One of the consequences of his fight with Watson had been that post-fight interviews were, for now, conducted outside the ring arena. Dressed in a light blue vest, Eubank answered questions with humour and also a little edge. When asked about a potential rematch with Benn, he warned that it would only happen if he was paid a million pounds after tax. Benn was the mandatory challenger for the WBO title, which meant that, theoretically, he would have to get a title shot by the end of the year. Benn had waived his right to the fight, for now, to allow Eubank to defend his belt against another American without much chance of victory, Ron Essett. And it was then, when asked further about Benn, that the fighter inside Eubank truly came out.
‘I’ve nothing more to prove to Nigel. I’ve beaten him once, there was no controversy or luck involved … If you don’t pay me what I want [and the fight doesn’t happen], I’ll sleep easily, knowing my name stands over his.’
Once again, the gauntlet had been thrown down to his nemesis. But exactly how could promoters find that sort of money for Eubank, an amount unheard of for British fighters boxing in their own country?
Knowing the only way he could get to Eubank was by going up a weight division, Nigel Benn became a super middleweight. Having watched his mate Watson come so close to stripping Eubank of his unbeaten record and then coming up tragically short had not put him off. Revenge was all he could think about. There are plenty who believe the move up in weight – Benn would carry an extra 8 lb – was detrimental. He was not a big middleweight and could possibly have got down to the light middleweight limit, so ferocious were his cardiovascular workouts. But not many people have ever persuaded him to change his mind.
American Lenzie Morgan was selected for his first super middleweight bout on 26 October 1991, with the venue being Matchroom’s arena of choice in Brentwood. Morgan’s record was littered with some of the better super middleweights and light heavyweights around the world. Crucially, though, he rarely beat any of them. He was around six inches taller than Benn and a couple of years younger. And he was tough. If Benn’s first fight in America, against Jorge Amparo, was a wake-up as to how hard this business was at the top, his first at a new weight was no different. Punches that in the past would move and disorientate seemed to bounce off Morgan. Ten rounds came and went and, although Benn would take a points decision by a single round, he never looked in serious trouble. Barry McGuigan reasoned that the extra pounds helped him take better punches, if not throw them. Interviewer Gary Newbon would incur Benn’s wrath by, in the fighter’s mind, failing to show him respect for the change in his style. It was a reminder of the volatility that always lurked beneath the surface with Benn; the eyes darkening and the sure knowledge that, if he was pushed further, he could explode. While Eubank appeared to be able to keep all those emotions hidden, Benn’s demand to be understood in the way he wanted was expressed in the severest of terms.
Eighteen days before Christmas 1991, Benn reassured his fans that there was still dynamite in his fists when he took on Buenos Aires middleweight Hector Lescano. The visitor had rarely fought outside Argentina and was out of his depth and weight class, a flurry of punches to body and head ending matters in the third. Hearn’s ability to build a fight was demonstrated in Benn’s next outing, against former Eubank foe Dan Sherry. The Canadian tried his best to bother Benn, but, again, he was not a super middleweight. Even if he had been, it was his bad fortune to walk on to a savage right hand in the third round of their contest at Alexandra Palace in north London. All those details about the context of the knockout were irrelevant in terms of hyping of a Benn–Eubank rematch. The challenger was healed and apparently hitting harder than ever. That fight took place on 19 February 1992 – Benn’s next fight would be against recently beaten ‘Sugar Boy’ Malinga.
‘He was my bogeyman,’ says Benn of the Zulu, who frustrated and teased him for ten rounds at the NEC in May that year. At the time, he would say, ‘He gave me a hell of a fight. I underestimated him and paid the price’, but in fact he paid no price. Virtually everyone at ringside believed Benn had lost – in fact the only person who didn’t was referee Paul Thomas, who gave the decision, by a round, in favour of the British boxer. ‘A bit of a hometown decision,’ says Benn of that night.
But the restlessness inside him, which was his default setting for much of his youth and still raised its head intermittently, threatened to derail his career. His problems with his first marriage and the lack of direction in his career – when would Eubank fight him? – were submerging him. There wasn’t much in the super middleweight division to keep him interested. Iran Barkley was the new IBF champion and there was little interest in seeing a rematch. The WBA title was held by Panama’s Victor Córdoba, a tricky southpaw who was bound to make Benn look awful if they fought. That left the WBC champion, Italian Mauro Galvano. Benn had bided his time, waiting for Eubank to grant him a rematch. If and when the fight took place, he wanted to be paid the same as or more than his rival. But that would never happen if he was a challenger. If he came into the rematch as a fellow champion, only then Benn could expect parity.
It’s no exaggeration to say that fighting in Italy was every visiting boxer’s nightmare. The word was that you needed a knockout for a draw if you were taking on an Italian in his own country. The Mexicans do their best to create an atmosphere of genuine hostility, but, equally, they are respectful if a foreigner shows courage and the ability to fight, rather than hide. Those attributes were likely to count for nothing against Galvano, whose connections with the Italian underworld meant that in 2012 he was sentenced to six years in prison for crimes such as extortion. In 1990, another east London boxer, Mark Kaylor, had lost his European title to Galvano in a fight the Englishman knew he had little chance of winning. Galvano was tricky and known as a spoiler, someone who would knock you out of your stride before instigating his own plan. Very few people outside Italy would willingly pay to watch him fight, but in front of his own people he was a hero.
Few gave Benn a chance of winning. But since he had watched Watson come so close to beating Eubank, he had an eye on how he would do what his friend could not quite do. He wanted to change trainers and he initiated the move to bring Jimmy Tibbs on board, initially for the Galvano fight, but with the bigger picture being to make him a better boxer for when he took on Eubank.
An East Ender, Tibbs had always known about Benn, from his early days as an amateur with blistering power through to his professional career. He’d watched the performance against Malinga and noticed how Benn’s head kept popping up after he’d throw a punch, making him an easy target. Although Tibbs had a reputation, unfairly he insists, for working with boxers who had upright, classic British styles, he could offer wisdom to anyone. And it was that conditioning and pace that he had instilled in Michael Watson which encouraged Benn to make contact with him.
‘A man rang me up and said someone is going to ring up – they want you to train someone. And I thought, “Not another six-rounder!” I don’t mind training six-round fighters, but they cost so much money, if you don’t have a promoter,’ recalls Tibbs. ‘Anyway, it was Nigel’s mate, Ray Sullivan [‘Rolex Ray’]. He said, “would you be interested in training Nigel Benn?”’
Meanwhile, Benn rang the Tibbs household and asked the lady of the house if Tibbs could come to Tenerife, his new training base, to train him. ‘Of course he can. I don’t care where Jimmy goes to train!’ Mrs Tibbs told Benn. The whole family had known of him for years – Benn had trained with Tibbs’s son, Jimmy Junior – and weren’t intimidated by his volatile reputation. ‘He was always polite,’ adds Tibbs. He was also a phenomenal trainer, according to the venerable cornerman. ‘He was a dream to work with. He never missed a morning run, was always on time. He might get a little excited every now and then but you wouldn’t want to take that away from him, because he needs to take that into the ring with him.’
‘He loved his boxing. If you told him to do something, he’d want to know why. And then he’d say “s
how me how to do it”. And I’d show him how and how other fighters did it, and Nigel would say “I’ll do it better than him”.’ Tibbs also realised there was an issue with Benn and sparring and would make arrangements to combat that, encouraging his charge to hit the pads harder and move his upper body more, making him a slighter, more elusive target. There would be sparring, but not every day, and Benn would never spar for more than nine rounds on a given day. The pair were together for three and a half years and Tibbs doesn’t recall them having a single argument. Even now, after a career in the sport that has lasted over fifty years, his eyes sparkle at the mention of Benn’s name and that era of boxing. And those days in Tenerife were also particularly special. Benn would also say that, in retrospect, if he had had Tibbs in his corner on the night of that frenetic fight against Watson at Finsbury Park, he might have had a chance of winning. ‘The best trainer I ever had,’ Benn told me.
The Galvano fight would be the first time Tibbs appeared in Benn’s corner and the last time he fought abroad. Prior to the bout, he was unbeaten on his travels. But for this assignment he was a massive underdog. ‘A cornered Nigel Benn is a fearsome beast,’ remembers Jim Rosenthal of those times when the experts thought he had bitten off more than he could chew. At just twenty-eight and very much in his prime, the time was right for Benn to pull off a surprise. The date was 3 October 1992 and the venue was the Ice Palace in the Italian town of Marino. On his way to the ring, Benn was the target of coins and spitting from racist sections of the crowd. It was unlikely to upset a man whose upbringing on the streets of east London was as tough as anything he experienced in the ring.
Galvano’s strategy was to hold Benn by the back of the neck whenever possible, in order to smother his power. But during the first round, a couple of big right hands landed on the Italian’s chin. The champion responded by landing an elbow by Benn’s left eye, while the American referee, Joe Cortez, was temporarily blindsided. Cortez’s mantra was that he was ‘firm but fair’ but he was probably one of the weaker world referees, allowing Galvano to hit low constantly and butt and elbow Benn. But while the Italian might have had the edge with the roughhouse tactics – Benn was no angel himself – he could not cope with the challenger’s power. Straight right hands and uppercuts continued to explode on Galvano’s chin, forcing him to fight more defensively. By the end of the third round, the champion’s left eye was bloodied and closing. Sensing their man was going to get a steadier beating, the Italian’s cornermen asked Cortez to examine the eye and looked for a technical draw, hoping that the official would rule the cut was the result of a head butt. ‘This is a real try-on by the Italians,’ said Jim Watt in the commentary box. If, under WBC rules, a fight was stopped before three rounds because of a cut caused by a clash of heads, the referee was obliged to call the result a draw. But Cortez never inspected the cut – it was the Italians who had decided their man had had enough, which really meant a retirement. Galvano did not come out for the start of the fourth and Benn assumed victory and started celebrating wildly, unaware, it seemed, that the Italians were looking to pull a ‘stroke’.
Barry Hearn sensed what was going on. He remembers the evening as follows. ‘I won Nigel the world title and he never wanted to acknowledge it. I could see there was a stroke going on. The Italians didn’t look disappointed or unhappy. I went over and I was told “no contest, we keep the title”. I spoke to Cortez and said, “Joe, you’ve done a hundred and fifty odd world title fights, don’t fuck your career up over this.” So I then got hold of the phone and I said I was dialling [Jose] Sulaiman [late head of the WBC] and you’re all out of a job. I went potty. And then Cortez said, “It was a punch.” So I told him he had to stick to that. And so we won the title.’
Benn had run the gamut of emotions in the space of three or four minutes and it was all played out on live television. He’d refused to be interviewed by Gary Newbon when it looked like he would not be getting the title. Then he had fumed, asking Newbon, ‘What do you expect me to say?’, and then, when he was given the decision, he hugged the interviewer. It was Benn in a nutshell, hostile one moment, teddy bear the next. He revealed that the name of his deceased brother Andy had been sewn into his shorts and dedicated the victory to him and one other person.
‘The other person who gets that belt is Michael. Michael, I hope you’re watching. That is your belt and no one can take it away from you. That’s from me to you, with my love, Michael.’
To complete the haul of men who had beaten him, Benn then reached through the ropes to greet Chris Eubank, dressed in a navy suit and sporting sunglasses. The two exchanged what passed for handshakes, before Benn had, for one of the few times, the last word:
‘Now we can do business.’
Scene II
In 1992, the biggest draw in sport was facing up to at least three years in prison. The former world heavyweight champion Mike Tyson had been convicted of raping Desiree Washington and was given a ten-year sentence. Four of those years were suspended and under the laws of the penal system in Indianapolis, where the crime had been committed and Tyson was housed, he would be entitled to a day’s parole for every day he served with good behaviour. Even so, the earliest he would be released would be some time in mid-1995. There was thus a void at the top end of the sport.
Tyson’s behaviour notwithstanding, boxers, especially heavyweights, were incredibly grateful to the self-styled baddest man on the planet. His reign as champion and even his subsequent fights as former king had generated so much money that fighters were being paid bigger sums than ever before. The number of noughts on the cheque had risen to seven by the time of his incarceration and he could expect as much, if not more, when he returned. The revenues were being generated by pay-per-view television, a rapidly growing phenomenon in the United States at the start of the 1990s.
While gate receipts generally cover the costs of a promotion, and in some cases can help generate a slight profit, television money had always driven the size of the purses that could be paid out. In America, pay-per-view or closed circuit television had helped put together such events as Sugar Ray Leonard’s memorable comeback win over Marvelous Marvin Hagler in 1987, as well Tyson’s ninety-one-second defeat of Michael Spinks a year later. The cost of paying for a fight to be broadcast into your home in America has usually been around the $50 mark. In 2007, Oscar de la Hoya fought Floyd Mayweather Junior in a bout purchased by 2.4 million households, generating nearly $140 million in revenue. With fighters represented by agents who are, generally, far shrewder than those who managed during the sport’s infancy, their knowledge of their own worth has grown substantially during the past twenty-five years.
Pay-per-view had not hit Great Britain by 1992, but, just as television programming in the USA had been affected by the power of cable networks HBO and Showtime, both of which were major players in boxing, so BSkyB were starting to flex their muscles in the world of sport. Their primary target had been the national game, association football. That year, the product now known as the English Premier League was born, offering clubs in the higher echelons untold riches compared to what they had received in the past. There was money on the table and soon some of the best players in the world, who had plied their trade in more lucrative markets such as Italy and Spain, were finding the lure of the lira and the peseta easy to ignore when sterling was thrust in their faces.
With dedicated sport channels, BSkyB could offer more depth to their coverage than terrestrial television, which had to justify itself to the licence fee payer. In the end, that would help the organisation to get their fingers into virtually every sporting pie that had previously been the preserve of the BBC, ITV or even Channel 4. In 1992, those days seemed far off, but for now certainly people in television whose jobs had rarely involved having to fight off rivals were now getting a little twitchy. Their principal concern was that they could not offer the money that promoters would expect from Sky. ‘We knew the game was up once Sky bought the Premier League,’ says Trevor Ea
st, Head of ITV Sport at the time, who would eventually work for his rivals as more and more sport disappeared from terrestrial television.
Tyson’s drawing power had increased his own financial strength and it was no different for Chris Eubank. ‘He got the ratings,’ said Gary Newbon, who had a dual role as ringside reporter and executive. It didn’t matter that ‘Simply the Best’ was involved in a series of bouts that were tactically sound, rather than offering heavy hitting violence. The other side to that was that, in Eubank, ITV were dealing with a man who knew his worth. He had done since he had embarked on his professional career and with every thrilling win over Benn or Watson the interest in this unique boxer grew. His demands for a purse in the region of a million pounds for a Benn rematch was unprecedented but also realistic. This would be a bout with global appeal, if marketed correctly. And if that happened, television revenues would be huge.
Eubank also knew that Nigel Benn had made a name for himself in America during that year after he was beaten by Michael Watson. And in the absence of Tyson, the likes of HBO and Showtime were searching around to find value in other weight divisions. Traditionally, middleweight boxing was the second most prestigious division, made glorious by Sugar Ray Robinson during the 1950s, and some of that lustre was seen again when Hagler dominated the 1980s, his bouts with Leonard, Roberto Durán and Thomas Hearns all doing fabulous business around the world. The current vintage of American middleweights looked promising. Michael Nunn, a stylish southpaw who had looked the natural heir to Leonard, had been a world champion and then moved up a weight and would soon dethrone Victor Córdoba to become a two-weight champ. There were others – Roy Jones Junior, who should have been Olympic champion but for a violently corrupt interpretation of scoring at the Seoul Olympics in 1988, and James ‘Lights out’ Toney, an engagingly outspoken fighter from Michigan who had inflicted the first defeat of Nunn’s career and was now finding a move up in weight a necessity.
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