual one  — his $20 million purse. “I want my kids to see me fight,” he proclaimed prior to the event. “They’ve never seen me fight before.” Those poor kids of his could only have sat there, at ringside, appalled at the sight of their dad, his right knee strapped up, moving around the ring with all the grace of a three-legged donkey.

That there had been many within the boxing commentariat who’d claimed, in the lead-up, that Tyson still had what it took to KO the upstart that is Jake Paul; this just goes to prove how low prizefighting has sunk. Money has come to dictate everything about it, it seems, and rather than boxing journalists, more and more we have ourselves courtiers wilfully abandoning the evidence of their own eyes in order to remain part of the masquerade.

Ultimately, whoever sanctioned this grotesque spectacle within the Texas Athletic Commission; he or she deserves to be chastised until the end of time.

The fight lasted eight two-minute rounds. Tyson managed to complete them only because Paul to allowed him to. The chorus of boos emanating from the crowd in attendance by the finale told its own story. For by this point there was no longer any pretending.

Those who’d coughed up for tickets had been hoodwinked and run amok. At this juncture you could almost hear the words of 19th century US politician and showman, PT Barnum, ringing in the background: “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

As a species we are addicted to nostalgia for the past, which this supposed contest was all about monetising. It allowed boxing fans of a certain generation to believe that through Iron Mike, they too could defy father time and vicariously reconnect with their past selves and physical primes. Instead, all that Mike’s faltering efforts to relive the glory days confirmed is that nostalgia is a dangerous impostor. It appears as a friend while in truth being an enemy.

Perhaps there is such a thing as poetic justice after all. It came with the crashing of Netflix’s livestreaming of the event to thus make it an even more unpleasant evening for the millions who’d paid for the right to watch it at home or in a bar somewhere. It was as if the gods of sporting integrity had intervened to say, “Enough!”

Tyson is a study in the allure of redemption. From the hard, crime-ridden streets of Brownsville, New York, as a kid he was marked out to enjoy less of a future than a snowman. A violent street thug in his early teens, it was while in juvenile detention that boxing came into his life as a potential route out of the ghetto. Legendary and by then ageing boxing trainer and philosopher Cus D’Amato saw in him human material that could be forged into greatness. He therefore took him in to become his last and most lasting project.

But taking a young man out of the ghetto is not to be confused with taking the ghetto out of the young man. As ferocious as he was in the ring on the road to becoming the sport’s youngest ever heavyweight world champion at age 20, outside the ring Tyson was out of control. Money and fame did not make him, it left him broken. Nightclubs, parties, drugs, mansions, cars, jewellery — the confusion of excitement with happiness left him lost and adrift.

A failed marriage to a celebrity TV star was followed by a criminal conviction and prison sentence for rape in 1992. You would think that in consequence it would be over. But no — fast forward to today and Tyson strikes an avuncular figure whose popularity is such that at 58 he managed to convince so many that his attempt to climb back into a boxing ring was worthy of stumping up the money to witness.

Paul is not a fighter, he’s a product of a social media age in which fame is its own reward. He is the circus clown with boxing gloves on — the court jester par excellence — who has amassed a huge fortune in the course of entertaining a mass audience desperate for distraction amid the chaos wrought by the beast of late stage capitalism.

Returning to Debord: “The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.”

Or as Cus D’Amato once put it: “To see a man beaten not by a better opponent but by himself is a tragedy.”

If only Mike had listened to Cus and taken heed. If only.