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| Tyson, here with his entourage from Wednesday, is going to be a spark point Photo Credit: Lee South/AllElitEWrestling.com |
I guess that more than anything would explain why he stuck around Jacksonville to appear in a show-closing angle where he and Chris Jericho, All Elite Wrestling's ostensible biggest star right now, had to be pulled apart by not only their entourages but by the rest of the locker room to sell the drama of two titans of combat sports coming to near blows. If I'm speaking frankly, the show did more of a favor to Tyson than it did to Jericho or AEW. It's not 1998 anymore; Tyson isn't a household name for the target audience unless the target audience is supposed to be old fuckfaces like myself. I imagine that Cody, Tony Khan, and the rest of the office wants to have me aboard, but you can't look at WWE's average viewing age and think that's the paradigm you want when wrestling has always been popular when the eyes skewed younger. If anything, Jericho and Cody gave the proverbial rub to Tyson to remind people that he is a bad, bad man who deserves your attention, your awe when he finally steps back into a boxing ring. I'm sure the eventual match will do the same.
One cannot notice the HBO Max logo festooning the AEW ring and not think that Tyson's continued presence in the company is leading to his comeback fight appearing on the premium cable network, if not the streaming portion, the regular channel you get with your subscription. All the signs are pointing in that direction. It's an exceedingly "TNA bringing in Tito Ortiz and King Mo Lawal to promote Bellator on Spike TV" kind of move, but it's not going to be nakedly seen as such because AEW has gained the benefit of the doubt in a year's time. And the Tyson shenanigans SHOULD be entertaining at least, which is the baseline. Who cares if they're trying to sell you something different if the advertisement ends up being great, right? At the minuscule least, Tyson's presence has already energized the base given how positively his pull-apart with Jericho was received. Energizing the base is a good thing, because you want the people watching your show to enjoy it.
However, most of the reaction to the stunt thus far has been two-pronged. The first is "the stunt is good because it's going to get eyes on the product." The second is "the stunt is bad because AEW is now parading a rapist around in front of everyone." Both are takes that seem reductive on the surface. One is more valid than the other (it's the latter take), but I also feel like both need to be addressed critically going forward. Tyson isn't going away, not at least until he has a confrontation at least or a match at best to resolve the issue he started with Jericho Wednesday.
The idea that Tyson was brought in to bring "new eyes" onto the product is a fallacy by the fans to believe at best as pointed out by the first couple of paragraphs in this post. If Khan really believed Tyson was the same key in 2020 that he was in 1998, then he's a fool at worst. The idea that Tyson moves any needle for fans who aren't already watching AEW or wrestling right now is Vince Russo thinking at its worst, and it fundamentally misunderstands the hierarchy of wrestling fandom, coined by K. Sawyer Paul on an episode of his old International Object podcast. Sometimes, I'm not even sure if he believes in it as much as I have come to over the years, but I will run it down again here. Imagine it as a pyramid.
At the bottom of the pyramid is the base, the Fans of Wrestling. As the base, the foundation of a building is the most important part, the fans of actual wrestling are the most important part, because they are the ones who aren't easily shed even in lean times. On the higher end, they're more likely to be knowledgeable on history, appreciate the matches on a more appreciative level, and think critically about what they're watching. On the lower end, they may not invest a lot of brainpower in wrestling, but they are more likely to look for and feel the magic of narrative catharsis in wrestling than in anything else. No matter where they are on the spectrum, they get wrestling. They buy merchandise. They pay for more than just the big special events. For them, wrestling is a or THE main form of release.
The middle group consists of the Fans of Personalities. You can't have a wrestling boom without this group built upon a strong base of the prior group. These people flock to wrestling because their fan friends told them about a wrestler or they saw a wrestler in a movie or on a television show, and they follow them on the strength of who they are. They may become Fans of Wrestling; they usually don't though. Whether it be the en masse magnetism towards a "Stone Cold" Steve Austin or Hulk Hogan or a smaller movement of attraction like the people who were invariably hooked when they saw an Orange Cassidy match before 2019 (at least now, with him in AEW, he could blow up huge), they are at least invested in someone on the show on a level that can, at peak, rival the intensity of the Fan of Wrestling.
The capstone group of fans, the most easy-come, easy-go fans, are the ones in the Fans of Movements group. They watch wrestling because it's what everyone else is watching, and they need to have something to talk about on Twitter or Facebook nowadays, or in the heyday of the last real wrestling boom, around the watercooler. This group is the one coveted the most by dipshits like Russo because what they see with them is vibrant cashflow and not the result of a strong foundation at the bottom. Fans of Wrestling are not easily lost, but chasing the Fans of Movements group when you don't have an energized base, let alone a strong figure for the Fans of Personalities to latch onto, is like trying to become a millionaire off Three-Card Monty.
How this all cycles back to Tyson is that AEW actually is in a position where it has a strong base and perhaps people watching who are Fans of Personalities with Jericho, Jon Moxley, Darby Allin, Orange Cassidy, and Hangman Page in prominent roles. It's certainly not at a level where you can consider it in a boom period, because it's still struggling to split viewers with NXT rather than building an audience of its own. It's hard to gauge who exactly is watching wrestling in 2020 because so few people tune in to watch anything live anymore compared to 1998, and while DVR numbers can be impressive, the networks rarely look at them favorably because they can't exactly be monetized with the ability to fast-forward past commercials. Still, one can reasonably assume that for a wrestling promotion only broaching its second year of operations, AEW is in a good place.
So that begs the question of "To whom does Mike Tyson appeal?" In 1998, he was a mainstream star, a dominant fighter who was just released from a stint in prison to attempt rejuvenation of a heavyweight division that had been stagnant for a decade since, well, Tyson lost his first fight to Buster Douglas. He was the perfect catalyst for an era that was predicated on edgy, bold, and borderline offensive presentation of professional wrestling that would capture the rapt audience the Attitude Era needed to sustain wild numbers for two-three years. In 2020, his cache is no longer mainstream. He's a niche name anymore who appeals to 80s and 90s kids like me, and even then, only a percentage of those kids who remember either Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, his career, or that crystallized moment in time when he got in a shoving match with Steve Austin on RAW. He's there to energize the base, whether or not people think he's there or not.
His success in that department won't or shouldn't be in viewers gained over the long term. Much like with David Arquette, who returned to wrestling after his acting career started to dry up, his success is going to be measured in how much of himself he's willing to put into it. Arquette has totally rehabilitated his image as the emblematic joke of late-era World Championship Wrestling by throwing his entire self into his wrestling dates and becoming a wrestler, not just an actor playing wrestler. In return, he was granted respect of fans and wrestlers alike, and people talk about him glowingly now. If Tyson treats his future AEW dates solely like an advertisement for a hypothetical HBO megafight, he'll be reviled and AEW will suffer. If he puts himself out there, lets Jericho direct the whole thing, and has both respect for the business and fun with his time, people will give him the same treatment as they gave Arquette.
OF course, other people do not want to give him any credit for the second reason listed above, that they see him as a trigger because of his 1992 rape conviction. His assault of Desiree Washington, the mere mention of it, can be a trigger to the countless number of assault victims in this country whose attackers have not faced a tenth of the repercussion that Tyson has for his rape. It is not my place to tell anyone who has trauma that their triggers are invalid. I can only speak from my own point of view. Tyson is different from other accused rapists in that he was actually convicted of his crime and served time in prison, which is supposed to be a place not just for punishment, but rehabilitation.
Too much in this country do people look at a criminal, especially a Black criminal, as someone to be punished continually, that punishment is the goal. It is never supposed to end, which is codified into law, because companies are allowed to discriminate against people with criminal records. It's not just the slings and arrows from people who refuse to believe a person who went to prison could have rehabilitated, especially if they're Black. It's not enough that someone like, say, Michael Vick, who has the leverage and privilege of celebrity, still gets massive protests of being a dog killer despite serving time and reversing course on animals to become an advocate against the thing he didn't go to prison for but what was why he went to prison on a RICO charge, dogfighting. His leverage of celebrity got him a job in the NFL again, but a lot of other reformed convicts, especially Black ones, don't get that chance. Tyson has the same leverage of celebrity and hasn't been wanting for money either.
Then again, framing this as a fight between Black people chewed up and spit out by the prison-industrial complex and rape victims sucks because you're pitting two groups of victim against each other for the benefit of the White supremacist patriarchy. It shouldn't be framed as one group needing to be lifted above another, but as two groups that might need to have a conversation with each other. Justice underserves both groups, and the ways that manifest horrifically. But as someone hasn't felt the sting of the former and will hopefully never have to be abused in the way that the latter group has, I'm probably not the arbiter of the terms of this conversation.
But I do think it needs to be mentioned that Tyson did pay for his crime, as horrific as it was. For an offense such as rape where fewer than two percent of all those who are accused even make it to trial, it feels like that's significant. AEW didn't just hire someone with skeletons in his closet for this spot. They're not Impact Wrestling, who has an entire roster full of people who are accused of terrible shit and haven't faced a single consequence. When the dust clears, they aren't flaunting hiring a scumbag. Should that count for something? Well, it should but the human mind works in confusing ways, and AEW might even lose viewers. It's a consequence they knew they were getting into, or at least should have known they were getting into. It's a difficult situation, but it's one I can't necessarily fault AEW for even if I am sympathetic to people who may be scared off from the move.
The whole situation feels like a delicate balance that I hope Khan and Cody and the rest of the gang did for reasons other than trying to duplicate success of another wrestling company. Trying to do things because WWE did them, especially in a bygone era where most of the fans present have given up on wrestling for good, would feel like a tone deaf move that was out of the spirit of how they build the company in their first year. Hopefully, for as many hot takes this is going to invite and as much of a social justice pinch point as Tyson can be, it's something they have an actual plan for.
