The fight between Chris Eubank Jnr and Conor Benn meant different things to different people. To some, it was a wedding following a 35-year engagement, whereas to others it represented a toxic couple trying to paper over the cracks in their relationship by renewing their vows. Then there were those who saw it not as a wedding at all, but instead a funeral; the burying of a long-running feud; the burying of the truth; the burying of boxing’s few remaining principles and its moral code. It could even have been viewed as a dinner party, one that seemed a good idea when proposed, only for its appeal to diminish considerably as the date approached; one involving a collection of the most unsavoury characters you could bring together in a room, each of them pretending to get along.
However you personally felt about Eubank Jnr vs. Benn going in, the feeling afterwards would have been the same. Like the aftermath of the wedding, or the funeral, or the dinner party you had been dreading, you would have been just happy it was all over. You would have started clearing up the mess left behind and perhaps turned to the person nearest to you and said, “Actually, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”
Suddenly, because of this, the mess left behind isn’t so severe and the clearing up is less of a chore. After all, nothing tends to absolve bad behavior and messiness like a good old prizefight. We all know that. Perform in the ring, where it matters, and every boxer knows they can get away with doing and saying just about anything. Perform there and we are all quick to forgive and forget and tell ourselves that at least we had fun. Didn’t we?
Last night, at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London, we actually did. We had fun. From first bell to last Chris Eubank Jnr and Conor Benn gave it their all, backed up their boasts, and delivered on the pre-fight hype. We saw a great fight, we saw a reunion between father and son, and we witnessed flickers of mutual respect between two men who all week couldn’t stand the sight of each other.
Forget the 60,000 fans in attendance, for 12 rounds Chris and Conor were just two sons fighting in front of their dads. They felt only their eyes on them. It was only their voices they heard. Legacy, at that stage, was no longer just a selling point or the cynical way in which promoters had managed to fuse these two – a welterweight and a middleweight – together. Now it was all that counted. Now it was everything.
As such, the two of them gave everything in what proved to be a rather fitting continuation of a rivalry. They exchanged ferociously throughout and produced a diluted but no less thrilling 12-rounder before a diluted audience no less captivated and enthralled. It was not Benn-Eubank, no, but it was, for all the pre-fight talk, never going to be, either.
If nothing else, it was a worthy tribute to the rivalry and a good impression to boot. Even the winner of the piece, Chris Eubank Jnr, was able to continue the pattern of a Benn coming up short at the end of it all, this time via unanimous decision (scores: 116-112 across the board).
The omens were good for the Eubanks. They often were when it came to this rivalry and that didn’t change in Tottenham, where the surprise appearance of Chris Eubank Snr – and yes, some parliamentary procedure – signalled things might turn out all right. With him there, the fight all of a sudden felt a little more meaningful, and some of the dirtiness had been wiped away, if only temporarily. Moreover, with Daddy Eubank arriving at the eleventh hour, we had our clearest indication yet that everything with this lot is a show, a performance, and that even familial bonds can be used for leverage, strategy, and promotion. It was perhaps then that we allowed ourselves to relax and not take anything too seriously. It was perhaps then that we resigned ourselves to the rules of the warped world in which these damaged men make a living.
In this world the sons of fighters, historically, have a tough time of it. They typically come to the sport late on account of not needing to do it, and they then struggle to muster the necessary hunger to go that extra mile. Yet, in the case of Chris Eubank Jnr and Conor Benn, there was no evidence of these shortcomings last night. Instead, with two and a half years of back and forth, and with their dads sitting ringside, there have been few fights as keenly contested in Britain for some time.
Whatever the impetus for it, the action in the ring was always frenetic, full of meaty exchanges and momentum swings, and both men performed as though to pause was to surrender. Even when things inevitably got messy, and they did, this messiness only added to the drama of the spectacle and served to remind us of how it came to fruition in the first place.
It was delightfully imperfect, in other words. It was not, as some have said, the best fight of the year, nor the greatest fight in a British ring since (insert any year here), nor anywhere near as compelling as the work their fathers produced in the 1990s. But that’s okay. We didn’t expect or even need any of those things. The truth is, we expected something a great deal worse and uglier than what we got in north London close to midnight. Some worried about a mismatch – in one direction or the other – and some, including the man’s own father, were worried that Chris Eubank Jnr would be badly hurt due to his weight cut, thus continuing the one Benn/Eubank tradition we never want to see continued.
That we managed to avoid all that can be deemed the fight’s greatest triumph. Indeed, the fight was such a success, as a piece of entertainment, that you were able to remember the actions of the dads while simultaneously forgetting the behaviour of the sons – no mean feat. At times you even forgot the sons had famous fighting fathers, for the shared desperation and exhaustion stopped them both from impersonating their heroes for any length of time. Gone, for instance, was Eubank Jnr’s famous posturing and the sense, true or not, that everything is measured and under his control. That was replaced by a sudden panic and urgency, especially in the fight’s second half, which led to Eubank Jnr becoming a head-down brawler and having to drag a performance out of himself. He was, in those moments, no longer the cocksure son of Chris Eubank, but a fighter in his mid-thirties who knows he can only go to the well so many times before, like his father, he finds it is empty.
He is, after all, despite his efforts to convince us otherwise, only human, Eubank Jnr. He is prone to the same deterioration and emotions as us all and of this we received proof last night. It was why he screamed as the decision was announced, then hugged his dad, albeit briefly. He also then mentioned how having his father in attendance gave him something extra, a statement at odds with what he has been saying for years.
Conor Benn, meanwhile, deserves credit for battling as hard as he did and for 12 rounds offering some of us the option to forget. “He surprised me,” said Eubank Jnr, 35-3 (25), after the fight. “I didn’t know he had what he had in him. I really didn’t. I thought I would break him early. I underestimated him. I didn’t train for a fight like that.”
Rather poignantly, as Eubank Jnr said those words in the ring, Benn, now 23-1 (14), could be seen in the arms of his father, his cheek against his shoulder, his body now a costume, empty. In this position, he was not only a boxer being held, but he was being held up, with his weight taken back by the man who had made him, the donation reversed. Suddenly Conor Benn was again just a boy. A boy with his dad.
“I looked at Chris [Senior] and I grabbed him by the neck and I said, ‘Mate, I’m so happy you’re here,’” Conor said at the post-fight press conference. “Because outside of everything else, all the noise and the promotion and the fight, your relationship with your dad never goes. That’s always there. That’s long-standing. That’s real without boxing. What’s boxing? What is it? Because I’d pick the relationship with my dad over boxing any day of the week. If this brought them together, that’s worth its weight in gold.”
As true as all that is, it is also the kind of talk you often hear at the end of a wedding, or a funeral, or a dinner party nobody wanted to attend. It is real talk but emotional talk. It is, in the case of the dinner party, usually followed by somebody saying, “We should do this again sometime,” and the rest, each of them relieved it wasn’t as bad as they feared, nodding their heads and saying, “Yes, absolutely, we must. We should get another date in the diary soon.”
But that doesn’t mean it will, or should, happen again, of course. Nor does it mean the sense of dread will be any different second time around. Sometimes, in fact, you are better off just leaving it at one and going home relieved everybody made it out alive.
