Bankruptcy, divorce and finding religion – how Chris Eubank and Nigel Benn faced the fight of their lives after life in the ring
As Chris Eubank Jr and Conor Benn prepare to recreate the epic fights of their fathers over 30 years ago, Stephen Armstrong talks to those close to the senior former rivals and finds out how tragedy has run through both families and is still casting a shadow over the next generation
It’s hard to explain to a new generation quite how important the two fights between Chris Eubank and Nigel Benn were – not just for boxing fans but for millions of average punters. They were the last great fights on TV, free to air for the 12 million people who watched their first encounter in 1990, and the 16 million who watched the rematch in 1993. Eubank’s manager and the current president of Matchroom, Barry Hearn, recalls “getting on the front page and the back page” of the tabloids regularly. “Everybody wanted to talk to us,” he explains. “Everybody wanted to know. And the main narrative was – these two guys just didn’t like each other.”
And now it is to their sons, Chris Eubank Jr and Conor Benn, to duke it out in front of a 60,000-strong crowd at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. To continue their fathers’ ferocious rivalry, but hopefully, duck the dark lives that played out beyond the ring; epic tales that make Rocky look like a camp soap opera.
The violence, the anger, the money, the tragedy… dramas that keep writing new, painful chapters.
Back in 1990, Hearn’s opposite number in Benn’s camp was Ambrose Mendy. The managers were both great with publicity. Before Hearn and Mendy, the ringwalk – the boxer’s intimidating march to a blaring tune – was rare in British sport. Mendy and Benn were a double act, taking Benn from brawler to winning the WBO middleweight belt in April 1990. By which time he was desperate to fight Eubank, who’d been needling Benn since Eubank had easily defeated Anthony Logan in 1989 – a fighter Benn had struggled to beat.
In many ways, the men had a lot in common. Benn was one of seven brothers born to parents from Barbados who’d moved to England. Eubank was one of five children born to Jamaican parents. Both had troublesome childhoods, getting into petty crime, and both had been sent away to learn discipline. Benn’s dad insisted he follow older brother John into the army to get himself out of trouble and he learnt to box in the Royal Fusiliers. Eubank moved to New York to live with his mother and went to the Jerome Boxing Club.
Benn kept his street fighting style – his nickname was the Dark Destroyer – and he could flare up at the slightest provocation. Eubank, meanwhile, cultivated a character based on listening to the BBC World Service. Positioning himself as the quintessential eccentric Englishman, he took to sporting a monocle and tweeds, professing scorn for aspects of boxing in an affected accent and mocking Benn for refusing to face him.
But inside, he was still the self-confessed delinquent or “master shoplifter” from inner-city London who had been thrown into the ring in the South Bronx – then known as the “Beirut of North America”. Having witnessed the toughest sparrers leaving there on stretchers, fighting for him was both raw and real.
They finally signed the contract live on television, on ITV’s Midweek Sports Special, presented by Nick Owen, who remembers feeling nervous throughout the process. “Usually, the pre-fight confrontations are theatre, but this was real,” he recalls. “Nigel Benn made it clear he didn’t like Chris Eubank. Chris sat with his back to Benn, he wouldn’t even look at him. It was fantastic television to watch but terrifying to be in the room.”
The first fight, at the NEC Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, sold out almost overnight, with Mendy – who organised the bout – getting calls from Ian Wright, Gazza, Gary Lineker, Frank Bruno, Ray Winston, all wanting in. This baffled traditional boxing journalists who couldn’t understand how a minor belt and two young boxers could sell out and go live around the world.
As Eubank left the dressing room to his traditional tune “Simply the Best”, Mendy cut the music, and he ended up walking in silence. “They gave us a s****y dressing room, dirty towels and messed up our entry music on the way in,” Hearn remembers. “Those days, I had quite a short fuse, so they had to restrain me.”
Benn’s entrance, by contrast, was spectacular – a specially recorded UB40 version of the reggae classic “Dangerous” blared, his mates from the Royal Fusiliers marched alongside him.
The pace of the first two rounds was frantic, but by the brutal ninth round, both were exhausted. A flurry of blows from Eubank forced referee Richard Steele to stop the fight, awarding Eubank victory.
“They used to have a term called a village beating,” Mendy says grimly. “That’s what they looked like in the dressing rooms after.” “Chris urinated blood for days,” Hearn agrees. “I’ve done maybe six, seven hundred fight cards in my time and that would be my number one.”
The two men met again in 1993. A lot had changed. Benn left Mendy for Hearn and decided to change his fighting style. Eubank fought and seriously injured Michael Watson, leaving him in a coma for a month. Both boxers were more wary in the ring, but the hype was through the roof.
“The atmosphere was something I’ve never experienced,” says Lea Worrell, author of Benn v Eubank: Who’s Fooling Who? “The crowd was roaring before it started.” But the two wary pugilists fought to a draw.
Eubank briefly retired in 1995, then admitted that he missed the limelight and returned to the ring, finally quitting the sport in 1998. Three years later, he was a contestant on Celebrity Big Brother, the first to be evicted, and in 2003 starred in At Home with the Eubanks on Channel Five, where he delivered Shakespeare soliloquies and Nelson Mandela speeches with his familiar lisp.
Declared bankrupt in 2005, unable to pay a tax bill of £1.3m, his wife Karron divorced him in the same year after allegations of cheating which vehemently denied and a bizarre beer-lorry incident where he leapt into the cab of a lorry blocking the road, drove it off and was arrested.
“This was the knockout blow,” Karron said at the time. “It was round-the-clock mayhem every single day. Chris lives on another planet – Planet Eubank.” She described his spending on shoes, clothes and cars as being “like Imelda Marcos. There was a Jeep which ended up in the pond because he forgot to put the handbrake on. Then there was a £55,000 Hummer he bought in Dubai, which never made it to England because apparently, its emission levels weren’t UK standard.”
Eubank Sr had forbidden his four children from using his full-size boxing ring in his mock-Tudor Brighton mansion, but Eubank Jr took to the noble art anyway and dad trained and managed him from 2011-2019. The pair even appeared on Gogglebox together.
More recently, they have drifted apart. Earlier this week, the younger man reflected: “My own father, a man I idolised for my entire life, and he doesn’t speak to me. We haven’t spoken for years and he thinks I’m a disgrace.”
Chris Sr skipped the build-up to his son’s 2019 hard-fought points win over former Olympic champion James DeGale – he had, for some reason, been made a US marshal in Louisiana – and was dropped from the training team.
Discussing the rift between himself and his father on Piers Morgan Uncensored last year, Eubank Jr revealed that his desire to forge his own path was the first major wedge between them, but then admitted that the real turning point came after the sudden passing of his younger brother, Sebastian, in 2021. The 29-year-old was found dead on a beach in Dubai, a tragedy that had a shattering effect on the entire family.
“That affected him in a deep way – it affected all of us. Mental health is a real thing,’ Eubank Jr explained. “That incident, coupled with the fact that we were already not seeing eye to eye, destroyed a large part of the relationship.”
While Conor’s father was more relaxed about him doing his own thing, he had to contend with a different kind of family turmoil. Benn Sr struggled with the womanising that cost him his first marriage. “It was an addiction, not to heroin or anything like that, but to women,” he told Esther Rantzen in 2001.
He blamed his “very low self-esteem” and in 1999, drove his second wife Carolyne’s car to Streatham Common where he tried to end his life after their marriage broke down. His attempt failed and soon after, he “had an encounter with Jesus”, he told Christian News.
“That’s when my life changed, truly changed. As soon as I had that encounter, no spliffing, no ecstasy, no women, absolutely nothing.” He spent a year living with his pastor, then reunited with Carolyne; the pair now offer marriage counselling.
His temper remained, as witnessed on his 2002 appearance on I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!, where he fell out with comic Rhona Cameron. At one point, Cameron told him to “go and read your Bible. Actually, why don’t you f*** off and leave?" Benn fumed: “You’re lucky you’re not a man or I’d knock you, sparko.”
Benn also kept hold of his money and is worth an estimated £15m, while Eubank has rebuilt some of his fortune through media appearances but has nothing like his former wealth. Strangely, while Eubank Sr and his son are not talking, the former sworn enemies have managed to build a friendship.
Eubank Sr is not attending Saturday’s fight, dismissing it as a circus and a “farce of a fight” between one fighter who is at two or three weights above the smaller guy. Never forgetting how he inflicted a career-ending and life-threatening brain injury during his fight with Michael Watson, it is the fight’s dangerous nature that he seems alert to. “My son is having to boil himself down to 160lbs. Three years ago, they were talking about him coming down 157lb. This is daylight murder,” he told one interviewer.
The build-up to the fight has certainly been very heated, with a press conference in February ending in chaos as Eubank Jr slapped Benn in the face with an egg. Something which his father called disgraceful, saying: “You are smashing an egg in someone’s face, and you are trying to justify it. There is no justification for it. There is nothing noble about that.” Another press conference, two days later, saw Eubank Jr threaten Nigel Benn, who put his hands around the younger man’s neck in the week’s earlier chaos.
Still, Nigel gave an interview to BBC Sport this week, calling out to Chris: “We all want you there, so we can see each other after the fight, mate, and hug each other and say it’s all over.”
“I felt that Nigel found himself and is more comfortable in his own skin,” says Sanjeev Shetty, former BBC sports journalist and author of the Benn vs Eubank book No Middle Ground.
“He was an angry young man. It was still there after he retired. Gradually, it dissipated after the attempted suicide and his faith. He is comfortable saying he needed Chris and Chris needed him. Chris has had more of a journey in life. Boxing for Chris made him a star. He hated not being in the limelight. Chris’s tragedy was that he was incredibly skilled at the thing he detested. The scars are still with him.”
Hearn is in no doubt that this Saturday’s fight only exists as an echo of the dad’s great rivalry. “Benn and Eubank Jr are both getting huge amounts of money for this fight, and good luck to them. Have they deserved that money? Have they earned it in the ring? Not really. They’re getting paid for the work their dads put in. And I hope everyone respects that.”
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