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As we sheepishly sift through the wreckage of Mike Tyson’s fight with Jake Paul, relieved that there isn’t a 58-year-old body somewhere in the rubble, we are tasked with making sense of the damage. And three words come to mind.

You’ve probably heard, read or said the first one yourself: ‘sad’. That’s obvious, so let’s get it out of the way. We saw a man thirty years removed from his prime, unable to do what once made him a uniquely feared athlete. We saw him shuffle clumsily around a ring, against a much less skilled man – 31 years his junior – and we saw him afraid to let go of his hands. Hands that once wrought such captivating destruction, the likes of which had never before been seen in sports. And in the end we saw him lose.

The other two words are somewhat at odds with each other, but somehow both can be true at the same time.

So the following is ‘merciful’. If you are indeed sad about what happened Friday, in front of 70,000 fans in Texas and millions of viewers live on Netflix, imagine how sad you would be if the former heavyweight champion had been knocked out last night. And actually, this isn’t an attempt to generate sympathy for Tyson. He is a complicated figure and a convicted rapist, lest we forget; no one is obliged to feel sympathy for him. At the same time, it’s okay not to wish for a 58-year-old father and husband to get hurt.

But that brings us to the final word, and one that seems to contradict the idea outlined above.

Friday’s fight between the heavyweight icon and the YouTuber-turned-boxer was “inauthentic,” and that’s another problem in itself. There were claims beforehand that it was scripted or being fixed. In reality the fight would never be such things, but this was not the case Real fight. That couldn’t be true when Paul was visibly trying, something he admitted after the eight two-minute rounds.

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‘I tried to hurt him a little. I was afraid he would hurt me, I tried to hurt him…” Paul sounded reserved as he spoke in the ring, but when asked at the press conference if he had been holding back, he opened up more. “Yes, definitely, definitely a little bit. I wanted to give the fans a show, but I didn’t want to hurt anyone who didn’t need to be hurt.”

This wouldn’t have been a problem if Paul vs Tyson had been sold as an exhibition, but key people went out of their way to make it an officially sanctioned, pro fight. That, combined with the constant talk of a knockout, was an attempt to convince fans that Tyson and Paul (more so the latter) would take this seriously. It was an exercise of painful cynicism.

And to be clear, this writer is not surprised. Paul and Tyson are friends, and instinct always warned that it would be a pro fight in name alone – more like an exhibition. But it was still a sour experience to see that play out in real time, at such a hyped and watched event.

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And yes, to highlight the problem with the inauthenticity of this fight – to highlight how it made fun of the real sport – may sound like it’s implicit: “We got to watch Mike Tyson get knocked out; Now that would have been real sport!”

Yet “merciful” and “inauthentic” can be contradictory here, but true at the same time. It’s good that a 58 year old man wasn’t injured by a 27 year old. It’s bad that fans were lied to. The fight was always going to be a lose-lose scenario.

That could have been avoided by staging it as an exhibition match, which would still have attracted millions of viewers wanting to see Tyson Box again – although the impossibility of Paul losing would have significantly reduced the emotional investment, it must be said.

So what was the actual solution? To never get into a fight in the first place.