By Pete Carvill
If you missed their first fight earlier this year, you missed a solid, competitive bout between two men, both of whom would have inflicted lasting, permanent damage upon the other. It was for two fighters unproven at world level and naturally a few divisions apart an event that overachieved in its public profile.
Much of that was down to the surnames of those involved: Eubank and Benn. Not the fighters in the ring, but the fathers who decades before had faced each other in Birmingham in 1990 and in Manchester in 1993.
That night in London was an evening in which past and present flowed into and around one another, enmeshing indelibly. There was a tremendous nostalgia about the event, so many people who had heard whispers of the legends, bouts that exist now as ghosts on videotape. It was a sensation that punched hard above its weight.
There was also love. When Chris Eubank Sr emerged from the car carrying his son, the crowd erupted. The eruption of the crowd was neither jeers nor boos. The elder Eubank was now treasured 鈥 public enmity at his antics turned to respect for his achievements, and possibly even a form of love. The people recognised his honesty and his integrity, and they cherished him for it even if they did not agree with him. Nostalgia has a way of doing that.
And then there was Benn, his back to the camera, stood watching the entrance of his old rival. It all made for perfect cinema.
When I watched the fight on YouTube a few days later, I was struck by a different feeling, one that always comes when I see the children of fighters go into the ring to follow their fathers: sadness.
I understand why many sons follow their fathers into the ring; it is both a way to prove yourself as a man and a challenge to the person who sired you. There are elements of hero worship, too, and possibly inevitability. A father鈥檚 trade passes down.
But my father was not a boxer and no child of mine will ever climb into the ring. I am that middle ground: the fragile boy who found manhood in his boxing gloves. And I have seen the costs in doing so, especially in recent years with all my friends who have been damaged in the ring and in the aches in my own bones.
So I view things differently. An aversion to having children box. As an old fighter once said: 鈥淚 fight so that my children do not have to.鈥
I was recently rereading part of The Hate Game by Ben Dirs. That book was about the original two fights between the senior Benn and Eubank.
At one point, Dirs spoke to promoter Barry Hearn, who said: 鈥淣igel had the last laugh because he put all his money into sensible things like property and Chris spunked all his on things like giant trucks.鈥
It would be improper to comment on a man鈥檚 fortunes or parenting, but it does not seem right that the son of an elite boxer, one who has seemingly held on to his fortune, should have followed his dad into the ring. Most boxers go into the ring from a lack of opportunity, but these men as children were blessed with a wealth of options.
As David Remnick once wrote in King of the World over 25 years ago, 鈥淏oxing has come to represent an utter lack of opportunity, not opportunity itself.鈥
If I was one of those fathers in that position, my child would not be a boxer. A lawyer, doctor, or accountant would be the path I would push them on. Something better, much better, than being hit in the head for a living.
The Independent’s senior writer/editor Pete Carvill is the author of Death of a Boxer (a Daily Mail and Irish Times 鈥楽ports Book of the Year鈥) and A Duel of Bulls: Hemingway and Welles in Love and War. He is also a frequent blow-by-blow commentator on DAZN for boxing from Germany.
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