Last modified on Sun 27 Dec 2020 09.33 EST
When Mike Tyson announced he was fighting an eight-round exhibition against Roy Jones Jr over Thanksgiving weekend after floating the idea of a comeback on Instagram for most of 2020, youâd have been forgiven if you dismissed the whole thing as a cynical money grab.
Nostalgia is a powerful narcotic. And the unspoken allure of old-timers exhibitions like Tyson v Jones is that people are paying not for the product on offer but a memory â a feeling. Embedded in the sales pitch of a Tyson fight was the promise of transporting the customer even briefly to a fairer, better time that mostly exists in our memories.