'What do I care about my legacy?' - Mike Tyson unruffled by criticism of Jake Paul fight

Mike Tyson's once-ferocious fighting career was already helter-skeltering towards its feeble conclusion when the video-sharing platform YouTube first flickered into life in February 2005.

Four months later, the so-called 'Baddest Man on the Planet’, who had cut a swathe through the world’s best heavyweights towards the end of the 1980s, was crumpling in the corner under the fists of Irishman Kevin McBride in Washington DC.

Tyson’s pitiful professional conclusion, which followed innumerable controversies and scandals that dogged his career both in and out of the ring, served to soften the memory of the impact of those crushing early wins, and question his hard-won reputation as one of the most brutal and unforgiving world champions of all time.

So it is hardly surprising that Tyson professes himself entirely unconcerned by criticism of his decision to end his 19-year hiatus from the ring and return at the age of 58 to face the YouTuber Jake Paul in Arlington, Texas - after Katie Taylor v Amanda Serrano II - on Friday night.

"What do I care about my legacy?" Tyson said in a wide-ranging chat with Interview Magazine this week. "I never knew what a legacy was and people started throwing that word around so loosely. A legacy sounds like ego to me. I’m going to be dead soon. Who cares what somebody is going to think about me when I’m dead?"

Given the nature of Friday’s upcoming spectacle, it is perhaps telling that Tyson should choose to speak so openly to a magazine founded in 1969 by Andy Warhol, who supposedly once opined that "everyone will be famous for 15 minutes".

From the day he first emerged from the slums of Brownsville to leave Trevor Berbick devoid his senses and become the youngest world heavyweight champion in history