Having spent years fighting his corner, Eddie Hearn did not expect to one day be told by Conor Benn that if their decade-long relationship was to continue he would need to now go sit in the corner and watch. But that, Benn said, was the new arrangement – the only way it could work.
Somehow worse than the relationship ending, Hearn, via texts and emails, found himself now belittled by the invitation to vicariously participate in whatever Benn got up to with his new fancy man: Dana White. It would have been too painful, perhaps, for Benn to fully separate from the promoter who had for so long fought his corner, so he didn’t. Instead, he simultaneously broke up with Hearn and allowed him to remain in the room: two in a bed, one on a chair tucked away in the corner.
For someone like Hearn, there could be no greater affront. If it wasn’t enough to have Benn believe he was better off elsewhere, the promoter was then essentially offered the job of baggage-handler, or fluffer, so that Benn wouldn’t feel too rotten about the move he had decided to make. Seemingly Benn, as all of us do, had wanted the best of both worlds. He had wanted the money he had been guaranteed by White and his Zuffa Boxing organisation (reportedly $15 million) and he also wanted to remain friends with his ex in order to protect their feelings and retain access to both their gym and Netflix account.
There was a sense, too, that Benn wanted to keep the door ajar for Hearn, just in case. Who knows, he might have feared that White and Zuffa, while good for a night or two, did not represent marriage material. Maybe he recognised that only Eddie Hearn and Matchroom truly understand Conor Benn the way Conor Benn wants to be understood.
Either way, there was a suggestion in the aftermath of Friday’s news that this might not be the end of the Benn-Matchroom journey after all. “I want him [Hearn] to be part of it,” said Benn, confusing matters. “I messaged him directly and said, ‘I want you to be part of the team, man. I want you to be here. The journey’s not done.’ I owe everything to him.”
From Matchroom, however, we heard only shock, disappointment, and notes of regret. We heard from Hearn, we heard from his dad, and we heard from Frank Smith, all of whom said pretty much the same thing: “Damn.” One after another these men spoke of the hurt they felt when learning of Benn’s decision to jump ship and how nobody had seen it coming. They also reminded both Benn and the rest of us of the time they all stuck by the controversial fighter following his two positive performance-enhancing drug tests for clomiphene in 2022. According to Eddie Hearn, a piece of his soul had to be sacrificed when defending Benn during that turbulent time, while Barry Hearn, speaking on talkSPORT, even wondered out loud whether they had misjudged Benn’s character and got it all wrong. Yes, all of it.
Seeing this drama unfold, it was hard not to sympathise with those who had been jilted and betrayed. After all, everything everybody at Matchroom was saying was fair, accurate. Not only had they each put their necks on the line and supported Conor Benn publicly at a time when his reputation was in the gutter, but they had also supported him privately, even lending him “hundreds of thousands of pounds” to tide him over while he was out of work and stuck in failed-test purgatory.
That, for most men, would be enough to guarantee life-long loyalty, regardless of the fresh-cut smell of greener grass. But not for Conor Benn, it would appear. He, despite all that Matchroom has done for him since turning pro in 2016, has an altogether different take on loyalty and the concept of reparations. You would have to be “mentally ill,” he said, to turn down what Zuffa Boxing offered him to turn heel and Benn, 24-1 (14 KOs), is many things but “mentally ill” he is not, apparently. Moreover, Benn is a fighter whose limitations are clearer than his intentions and whose career is destined to be a short if compelling one. In other words, Nigel’s son knows as well as we do that it might not get any better than it is right now and that his small window of opportunity is precisely that: small.
For now, Benn is relevant, he is notorious, and he is everywhere. Since beating Chris Eubank Jnr in their November rematch, he has been spotted at just about every fight and event going and his peroxide blonde hair has ensured he is seen even by those who are sick of the sight of him. There have also been callouts, so many callouts. One day it is Gervonta Davis, the next it is Shakur Stevenson. Then you have Ryan Garcia, the latest big name to tickle Benn’s fancy and the one most likely to fight him.
All these men, whether the same size as Benn or smaller, are more famous than Benn in America and better boxers than him in any ring, but that’s not the point. The point is, Benn, by virtue of his newfound infamy, feels he is now part of the same club and deserves to be rubbing shoulders with the best in the world. Even if you dare remind him that his standout win is a decision over an old, weight-drained Chris Eubank Jnr, and that nothing he has produced to date indicates he is good enough to win a world title, it will fall on deaf ears. It will fall on deaf ears because logic and common sense, like loyalty, no longer have a place in the chaotic, fast-moving world of Conor Benn.
He’s not alone in that respect, either. Numbers, clicks, and views have in fact skewed many boxers’ perception of their worth to such a degree that achievements in the ring are now not worth the paper they were once written on. The same goes for agreements and contracts.
As for Hearn, the promoter, one wonders whether his split from Benn will be total or whether he will occasionally look back at old photos of them together and check that he still follows him on social media. “Is this really the end?” he might ask himself at night, remembering that Benn left the door open and a chair for him in the corner of the room. “Might there be a chance of him coming back to me?”
Considering how the job of a “promoter” has now changed so dramatically, it is not beyond the realms of possibility. Many promoters, in fact, are today content to be no more than advisors, cheerleaders and mascots, with very few needing to expend the same sweat and elbow grease as the men who preceded them. Now they can just attend press conferences, do lots of interviews, and show up on fight night, knowing that much of the risk of putting on an event is mitigated by the Saudi financiers who watch them through a peephole in the bedroom wall. Not only that, we have seen instances in the past where promoters have been able to quickly forget their decades-long dislike for one another if it means maintaining relevance and sharing the wealth. Suddenly then pride and ego disappears. Funny, that.
In this scenario, with Benn, Hearn and White, it could be a little trickier to sell them the idea of a throuple. I say that only because the relationship between Hearn and Benn was less like a partnership, or even marriage, and more like a parent-child relationship. This was never truer than when the child in question was caught misbehaving and needed both the warm embrace and unwavering delusion of a parent. It was at that point the relationship between Hearn and Benn intensified and protection took on a new meaning. Now Hearn, as the promoter, wasn’t just looking to protect Benn with soft fights and a straightforward route to a world title. Now he was protecting him from the public, and from suspicion, and from vultures. He was indeed handling his baggage.
We first saw evidence of this when Hearn, a week after the cancellation of Benn’s fight with Eubank Jnr in 2022, met with a group of boxing journalists at a restaurant somewhere in London. That day Hearn had the unenviable/impossible task of defending a man who was in the eyes of those journalists indefensible, and yet somehow he pulled it off. In his own unique way, an impressively composed Hearn spoke for almost two hours and managed to avoid putting his foot in it or making matters worse. He would have known all the risks, too. He would have known that the chance to bend the narrative in his favour – meaning Benn’s favour – had to be carefully measured against the possibility of it all getting rather messy and him saying too much.
Also, this was not something he had to do, remember. He would have felt some pressure around that time, certainly, but that still didn’t mean Hearn had to put himself in the firing line and leave himself open to ridicule. Even just seeing him try to defend Benn during that grim period left him open to that. It was one thing defending a fighter after a pull-out, a disqualification, or some other kind of mishap, but the idea of defending a “drug cheat” yet to be cleared, having earlier tried to get that same “drug cheat” into a boxing ring, was about as transgressive as it gets for a boxing promoter. By doing so, Hearn wasn’t just playing around with Conor Benn’s reputation. He was playing around with his own.
Then again, that was his job; Benn was his boy. Besides, back when Hearn was busy firefighting in London on Benn’s behalf, he wasn’t merely sitting in the corner of the room asking when he would be allowed to join in. He was instead sitting at the head of the table, with journalists gathered around him, just how he likes it. In that moment, Hearn had power – all the power Conor Benn lacked – and he had belief in the man he was defending; belief, that is, not of his innocence, perhaps, but of Benn’s ability to outlast this controversy and become an even more valuable commodity off the back of it.
What Hearn didn’t anticipate, however, was the prospect of Benn outlasting the process and then outgrowing the people who helped him through it. What Hearn didn’t anticipate was being asked to switch seats just as both he and the commodity were starting to sit comfortably again.
