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Chris Eubank and his son, Chris Eubank Jnr,
Boxing fans are divided over Saturday’s boxing show-piece. Some see Conor Benn v Chris Eubank Jnr as a welcome reboot of a once-great franchise. Others consider it a tawdry cash-in. But no one has been more consistently critical than Eubank’s own father.
Only last week, Chris Eubank Snr told website Seconds Out that he would be snubbing Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and the 62,000 fans therein. “I will not be an accomplice to their stupidity, their circus,” he declaimed, with a passion that was not at all undermined by that oft-parodied lisping voice.
To anyone who has not followed the saga of this long-postponed fight, Eubank Snr’s vehemence might seem surprising. After all, Eubank Jnr v Benn is effectively a tribute act to his own finest hour: the 1990 barn-burner against Nigel Benn, which Telegraph Sport’s own Gareth A Davies recently ranked among his four finest fights of all time.
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Chris Eubank Snr beat Nigel Benn in a fierce 1990 contest that spawned a bitter rivalry - Getty Images/Bob Thomas
As one of boxing’s great self-publicists, one might have expected Eubank Snr to enjoy the extra attention. But his objections are very specific. They relate to the difference in sizes between his son – who normally competes as a 160lb middleweight or higher – and Conor Benn, whose previous 23 unbeaten fights have all come at welterweight (147lb).
“It’s against the rules, what is happening,” Eubank Snr insisted a week ago. “If you are not clever and you are not noble, this will kill you, this vocation, what they call sport. If you don’t play it right already, Conor, you don’t have a career to enjoy.”
Other pundits, including old nemesis Steve Collins, have accused Eubank Snr of being over-dramatic. Boxers zip up and down weight categories all the time, they point out. Even so, there was no mistaking the feeling in his words, nor the inspiration behind them. Eubank has seen too much loss, both in his own family and in the ring, to be sanguine about the risks.
History is said to repeat itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. And while there has been a farcical element to this year’s build-up – notably when Chris Jnr slapped Conor Benn with an egg – Chris Snr is still reliving his own personal tragedy. In 1991, he delivered one of the most infamous punches in British boxing history: the 11th-round uppercut which left Michael Watson in a coma for 40 days.
Even before the Watson fight, Eubank was referring to boxing as “a mug’s game”. Later, after the horrific experience of seeing Watson “lying there, in the bed, with a quarter of his skull missing”, he upped the ante with some characteristic verbal flourishes. In an interview with boxing sage Donald McRae, he called the sport “a soiled activity, a savage blood-business”.
For Eubank, some crucial part of his identity changed that night. As he would write in his autobiography, “Post-Watson, I lost the instinct to finish a fight.” It was a trauma that reverberated through the rest of his career. The rest of his life, even. And when the bell rings on Saturday night, he clearly fears the worst sort of flashback.
As far as Chris Snr is concerned, the 1990s should be celebrated – but not in the ring. He would rather stick with the memories, the video highlights and the old stories. Hence the so-called “Trilogy Tour” of theatres that he and Nigel Benn staged in 2021 and 2022. A couple of years later, they were reunited (alongside heavyweight rivals Lennox Lewis and Frank Bruno) for the Amazon Prime series Four Kings.
That golden era of British middleweight boxing is still catnip for nostalgia junkies. Not only did Eubank and Benn fight like demons, but they also gave great hate. Their enmity stemmed from an extreme clash of personalities. With his monocle, his cane, and his studied BBC accent, Eubank saw himself as a martial artist in the truest sense, a craftsman painting intricate patterns upon the canvas. Whereas Benn – to his mind – represented exactly the sort of ignorant thug he looked down upon: the original mug from the mug’s game we mentioned earlier.
Eubank Snr: ‘You never see middle-class or upper-class boxers make it’
While these two rivals may have reconciled in recent years, they used to repel each other like a pair of powerful magnets. Rachel Shelley Lawrence, who directed the 2003 reality show At Home With The Eubanks, remembers being told to steer clear of Benn at all costs. “We had Lennox Lewis on the show,” Lawrence told Telegraph Sport. “And we had Michael Watson [who achieved a miraculous, if partial, recovery from his brain injuries]. But Benn was a total non-starter. There was obviously some very bad feeling between them.”
If you can track it down, Lawrence’s show now stands as an intriguing historical document. In between Eubank’s showy set-pieces – which include Shakespeare soliloquies and Nelson Mandela speeches – a sub-plot emerges around his conflicted relationship with Chris Jnr. “He’ll be one to watch,” says Chris Snr of his eldest son. “But I so hope it’s not in boxing.”
During that happy period in the early Noughties, Chris Snr kept his own full-size boxing ring at the family’s mock-Tudor mansion in Hove. But when Chris Jnr – who was 13 at the time – asked if he could train there, his father slapped him down. “You never see middle-class or upper-class boxers make it,” said Eubank Snr. “Because you’ve been brought up in these four walls, you’re not going to be hard enough.”
Realistically, Chris Snr was always going to drop his objections at some stage. Once At Home With The Eubanks had finished its run, this textbook narcissist found himself alarmingly short of airtime. An all-encompassing role as Chris Jnr’s trainer, manager and mentor – which he fulfilled between 2011 and 2019 – was exactly the tonic he needed, giving him plenty of opportunity to strut around at ringside in his trademark sleeveless suit. Towards the end of that spell, the two Chrises were so inseparable that they even appeared together on Celebrity Gogglebox.
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Eubank Snr and Jnr were once very close - Channel 4
With his father’s help, Chris Jnr built a substantial career. He might never have landed a world title, but he is rugged, resilient and resourceful. A record of 34 wins from 37 fights proves that a public-school education need be no bar to boxing success.
More recently, however, the Eubanks have drifted apart. He has not been seen in his corner since 2019.
Then, two years later, tragedy struck the Eubank family again. This time it was one of their own: Chris Jnr’s younger brother Sebastian, who suffered a fatal heart attack while swimming off the coast of Dubai. He was just 29.
Rather than pulling the family together, Sebastian’s death only widened the rift between father and son. The timing came shortly before the announcement of Chris Jnr’s first scheduled date with Conor Benn in October 2022, and surely explains why Chris Snr has always had such a downer on the fight.
“We have to be strict,” Chris Snr said, in the build-up to that first date. “Otherwise lives are put in danger and my son’s life cannot be put in danger. I’ve already lost one. It can’t happen again.”
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Eubank Snr changed after the death of his son Sebastian in 2021 - Paul Grover for the Telegraph
This was hardly what Chris Jnr wanted to hear, just as he was about to clinch the juiciest payday of his career. As it turned out, the fight was postponed at the last minute, when Benn tested positive for the banned fertility drug Clomifene. But the delay didn’t end the big freeze. Quite the reverse; it grew to occupy the empty months. Up until March, when they coincided at ringside to watch Chris Snr’s nephew Harlem Eubank, father and son hadn’t spoken for two years.
If one theme keeps recurring in the Eubank narrative, it is his inextricable link with Nigel Benn. Even the very origins of Chris Snr’s dynasty can be traced back to the moments after he seized Benn’s WBO middleweight title by knockout. Bathed in sweat and blood, Eubank looked into the camera and asked “Karron, can we get married now?”
Since then, the two boxers’ lives – and those of their relations – have continued to intersect like a giant double-helix. There are many ironies here, including the fact that Chris Snr is now on better terms with Nigel Benn than he is with his own son. And that Eubank’s daughter Emily now happens to be dating Frank Smith, a boxing promoter whose company Matchroom looks after Conor Benn.
Meanwhile, Chris Snr’s fortunes have reached a low ebb. His 2005 bankruptcy was probably inevitable, in the light of an absurd lifestyle: a permanent suite at the Grosvenor House Hotel (£40,000 annually), regular Concorde trips to New York for shopping (£29,000), and the never-ending stream of parking tickets incurred by his enormous Peterbilt truck.
Then came two divorces and the communication breakdown with Chris Jnr – a contrastingly stable character who only seems to have benefited from the middle-class upbringing his father felt would soften him.
“I always felt that, out of the four kids, Chris Jnr was the most like his father,” says the documentary maker Rachel Shelley Lawrence, who spent eight months with the Eubank family in 2003. “He was a very determined character, with a lot of focus and drive, but there was also one obvious difference, in that he was never a showman. In fact, he probably reacted against his father’s need for attention, and went the other way.”
Almost everything we hear from Chris Jnr – with the possible exception of that rabble-rousing egg stunt – sounds measured and mature. “I’ve told him I want him there,” he said this week, when the BBC asked him about Chris Snr. “I’ve told him what it means to me, and what it means to the public, to the fight fans who have followed both our careers for so long. He doesn’t seem to care, or he doesn’t seem to understand … What can you do?”
Chris Jnr delivered this speech in a tone of regret rather than anger, almost as if he were the father and Chris Snr his wayward son. When set alongside such composure, his father’s repeated protests start to sound shrill and panicky. And yet, these are not entirely confected concerns. There are valid reasons to believe that slimming down to 160lbs could leave Chris Jnr fatigued, dehydrated and vulnerable. In photographs taken on the eve of the 2022 postponement (when the catchweight was set at 157lbs), he looks alarmingly gaunt.
Whatever your views on the weight issue, the father-son fall-out feels in keeping with the rest of Eubank Snr’s story: simultaneously intriguing and ridiculous. Nothing he does is ever straightforward. Remember, this is a man who grew up with a largely absent mother, a penniless father who beat him, and three older brothers who “openly and constantly denigrated me”, according to his 2003 autobiography. That “need for attention” – in Lawrence’s words – is hard-wired into his system.
Besides, Chris Snr might just have a point. As Saturday night approaches, we should wait before rushing to judgement. We should see both fighters safely out of the ring before we accuse Eubank of crying wolf. Boxing can be an ugly game. And no one knows that better than him.
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