On the undercard, new met old as Michael Watson took on Errol Christie in his first fight since losing to McCallum in April. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. Watson had expected to be the headline act by now, courtesy of that win at Finsbury Park, but in the eighteen months since, fate had contrived to put him back to where he had been before that victory. With his relationship with Mickey Duff coming to an end, Watson had sought assurances from other promoters. Barry Hearn outlined a strategy for him to fight for a world title; he visualised a victory for Eubank against Benn in the main event later that night with Watson becoming his main challenger the following year. That plan helped appease Watson who admitted that watching Benn rise from the ashes and reinvent himself had tested his faith. He knew that Benn had no need for a rematch with him and his resentment wasn’t with his fellow fighter but with the nature of the sport. That, despite all he’d done on the way up, he felt like he had to start all over again. One of boxing’s oldest and cruellest adages is that you’re only as good as your last fight. In Watson’s case, that meant he was a failed challenger who’d come up short at the highest level. Benn was, on current form, the most exciting fighter in Britain and Eubank the most enigmatic. Whether he liked it or not, Watson needed a new sales pitch, a chance to re-establish himself as the best of the bunch. That journey would start in Birmingham that night.
Watson was only two years younger than Christie but his mind and body were at least ten years younger. Christie had once been the golden boy of British boxing, but five knockout defeats had left his confidence all but shattered, while trying to meet the expectations he’d set himself during an outstanding amateur career had taken its toll. By now, Christie had gone from prospect to opponent, being used as a sparring partner by, among others, Eubank. He was floored within the first minute by Watson, before being stopped in the third round. Given that he hadn’t fought for over seven months, Watson looked very impressive. Job done, Watson took his place at ringside to watch the main event.
‘Who did you want to win?’ I asked him years later.
‘Is that a difficult question?’ he replied.
‘Benn?’
‘That’s right.’
Eubank’s preparation in his dressing room had been almost perfect. He had arrived at half six, surprisingly early for someone renowned for his tardiness. Promoters, trainers and reporters would get used to Eubank almost never being on time for any appointment for years to come. His routine involved massaging his feet and then insisting on trainer Ronnie Davies singing. After the referee came in to give him the fight rules – a legal obligation – Mendy would arrive to supervise the taping of the boxer’s hands. Eubank brushed Mendy off, telling him that he could appreciate what he was doing for Benn but that it would be to no avail.
As befits tradition, the challenger Eubank entered the arena first. It soon became apparent that the Benn camp had more up their sleeve. Since he had joined Hearn’s Matchroom stable, Eubank had entered arenas to the sound of Tina Turner’s ‘Simply the Best’ (an idea first suggested to him by Hearn’s wife). That night was no exception, but for the fact that when Eubank got to within fifty yards of the ring the music stopped. Hearn, suspecting this was no accident, rushed to the studio where the music was coming from. ‘I whacked someone upstairs – the only person who was calm was Eubank. I was foaming at the mouth!’ says Hearn. Though always denied by Mendy, it has been claimed that at his insistence, the sound operator had been told to play half of Eubank’s music before shredding the tape. Hearn was talked back into the ring by Eubank and the team headed for their date with destiny, the challenger still looking imperious. This was the moment he had waited for his whole adult life; rather than being daunted by it, he was soaking it up, putting himself in a position to seize the day. None of the stuff attempted by Mendy stopped Eubank, who was wearing a white poncho and matching shorts, from vaulting into the ring (more than one member of the press has told me that they secretly hoped he’d slip and fall on his behind) or stalking the canvas with his hands gloves by his side. What was also apparent was that, for all the talk about him a being divisive hate figure, Eubank wasn’t booed much on his way in and many even cheered when he jumped the rope.
Seconds after entering the ring, the sound of drums could be heard, followed by the sight of members of Benn’s former army regiment coming into view. Despite the energy he had expended earlier in the day, Benn jogged to the ring, clad in a black sequined jacket and shorts. Once in, he eyeballed Eubank, looking desperate to get as close to the challenger as possible. As if the hype for the bout hadn’t been rich enough, especially after the pair’s contract signing, Benn had stoked things up even further the day before the fight by announcing he’d retire if he lost. Conversely, Eubank had let it be known that he had bet £1,000 at 40-1 to knock Benn out in the first round. After the introductions, both men were invited to the centre of the ring to be given the fight instructions by American referee Richard Steele. Benn, snarling, moved forward, but was made to wait by Eubank, who, hands by his side, finally strutted to Steele’s right. When asked to touch gloves, Eubank left his right hand low, and it was smacked hard by the champion, whose facial expression had never softened.
As the timekeeper prepared to ring the first bell, Eubank once again reverted to pose – this time, both arms crossed, the right slightly above his waist. Again, Benn just glared. At ringside, a nervous Hearn turned to Benn’s promoter Bob Arum and told him, ‘You know you’re fucked, don’t you?’ Arum asked why. ‘Because you haven’t got any options,’ replied Hearn.
As convinced as he was that his man would win, so was Mendy. Something had to give.
Scene V
‘Chris Eubank was the kind of man you’d want with you in the trenches, if things were going bad. Tough, tough man’
– former world super featherweight challenger Jim McDonnell
‘Let’s just say Nigel Benn enjoyed his job’
– TV presenter, commentator and interviewer Jim Rosenthal
Once the introductions were over, this was a fight that oozed tension. Noise from the crowd was occasional, and when it came, loud. But everyone there, and that includes fans, reporters, fighters and trainers, remembers it as a night full of tension. ‘Television neutered the event. It cut out the atmosphere which enveloped the ring,’ wrote Harry Mullan, editor of the trade paper Boxing News. The fans, the bulk of whom followed Benn, were nervous, as they always were before one of his bouts. ‘The Dark Destroyer’s’ vulnerability, exposed against Logan, Watson and, in his last fight, against Barkley, meant he always seemed a punch away from defeat. That small band of supporters chanting Eubank’s name had no real idea how good their man was – but they probably suspected that he had a chance. But Eubank hadn’t demonstrated in his previous fights that he had the ability or stamina to take a fight by the scruff of the neck and control the tempo. As he had been on the street, as a pickpocket, Eubank was an opportunist, seizing the moment and maximising it. That’s why his knockout of Renaldo dos Santos had become such a defining point of his career – winning in twenty seconds hadn’t been as impressive as the pose he gave to the camera in the corner, with the stricken fighter also in shot. ‘Most fighters are great actors, performers’ says Nick Owen. Few enjoyed the theatre as much as Eubank because his mind was set up to take advantage of any time the camera was pointed in his direction. That clarity of thought was a massive advantage in the ring as well.
Future Olympic 100 metres champion Linford Christie and Frank Bruno were just a couple of the 150 or so sporting celebrities in attendance. The televised contract signing between Benn and Eubank, and the subsequent replays of the snarling and goading between the pair, had piqued the interest of the general public. So many fights seemed to involve one boxer playing the role of the straight man and the other the instigator. Here, both men seemed to take turns in trying to unsettle the other. ‘We worked the crowd,’ Benn would say years later, but in 1990 there was no collusion in order to hype up
the fight. Their mutual dislike and antipathy had transferred into true box-office theatre. Benn, so full of hate, was obviously irked by his opponent, whose cold but articulate demeanour was superficially the very opposite of his. They were both men of the street, but while Benn had taken to them to try to rid himself of an inner fury, Eubank’s personal circumstances had offered him very few options. At the time, little of this was common knowledge. What sold the fight was the placing of these two men against each other, the furious Benn, back from his American adventure to take care of some domestic trouble. But the trouble wasn’t in the form of the honest and dedicated professional Watson, or even the dancing Herol Graham, but in the strutting and pontificating Eubank, who you sensed wound Benn up before he’d even said a word. The weight of public opinion was behind Benn – people generally didn’t like Eubank and they wanted him silenced. They identified with Benn’s anger.
These were unsettled times for the country, with rising unemployment and inflation and Benn, his scowling and snarling, whether he knew it or even liked it, had come to represent the maligned and frustrated who wanted their boxing to be violent and quick. They couldn’t see past the fact that Benn actually had more in common with the Thatcher principle of ‘go get yours’. Here was a man from a modest background who had managed to turn his life around by finding a sport which catered to his ability and then rebounded from his first setback to become even more successful. Those same people probably couldn’t work out Eubank and the apparent hypocrisy of making a living out of something he so openly disdained. And yet there was another class of fan who enjoyed Eubank for what he offered – entertainment. He didn’t fight with the energy and electricity of Benn, but at least he had an act. He dared to be different and in every generation there is a percentage of people who can identify with that desire to stand out, to make their own way, while paying scant regard to authority. At the start of the nineties, with the country in recession, with the message being sent out that things weren’t necessarily going to get any better any time soon, Eubank offered a little escapism, some theatre that you didn’t expect to find in a boxing ring. Those fans began as a minority, not nearly as vocal as the followers of Benn, but just as loyal. And when Eubank told them he was the superior boxer, they believed him, turning what seemed like a mismatch into a contest you had to watch either in person or on TV. Around twelve million, nearly a fifth of the population, would turn on for the fight, believing something special would take place that evening. And they had to pick a side. Both boxers had such strong personalities that they urged you to choose one. There could be no middle ground.
The fight began, as expected, with Benn following the challenger around the ring, in a clockwise circle. That itself was a dangerous policy, with Eubank, in theory, travelling in the direction of Benn’s venomous right hand. But the challenger was not in survival mode – he might have been in retreat for most of the opening round, but it was his counter punches, mainly with his own right hand, that scored the points. On a couple of occasions, it seemed that he might have stunned Benn, but the round ended with the challenger establishing his jab and also demonstrating his power. Screensport commentator Dave Brenner accurately summarised the round: ‘Definitely the challenger’s.’
Brenner got to know Eubank as well as most during the beginning and interim period of his career: ‘He is a lovely guy, but could never be told.’ Indeed, after the round ended, Eubank, rather than return to his corner, strolled around the ring, gloves cupped at his waist. At the urging of cornerman Davies, he finally sat down, but the posing did him little good. He spent the majority of the second round swallowing leather, including a right hand which nearly lifted him off the ground. Although he stunned Benn at the end of the stanza with a left hook, the cleaner and harder punches had come from the champion. Eubank would later admit that he feared the pace of the first two rounds such that, for the first time in his career, he considered he might have to take a count. Even when he had Benn in trouble, Eubank didn’t really go in for the finish, wary that the champion had a reputation for exaggerating the danger he was in, before landing a potentially concussive blow.
The third round saw Benn concentrate his attack on Eubank’s mid-section. ‘I’m worried that Chris doesn’t take a great body punch,’ said TV analyst Barry McGuigan. In the majority of the exchanges, Benn’s power seemed superior – but it was also obvious that Eubank could take the punishment. Both men talked to each other throughout, but for much of this period the challenger’s words were more prolific than his punches. Even a late flurry, which included an uppercut that rocked Benn’s head back, wasn’t enough to swing the fight in Eubank’s favour. But he had done something which, intentionally or not, would later prove pivotal.
By the end of the third round, Benn’s left eye was swollen and seemed about to close. ‘He got me with a thumb – and that hurt! It was like someone had pricked me with a needle. It was sending pain to my brain … it was killing me, killing me,’ Benn told me. In the early twentieth century, an American middleweight called Harry Greb became as famous for his whirlwind punching style as he did for his ability to use the heel and lace on his gloves to wound his opponent. The tactic was so routinely employed in that era that Greb would partially lose the sight of both his eyes because of opponents out for some measure of revenge. The problem for Benn was that only partial vision in his left eye meant he could not see the Eubank right hand.
Benn could play the dirty tune as well – many of his body punches were only just about legal and some were clearly hurtling too closely to Eubank’s groin. But those punches weren’t the ones that caused Eubank the most distress in the fourth round. ‘We were in a clinch … and when you are in a clinch you actually put your head over your opponent’s shoulder. When you do that and drop your head, your jawbone automatically opens. And when your jawbone opens, your tongue slips between your teeth,’ Eubank remembers. At that stage, the challenger was weary, having absorbed numerous painful body punches. He was in the clinch, seeking rest. But Benn bobbed and rolled out of the clinch and landed a tremendous uppercut. ‘And there was a half-inch gash in my tongue,’ continues Eubank. It gave him a number of problems. The tongue was now a liability, causing him huge pain and also forcing him to swallow blood in steady amounts. He knew that if either his corner or the referee discovered his predicament, the fight would be stopped. It looked bad enough for him at the end of that fourth round, after absorbing nearly a dozen hooks to his abdomen which left him so disorientated that he nearly went to the wrong corner. It looked now, finally, as if one fighter had established dominance – but the champion’s left eye was now closed and he was, because of the ridiculous weight fiasco less than twelve hours earlier, operating on less than a full tank of gas. McGuigan, who is rarely wrong about much in boxing, would say at the start of the fifth, ‘This is all down to who is the fittest.’
Round five was the first that saw both men fight as if they had been in war – both were more circumspect and less willing to go to the trenches. This suited Eubank, whose superior boxing ability on the retreat meant he was able to hit and not get hit as Benn took a breather, his work rate conspicuously low. The eye looked worse and worse, so bad that today it could well have forced a stoppage. Benn’s corner, including Vic Andretti and veteran cutman Percy Armstrong, were unable to do anything to prevent the swelling increasing and the fight was turning slowly in Eubank’s favour.
It’s at such moments that boxers have to find something within that defines them, not just for one evening, but for the rest of their careers. Labelled a quitter when floored by a jab from Michael Watson, Benn now had the chance to erase all questions about his mentality. Boxing is a natural haven for bullies and his attitude before and during fights fitted the profile of one. As Eubank would say many years later, the force of Benn’s intimidation could beat 90 per cent of those who stepped into the ring with him. But now, nearly halfway through this contest, the scowl had been replaced by a squint. His face disfigured, could B
enn find another way to victory?
In the other corner, Eubank himself was hardly fresh, but his countenance remained implacable. His gift for theatre was an advantage – he had absorbed numerous hard punches but had yet to give Benn an indication that one more punch was all that was required to finish matters. Benn thrived on fear and he had yet to find it in his opponent. Eubank’s strategy since the fight was signed was to show as little weakness as possible. He’d refused to make eye contact when they were in a studio together and even now, with blood pouring from his split tongue down his throat, he made every effort to remain, at least on the outside, stoical and unbowed.
No Middle Ground Page 11