Few things can compete with a great heavyweight slugfest, particularly those Butterbean-style toughman affairs by which two largely untrained big boys trade winging shots until one or the opposite drops. Last Saturday’s DAZN X Series 001 featured precisely one bout of this type, with the 6’5”, 261-pound comedian Sam Hyde—canceled for the reason that very first days of the Trump Era, the rising of the Orange Sun around which the new take planets, desperate for warmth, got here to revolve—pitted against the 6’1”, 255-pound Instagram “tits and ass” violinist Jake “iamthmpsn” Thompson.

If this seems like a risible premise, it’s. But I can’t get enough of it. An acquaintance and I incessantly discuss celebrity boxing and boxing archetypes, speculating about hypothetical showdowns between the likes of Chris Evans and Larry the Cable Guy. I’ve loved this silly stuff since I first watched William “Refrigerator” Perry, Manute Bol, Jose Canseco, and Danny Bonaduce disgrace themselves by deigning to throw hands in exchange for a couple of gold doubloons. The caliber of this type of performance has improved in recent times, though, driven by the Paul brothers—legitimate multi-sport highschool athletes—turning above-average skills and admirable dedication to the craft right into a multi-million dollar opportunity to embarrass other content creators, retired MMA fighters, and other tomato cans craving for quick paydays.

Hyde and iamthmpsn was a fight that held considerable promise. Each men were big, each a legitimate heavyweight, and solidly-built—a pointy contrast to the fat boys and jelly bellies dotting the lower and middle ranks of boxing and MMA. If you happen to put either within the ring with, say, former UFC heavyweight Roque Martinez, a surprisingly nimble striker with good footwork who nevertheless resembles an actual “tub of guts” and other assorted viscera, Roque would destroy them, but few viewers at home would predict that. In truth, the 37-year-old Hyde, who’s come a good distance from each his McLovin-esque highschool phase and his later run as a chubby-cheeked Adult Swim sketch comedian, now resembles a rather taller, longer-limbed Marcin Tybura.

Hyde, with 4 inches of height and five inches of reach on his opponent, entered because the clear betting favorite. He’d trained the towering Epic Meal Time vlogger Harley Morenstein for his successful bout against plump, schlubby Game Grumps creator Arin “Egoraptor” Hanson at YouTuber iDubbz’s May 2022 Creator Clash. There, Morenstein implemented the sport plan as Hyde had taught him: ignore footwork, ignore head movement, ignore finesse and as a substitute concentrate on absorbing punches on the arms and the highest of the pinnacle while waiting to brawl inside and brutalize the opponent with heavy hands.

This was the identical strategy Hyde sought to employ against iamthmpsn, however the violinist kept Hyde at bay by pressuring him early. Neither man was a model of grace or beauty, but iamthmpsn weathered a really quick initial storm from Hyde and countered with some big, sweeping hooks, which Hyde—contrary to his much-vaunted strategy—ate like a bento-boxed lunch right on the ear. If Hyde was hurt, he didn’t register it, though apprehension in regards to the looping punches kept Hyde honest for the rest of the primary round.

For individuals who’ve never wrestled, boxed, or grappled, these short rounds look like nothing—how, for instance, can three minutes within the ring possibly be as taxing because it looks? I can assure you they’re. I wrestled throughout my youth and adolescence, and after I’ve needed to restrain obese “consumers” within the group home or truculent neighbors on the road, those skills proved handy—but I used to be gassed in each later instance. If you happen to’re not continually conditioning yourself through hours of this work, continuous sparring within the type of eccentric UFC middleweight Sean Strickland, those three minutes of lactic acid build-up will strike you as anything but heavenly. Hyde and iamthmpsn were fatigued; each were respiration through their mouths two minutes into the fight. By the second round, iamthmpsn was taking steps back and even resting his hands on his thighs, something rarely seen in skilled boxing or MMA outside of oddball encounters just like the UFC 278 tilt between now-retired Luke Rockhold and Paulo Costa—a fight that was happening at elevation in Salt Lake City, mind you, not sea level like this London event.

By the close of the second round, Hyde’s power was starting to inform the story. Unlike iamthmpsn, who relied almost exclusively on hooks, Hyde threw some primitive jabs—and so they were getting through iamthmpsn’s guard. Hyde’s training footage with Morenstein demonstrated that this was his preferred approach to attack—“he rips your guard down like an Uruk-hai,” the food vlogger had noted—and it allowed him to start out touching after which hurting iamthmpsn. Within the third round, iamthmpsn’s hooks died on Hyde’s arms whilst Hyde began landing jabs and straights that dazed iamthmpsn. The toughest of those shots led to a pair of standing eight protection counts, the second of which resulted within the referee waving off the fight and awarding the victory to Hyde. To iamthmpsn’s credit, he never a lot as took a knee, though he was nearly out on his feet.

In the course of the post-fight interview, Hyde called out the extremely popular leftist streamer Hasan Piker. The fight looks as if smart business for Hyde if it’s accepted, fast-tracking his rise back into the mainstream—individuals who wouldn’t have mentioned his name in 2017 during his “Hatreon” days were now openly praising his victory on Twitter—and amounting to a neater fight than the one he’d just lumbered through. At 6’3”, Piker is a hair taller than iamthmpsn, but a recent image of the lanky streamer holding a kettlebell within the starting position of a swing inspires little confidence. The person who became wealthy and famous for selling anti-capitalism to others is lean in a pretty-boy type of way, but Hyde has endured hard shots from the much larger Harley Morenstein and iamthmpsn without batting an eyelash.

In his final-boss form, the middle-aged Hyde is an inelegant boxer who has finally matured into an asymmetrical, pock-marked face and large, bloated body that exhibits the “positive libido for the ugly” able to complementing his grating, unpleasant voice. The fight with Piker, should they comply with have one, could be a clash of shadow and light-weight that Hyde—no stranger to mocking such manga-style motion tropes in his comedic work—would relish. In any case, it’s through careful design that one the best trolls of the past decade now physically resembles one, too.