Some of what I hear: He sucks. He’s the worst. Nah, I ain’t about him. He’s a douchebag. He’s a tool. He’s a punk. Even in a crowd of mostly white male 20-somethings, in one of the most notoriously basic neighborhoods in New York City, I couldn’t find a Paul fan.
I finally find Evan Bilton, 23, in from Boston, previously worked in sales and day-trading, currently taking a year off work to travel around. He’s of the age, and yes, he did grow up watching Jake Paul’s Vine videos (on the short-lived platform where Paul grew to prominence). “I wasn’t a fan, but I’d always see them,” he said. But he found the Jake and Logan Paul show unsavory, at best. “I feel like everyone I know thinks he’s annoying,” says Evan. “But when it comes to social media, what blows up is ragebait. Everyone loves to watch a fucking train on fire.”
Evan also grew up following boxing—he’s Filipino, a Pacquiao fan. He needed to see the fight, but knew once he saw the rules that it wasn’t going to be good. In this respect, Evan was perhaps exactly the right person to spend fight night with
At one point, during a pre-fight interview with Tyson, the entire bar gasps and laughs as Tyson turns away from his interviewer, his almost entirely-bare ass brazenly flashed for the world. I thought about the moment from the Netflix three-part documentary produced for the lead-up to the fight, in which Tyson goes to the mall with his daughter, and, at a candy shop, dispenses sweets straight from a candy scoop into his mouth, and puts the scoop right back. His daughter is aghast. What? Tyson says, arguing that the scoop is now worth far more than it was before. This is not a prizefighter. This is an embarrassing Dad. This is the guy we are hoping will win a fight tonight.
By 11 p.m., the bar is packed wall-to-wall. It’s hard to tell who’s here for the typical Friday night Murray Hill pickup scene, and who’s here for the fight—but the place is, in fact, buzzing, like any bustling metropolitan bar on a Friday night should be, full of people smart enough to live in New York City.
