Social media star-turned-boxer Jake Paul and former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson are going head-to-head in a live boxing match on Friday night, streaming on Netflix.

Paul and Tyson met on Thursday night for a weigh in and final face-off. After his opponent allegedly stepped on his foot, Tyson slapped Paul in the face.

“The talk is over,” Tyson, who weighed in at 228 pounds, said before leaving the stage.

“Now it’s personal,” Paul, who weighed in at 227 pounds, responded.

Paul told CNN that he believes in his skill and is not nervous. He also said he thinks he will knockout Tyson — who is known for his brutal knockout wins — in the fifth or sixth round.

How to watch the fight

Paul vs. Tyson will be the main event on Friday’s fight card with six other matches scheduled to kick off Netflix’s first live-streamed boxing event. Anyone with Netflix access will be able to watch at no additional cost.

The stream will begin at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT. Six other fights will take place before Paul and Tyson’s heavyweight ring walk, so their fight likely won’t start until hours later.

Jake Paul: A 27-year-old YouTuber-turned-fighter

Paul, 27, rose to fame on social media platforms with viral six-second videos on Vine and prank content with his older brother, Logan Paul, on YouTube. Today, Paul boasts over 20 million subscribers on his own YouTube channel.

The younger Paul brother had a brief acting career with a recurring role on Disney’s Bizaardvark from 2016-2018. Soon after leaving the show, he began his boxing career with an exhibition match against fellow YouTuber Deji Olatunji. Paul won by technical knockout. His first professional fight was in 2020 against YouTuber AnEsonGib, who he defeated in a technical knockout in the first round.

Paul was accused of sexual assault by TikToker Justine Paradise in 2021. Paradise says that Paul forced her to perform oral sex. Paul has denied these accusations.

Mike Tyson: The 58-year-old former heavyweight champ

Tyson, 58, began his boxing career in 1985. In 1986, Tyson defeated Trevor Berbick and became the youngest heavyweight champion in boxing history.

Friday’s matchup will mark Tyson’s first professional fight in almost 20 years. His last professional fight before retirement was a loss to Irish boxer Kevin McBride in 2005. Tyson fought multi-weight class champion Roy Jones Jr. in an exhibition match in 2020.

In 1992, Tyson was convicted of raping 18-year-old pageant contestant Desiree Washington. Tyson was sentenced to six years in prison. He was released on parole after three years and resumed his career, though he’s been a registered sex offender since.

He was accused of rape again in 2023 by a woman who claims the assault occurred in the early ’90s in a limousine in Albany, NY. She filed a lawsuit seeking $5 million for “physical, psychological and emotional injury” since the alleged incident. Tyson denied the allegations in records filed last year in district court in the Northern District of New York. The case is ongoing, and court documents indicate the latest filings from Tyson’s team are due early next week.

Justine Huang, 26, ran the New York City Marathon drunk — and she has no regrets.

Huang said she likes to push herself, but drinking to the point of being unable to break any records reminded her that running can be fun — especially when roughly seven alcoholic drinks are involved.

“As a competitive person, I have the mindset that I want to run as fast as I can,” Huang said. “But forcing myself to slow down this time — spending time with spectators and friends who came out to support me — made this experience so much better than I thought.”

Huang didn’t think she’d get the opportunity to run the Bank of America Chicago Marathon and the TCS New York City Marathon three weeks apart, since both are hard to get into.

The New York City Marathon’s lottery has an acceptance rate of 4% — the same as Stanford University. Huang was able to bypass the lottery and snag one of the 14,000 slots allocated to charities who give bibs to runners who fundraise for them.

But, she relied on the lottery for the Chicago Marathon — where over 120,000 runners applied for around 50,000 spots, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Once she learned she had received a slot, she decided to run for speed there, and run for vibes in New York City.

“I wanted to go hard for Chicago because I had a time goal to beat,” she said. “And so that was what I focused on.”

The Chicago and New York City marathons are among the seven Abbott World Marathon Majors, along with Tokyo, Boston, London, Berlin and now Sydney, which was added earlier this month. They’re known for drawing huge crowds of spectators: Chicago has an estimated 1.7 million on-course spectators, and New York has over 1 million, according to Abbott.

As Huang raced to meet her time goal in Chicago, she wasn’t able to interact with the cheering crowd and friends who came to support her as much as she wanted to. So, her goal going into the New York City Marathon was to engage with the spectators cheering her on — especially since multiple friends were going to be joining her.

“I wanted to eat all the food I saw and then drink whatever the spectators were bringing,” Huang said. “That was my plan going into this race. But I didn’t expect how much food and drinks there would be.”

She started with candy, then “the first guy handed me, I think, a shot of Hennessy,” Huang said. “After that, it got really, really lit.”

Justine Huang consumed around seven alcoholic drinks while running the New York City Marathon.

MarathonFoto/Justine Huang

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MarathonFoto/Justine Huang

Shortly after, three people handed her beers, and her friends who came to cheer her on brought her another shot of liquor. She detailed her full drunk running experience in a TikTok that has amassed almost four million views.

In all — she estimates she had “four or five shots of liquor and then maybe another four or five half cups of beer” — along with a red Solo cup of prosecco shown in another TikTok with over eleven million views.

New York City running coach Elizabeth Corkum, known as Corky in running circles, said dehydration is a big concern during a marathon — even without the alcohol.

She loves a post-race beer, but said alcohol and running generally don’t mix well.

“Alcohol is poison. It’s a fun poison, but it’s poison,” Corkum said. “And so for a runner, it’s going to do a couple of things. First off, it’s a diuretic. So depending on how much is consumed, it might actually impact that athlete’s dehydration. Alcohol can also get in the way of our body’s ability to really utilize carbohydrates efficiently.”

The amount of liquid needed to stay hydrated during a marathon varies across athletes and situations — but she said ideally, “most marathoners should be trying to get in about 16 ounces of fluids per hour.”

She’s also wary of athletes doing something they’ve never done before on race day — since they don’t know how their bodies will respond.

“A marathon is a really big undertaking and a very stressful experience for our bodies mentally, physically and emotionally,” Corkum said. “So I would caution tossing in something, you know, like alcohol or weed, because it’s already a pretty extreme scenario.”

If you must consume alcohol during a marathon, Corkum recommends finding drinks with a low alcohol content, such as 4%.

But Huang was intentional about hydration.

“I also did stop at every single water station that the marathon provided,” she said. “I would chug down two cups of water and two cups of Gatorade at every station. But I did have to go to the bathroom at least six times during the race.”

And, she paced herself with the booze.

“This was like during the course of maybe five or six hours,” Huang said. “So I wasn’t pounding alcohol within the span of like 30 minutes or something.”

And even though her body wasn’t used to running drunk — her body was used to running: it was her third marathon and she said she runs 30 to 55 miles per week.

Huang said her stomach was “surprisingly fine” with all the snacks and drinks, since this was her first time consuming anything other than gummies and water and electrolyte drinks on a long run.

She finished the marathon in around 5 hours, 36 minutes — compared to 4:14 in Chicago a few weeks prior.

“I met so many cool people on the run,” Huang said — many of them in bathroom lines.

“I literally ran the whole thing with my best friend and it was her first marathon,” she said. “Being with her and seeing our friends who spent the entire day running around the city finding spots to cheer us on, that just made me so happy. I have no regrets at all.”

The sun has just set over the Palos Verdes hills, and the tennis court lights are buzzing to life. I’m enjoying time with my husband, Steve, standing between clean lines on the deep blue courts made bluer by the artificial glow. It feels familiar and self-contained, the two of us alone in our little rectangle-shaped world. I almost believe that everything’s going to be OK, despite the phone call we just had.

I watch Steve toss the ball high over his head in a straight line, striking “the trophy pose” — the one you see on all the trophies, with one arm reaching for the sky and the other holding the racket cocked back. And with the grace of a dancer and the force of a quarterback, he whips his racket over his head to connect with the ball in a perfect serve.

“Just like that,” he says, smiling. “Did you see how my racket scratched my back?”

I’m a little breathless watching — and not just because the temperature has dropped. I wish I could serve “just like that.” But mostly, I’m admiring my amazing husband.

“Yeah, just like that. You make it sound so easy,” I tease.

The serve, I’ve learned, is the most important shot in tennis because it’s the only one you control. Everything else is just a reaction. It’s hard to perfect, and still new to tennis myself, I’m afraid I’ll never get it.

“Remember, if the toss isn’t good, don’t even try to hit it,” he says. Which is solid advice for dating too, now that I think about it. Steve’s and my online profiles could not have been more dissimilar. I was recovering from an excruciating divorce, but I signed up on the advice of my writer friends (“It’s great character material!”). My profile was just a photo of my eye and a passage from a novel — something about how a couple reads their books: One dog-ears and underlines; the other keeps their reading material pristine. Steve posted a straightforward photo with a complete description of who he was and who he wanted to meet. Lucky for me, he’s into literature.

We married 10 years later during the COVID pandemic on Catalina Island. We kayaked to our beach “venue” with our laptop, rings and champagne rolled up in waterproof bags. We traded life vests and bathing suits for wedding attire behind a rock and connected to shaky cell service so family and friends could participate. Then we paddled back, racing to return the kayaks before sundown. That’s what life with Steve is like. There’s no such thing as “can’t.” If I dream it, he gets it done down to the last detail.

From tennis to home repairs, I’m tempted to call in an expert, but Steve’s credo is: If another human can do it, I can too. From the phone call we’d just had, I was becoming aware that this difference between us was about to be tested. Having opposite dating profiles or reading styles is very different from conflicting stances on lifesaving medical treatment. Steve’s PSA popped outside the normal range during a routine lab test and his urologist recommended an MRI. Steve didn’t wait for the follow-up to learn his fate. He disappeared into his office, searching Google and picking through the latest medical journals.

He even spent time learning to read his own MRI the same way he learned to play tennis: YouTube.

“Let’s see your toss,” Steve says, as yet another of my serves crashes into the net. It’s getting colder and darker. “Try starting with both your arms straight,” he says. “Ajla Tomljanović does that.”

I doubt I can do anything like the “Break Point” star, but I try. I want to get this serve fast. Patience is not one of my virtues. Also, we need to get home, and, according to the urologist, we need to get started on treatment.

My instinct is to trust doctors to know more than I do. If they say biopsy, I ask when. Steve rejected the standard biopsy in favor of his own plan, so he’ll need a referral, which will take time. Maybe too much time. The MRI indicated a large tumor that has spread outside of his prostate. Yet here we are out on a tennis court, worrying about whether a small fuzzy ball is landing in a painted box.

I watch Steve fish around in the basket of balls. “Look at my arm as I toss,” he says. I can’t, because my eyes are swimming. The thought of life without this man is unimaginable. Prostate cancer is not a death sentence these days, but it’s also not something you put off. As I watch him strike the trophy pose again, I shake my head to drive away thoughts of his athletic body deteriorating before my eyes. I know that the side effects of hormone treatment, horrifyingly referred to “chemical castration,” can be permanent.

It makes me want to freeze this moment. During the call with the doctor, Steve used the pronoun “we” a lot — as in “We have prostate cancer” and “We want an MRI-guided biopsy.” His eyes met mine more than once, reassuring me that we’re still a team — just like we are on complex video shoots for our business, parenting a blended family and wrangling our 120-pound dog for a bath.

All these years later, the books on my nightstand are highlighted, annotated and dog-eared. Steve’s bookmarks mostly point to YouTube channels. But we’re both consulting experts in our own ways.

He misreads my face and says, “Try to remember that tennis is play! Just relax and don’t think.”

How can I explain to this star athlete that for me, play was never about competition or skill? It was always about imagination. That’s my superpower. I realize that if I keep using it to imagine the worst, it will make the difficult time ahead much harder. Instead, as the courts around us go dark one by one, I take his hand and conjure up an image of the two of us, decades from now, standing on another blue tennis court in some exotic locale, lifting a giant United States Tennis Assn. seniors mixed doubles trophy — together.

The author earned an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles, and her work has been published in Kelp Journal, Proud to Be, Inman News and others. She’s writing a hybrid memoir with her husband about their cancer journey. Find her at brennahumphreys.com and on Instagram: @brennahums.

L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.