But then Mike Tyson himself steps into the ring, face-tattoo gleaming at the camera, wearing a repairman’s uniform and knocks the Vanilla Gorilla out cold.

The 30-second television ad, appearing just before halftime in this year’s Super Bowl in a few East Coast states, is part of a multi-year campaign by Washington area plumbing and heating company Michael and Son Services to generate media attention without paying for a national ad. Ads that run regionally can be significantly cheaper than the national ones.

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“Even though we do these local ads we do it with the concept that we’re trying to get press and buzz outside of these areas,” said Michael and Son president Basim Mansour.

Mansour declined to disclose how much he paid for the spot, saying only it cost more than $100,000.

“I’m not a stupid businessman, I didn’t [grow up] with money and I don’t like to waste money,” said Mansour. “It’s far less than what people are going to think it costs.”

Springfield, Va.-based ESB Advertising shot the ad at the Sphinx Club, in the basement of a colorful, temple-like building on K Street Northwest. Extras were recruited off the street as business closed on a Thursday evening. {Disclosure: This reporter was one of the extras.] Mansour even negotiated language in the contract requiring Mike Tyson to post about the ad on his personal social media account.

This isn’t Michael and Son’s first shot at the Super Bowl. Last year the company bought a 30-second ad featuring an Obama impersonator taking series of five-second swipes at Tom Brady’s deflate-gate scandal. It aired on the eve of the Patriots’ Super Bowl win.

Mansour had been after Tyson for a while. Last year he told the Post’s Emily Heil that he had originally planned to re-enact a scene from “The Hangover” for a 2015 Super Bowl commercial, but the deal fell through because a contract forbade Tyson from re-enacting the scene.

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This year Mansour tried again. First, he reached out to Tyson’s agents. That didn’t work out so well; the company got an offer it couldn’t afford by a long-shot, Mansour says.

Then, Mansour found out he was only a few degrees of separation from Tyson, who used to live in Potomac, Md. A good friend of Mansour’s is Fouad Qreitem, owner of local pizza chain Paisano’s.

“Me and Fouad, we roll together,” Mansour said. “We see each other all the time and it just came up in discussion.”

Fouad through a mutual friend said he knows Damon Bingham, the god-son of Muhammed Ali who knew Tyson in his boxing days. As an advisor to Tyson, Bingham has been instrumental in re-shaping the once-infamous star’s image, playing a producer role in “Tyson,” about the former champ’s life.

Fouad helped broker the deal, but at first the two parties still weren’t seeing eye to eye on pricing. It took more than a year to iron out the details, and it wasn’t until a day before filming that a contract was finally signed.

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“I was basically vouching for both sides,” Fouad said. “They were obviously worried when somebody unknown came to them…Mike Tyson’s dealt with some pretty shady people in his lifetime, and they’re very concerned who they deal with.”

Mansour says it also helped that Tyson’s ex-wife, with whom Tyson lived in Potomac, was a customer of Michael and Son in the company’s early days. Mike Tyson’s son Amir is a local too – he currently attends a Washington area university

Tyson’s agents cut Michael and Son a good deal, Mansour says, and they spent less than a week preparing the shot. They didn’t even have a location locked down until the same day Tyson flew into town on a Wednesday evening, and they filmed the whole thing in under five hours.

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As for the quirks and celebrity spots? Next year Mansour says he wants to aim even higher. He isn’t saying anything specific yet, but Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name comes up in a list of people he’d like to work with.

He’ll have to really dig through his Rolodex for that one.