Boxing News Boxing News
By Gary Evans
What happens when very young men fall out of the bottom of the education system? Some of the more obvious answers can be found in broad daylight on a busy street in North London, in the shadow of the Spurs football [soccer] ground [where, incidently, Eubank fought Michael Watson on that tragic night].
A bunch of teenage boys, some of them hooded, are hanging out by the railings near the shops. A dealer arrives and hands one of them a phone. It contains drugs, but doesn’t look incriminating if caught on a camera. The boy vanishes. When he returns and hands the phone back, it contains money.
The mobiles harbour other things – scenes that, despite their low-pixel graininess, are all too vivid – a group beating up a single victim, a young man scaling a drainpipe to the sixth floor of a block of flats and going in through the window.
A few seconds later, out flies a TV set. Having trashed the flat, the figure reappears and shins back down while his friends laugh
and cheer. The footage then circulates with greater speed than gossip ever managed.
These are some of the episodes described by teachers and youth leaders at a new academy that aims to give boys from this culture a last chance to change. “They are doing this with a combination of basic schooling and sporting discipline. It started last year with just nine students. They are aged between 14 and 16, and have already been in trouble with the law.
“Some entered their teens without mastering single-digit adding and subtraction. What almost all have in common is that they have been excluded from schools for excluded pupils. Those establishments were once known as approved schools, then pupil referral units and now pupil support centres.
“However you name them, they didn’t work in the cases of these boys, and this bare classroom in a building off the high street is the very last of last-chance saloons,” Eubank told me.
Eubank has dipped in his hand in this venture and will help where he can in the future. There are 90-minute lessons, four times a week, in English and maths.
Also brought in will be boxing, where Chris comes in. “They fight already. Boys have always fought. This is about teaching them some discipline, some manners. It is also about using people whom they respect as role models.”
He uses attack as his best of defence when saying “There’s rank hypocrisy about. Education is entrusted to governments composed of sane, middle-class people who make moral judgments when it suits them, but who haven’t got education remotely right.
“How dare they take away kids chances and then tell them, ‘you offend my moral sensibilities by lacing on boxing gloves’. Look at these kids’ expectations of drugs and crime and then compare that with the virtually irrelevant damage that carefully supervised boxing does. It doesn’t stack up, does it?”
He says contact in the sessions will be limited. When there is contact, it’ll be to the body to body sparring.
A word to the wise: “I tell them: “Your health, if you actually think about it, is the most important thing in your life. If you want to live and enjoy your family, girlfriend, boyfriend, a winter’s morning, the cinema, ice cream – whatever, don’t smoke! Forget boxing, what about your bon bon’s?”
Chris doesn’t believe in diet at all. He says mood and mentality are more important that cholesterol! “One must be buoyant, and that requires strawberry bon bon’s.”
I asked him why he started boxing in the first place. He says he had “a little belly, or abit of a belly” when he arrived in New York when he was 16, “when you get through as much weed as I got through, you need five or six bags of Treets a day!”
But that belly had vanished within three months of arriving in New York because he barely had any food. However, he wanted to be able to stay in shape because he then had good food supply, and wanted to do so in a way that used his fists because it’s all he knew. “There wasn’t the facilities to play football or tennis when and where I was growing up.”
But also, his expectations for himself were very high. “I wanted to be able to fly Concorde, eat a tossed salad whilst sitting on Ocean Drive in Miami. When I realised the criminal world probably wouldn’t steer me there, boxing was an option because it was an exteme job and I was an extreme individual. Two extremes go hand in hand.”
If you weren’t brought up fighting on the streets, Eubank says you likely cannot make it in boxing, “unless you’re severely abnormal”. He explains, “I’d been beaten up on average four days a week from the age of four. That conditions your body to physical pain, if I wasn’t conditioned to physical pain, then I would never have come close to making it in boxing. I would have
taken many years to actually condition my body to physical pain, and by then I would be put off.
“But being a former scrapper in the street is a great qualification, a great technical skill to have when entering pugilism, to bring with you into the world of pugilism – especially if you lost more than you won, because your body is already conditioned to physical pain and harm, and you can just get on with learning the craft and making a neat little home for yourself in the trenches where you base yourself in sparring. That’s how you become a good fighter: get beat up.
“I came up the correct way in that when you are four years old, you are only being hit by fellow four-year-olds – six-year-olds at best. So you’re conditioned all the way through. It’s like your classmates, you don’t notice the others in your class at Bellingden Junior changing in any way when you’re growing up, but then in Year Six you look back at photographs of Year Three and see that you are all very much different and yet you haven’t noticed that.
“If I was to have been hit by a 12-year-old when I was six, the pain would be substantial – more substantial than it could be. But I wasn’t hit by a 12-year-old until I was 11.
“When I started sparring in the Jerome Gym in June 1983, I started off with one set of three rounds, then over the months that progressed into six-rounders, then eventually full-blooded 12-rounders. We even did some 15-rounders to condition ourselves so that a 12-round fight felt easier.
“Moving into the pros, it was four-rounders, onto six-rounders, then onto eight-rounders, 10-rounders and eventually the 12-round championship fights. It was just so correct.”
Early in his career, Eubank went through eight or nine trainers and he kept changing as he wanted to get the best out of himself, and he wanted someone to bring the best out of him. “My first trainer was Andy Martinez, who if your height and reach were longer than average for your weight class he would only work on you throwing straight punches.
“I’d always find myself looking over at Maximo Pierret’s fighters and trying to copy the way they’d throw a left hook. I basically taught myself how to throw a left hook, because Martinez couldn’t be bothered.
“Then I was trained by Luis Camacho, who hadn’t actually been a fighter himself which I found a little put-offish. Then a Polish guy called Pat Vercase, who’s only words spoke in English were “Move your head!’.
“Then a guy called Patrick Ford in the Gleason’s Gym, I’d spent about four weeks with him, working on staying on the outside and bringing in hooks to the body, when I got the news I’d ran up a $250 bill on the school phone, and that my mother would somehow have to scrape together enough money to pay the bill – she didn’t earn that much in a week, which made me physically sick.
“So I approached Adonis Torres, owner of the Jerome Gym, about turning professional and signed the forms in August 1985, with Maximo Pierret becoming my trainer – which was orgasmic!
“Whenever I overheard or oversaw Maximo, even in my earliest days in Jerome Gym, he was always the one who to me at that time really looked like he knew what he was doing or really sounded like he knew his stuff, knew his works, this was impressionable on a 16, 17 year old. Plus, he trained Dennis Cruz. Dennis Cruz was a demigod in my world.
“I told the school that I would have the debt paid within six weeks of the new school year. I earned $250 from my first professional fight in Atlantic City and that money went straight to the school.
“Patrick Ford’s brother, Terrence, would sort me out with sparring partners. Then there was Ronnie Davies and Darkie Smith in England, but I knew what I was doing.”
Eubank used to work on his footwork by kicking a soccer ball around in front of Jerome Gym. Simultaneously, he would keep his hand’s in a defensive stance, throwing rights and lefts as he precariously kicked the ball across the vacant parking lot. He received criticism from his trainer at the time Luis Camacho for this, and cut out the practice altogether.
He believes it is only logical that a trainer is a former fighter himself, not someone who is just an observer. “You need a brain what knows what it feels to be punched, how to throw punches correctly. Maximo had all the moves and could teach you everything. For me, he was the definitive trainer.”
He says he didn’t have any boxing idols. “But those fighters I admired? Those fighters were Dennis Cruz, who you would not have heard of. He was a gym fighter, he had perfect balance. I admired greatly the jab of Thomas Hearns, but knew I could never have a jab like that because we didn’t have the same body structure. My style more or less was my own.”
The style he used in his amateur career was vastly different to the style we saw him use in his world championship days. “I very straight up and throwing straight punches, which is being very limited. My style hadn’t evolved yet, I was base because I didn’t have the years. ”
A young Eubank was offered a TV contract, a rariety for a 19-year-old, with SportsChannel in December 1985. Adonis Torres took him off TV after two fights and Eubank turned down the offer. “I felt that I was too limited and would come unstuck when I moved up in class and had so much more to learn and develop at that stage. I’d only been boxing properly for two and a half,
three years – that’s apart from a few scraps in the gym where my brothers trained when I was a kid.”
It wasn’t long after that he met a man by the name of Walter Johnson, nicknamed “Doctor’ by Eubank, who introduced Eubank to various forms of martial arts. Eubank claims that he used martial art moves in his training that helped him understand and develop his own fighting ability. He recommends that other boxers look into martial arts as an important supplement to their training.
Chris told me he would subconsciously use some of the moves and stances Walter taught him. Eubank first met up with this guy one dark night, and recalls this encounter wasn’t exactly friendly! Suffice to say that Walter convinced Eubank that no matter how good you are, you still might not be able to pull it off! After that they became friends.
Walter taught Eubank how to dominate the opponent even before blows are exchanged. He told him that you have to stand tall, appear confident and cause the opponent to feel inferior. He also noticed that Chris’s twin brothers [who were both professional boxers] were musclebound and to prevent Chris going the same way, he introduced stretching exercises into the training. Chris found that these helped with his breathing.
Another area where this Walter was a big help was in improving Eubank’s wrists, for no matter how many times you wrap bandage around a wrist, if that wrist is weak, then powerful impacts become risky. He taught Eubank jiu jitsu wrist exercises, and in addition to those would later introduce an element of training into such everyday operations as wringing out a dishcloth or playing the guitar.
Chris says the dishcloth exercise is useful for its combination of grip and range of wrist movement, whilst guitar playing strengthens the fingers. Chris, however, is quick to point out that the use of everyday objects for exercising was not his or Walter’s idea, but came from Chinese martial tradition.
He says he was still boxing training everyday, too, and that everyone “chipped in’. “It was myself, Maximo, Adonis orres, “Doctor’, there was Pat Vercase and Patrick and Terrence Ford would bring sparring partners over and we all worked together.
“I was a project, only I was the one calling the shots – moulding and modifying things to suit my own liking, my own personality. It was like a scientific experiment.”
When asked to elaborate on what he meant when often in the past saying how he came up the “hard way’, he says “We were breaking into Peckham Market for food because we had no money, me and Go Briggs [?], and then we took it to the nearby hostel and me and Lennox cooked it – not Lennox Lewis, only for others to eat it where we were threatened with kitchen knives.
“While all this was going on, Nigel Benn was driving around London in a Porsche in his first year as a pro. But I always said I would be a champion boxer – ask Go Briggs and The Sticksman [??]. Where they are now, I don’t know.
“When I moved to Brighton in January 1988, I lived in a tiny bedsit with all my belongings in a black bin liner and I worked two jobs while in full training and taking fights on short notice. One job was at a Wimpy and the other in Debenhams. While all that was going on, Frank Warren and Ambrose Mendy were giving Nigel Benn Rolex watches and trying to poach him from the other.
“When I finally got Nigel Benn into the ring years later, I got £45,000 net to fight him which to me at that time was a fortune. Benn’s purse was £1 million.”
He says he doesn’t like to talk about money, because he finds it rather vulgar, vile. But when pressed on his total career earnings “If you must know, £35 million gross. But only £15 million from purses. Most of the rest from sponsorships and endorsements.” [about 70 million dollars]
When he moved to Brighton, he says there was nothing Ronnie Davies could teach him. “It was about streamlining what I had learned from Maximo and “Doctor’, and continuing to imprint the philosophy behind the art of war to my conscious mind so that I had access to it at all times. Ronnie was my supervisor, that’s what I employed him as.”
He said at another point of our chat “Boxing doesn’t affect a boxer’s intelligence. It may affect their speech or their motorised speech patterns. A lot of fighters have the tendency to slur, but that has nothing to do with their intelligence. I remember seeing a boxer called Meldrick Taylor on 7th Avenue and speaking to him and respecting the fact he spoke well.
“Then, 15 years later when I was going to commentate [announce] on the Lewis-Holyfield fight I saw him in the exact same place as I did 15, 14 and a half years previous and couldn’t understand a word he was saying – stuff like that can break your heart.
“But the only reason these fighters slur their speech is because they didn’t have enough wars in the gym, they didn’t have that application. If you aren’t punched hard and often enough you are vulnerable for when you are punched hard and often.
“It’s all about immunity, you must go to war on a daily basis if you want to come out of boxing unscathed and remain unscathed later on. There is no other way.”
For years, Chris says he always used to say that the jab was the most important punch in boxing and truly believed this. But after Errol Christie started getting the better of him in sparring in the summer of 1990, after a year of Eubank getting the better of Christie, Eubank changed his mind.
“Whenever I couldn’t get my jab going, I had a tough, hard fight – Joseph Henry, Eric Holland, Greg George, Anthony Logan. But what that really showed was limitations in other areas – where you are to be able to be leading off with the right hand from the off and landing the right hand from the off where you’re bypassing the jab, which I showed best in Benn 1 in my opinion.
“Everyone was so obsessed with my jab but I don’t know why, it was alright, but people who do all this predictive stuff can’t hang with the innovative, dynamic and intelligent approach. The guys who say, keep moving your head, keep jabbing etc you do that too much and you are in a readable pattern where you get picked apart. Of course it can make you successful but do you
want to be good? Or the best?
“Same with the martial arts. What martial arts allowed me to do was get away from the conventional. The conventional will see you beaten sooner rather than later, because people will be able to work you out. People cannot beat you if they don’t know what you are going to do next.
“If you box with your hands up, then no fighter will be scared of you, because they know that stance – they have been training for that all their boxing careers. Box with your hands down and it unsettles them: they haven’t seen it before, it is uncommon, unconventional, extraordinary. The opponent has to work out the terrain from scratch and while he’s doing that, you are hitting him.
“If you can think alternatively, you can go on to be champion for a long time. As I did.”
He’s keen to point out that he didn’t steal the vault over the ropes from Naseem Hamed. “I met Naseem in May 1989 when I wanted to do some sparring with Herol Graham and Johnny Nelson for my fight with the slippery Randy
Smith. I did the vault in October 1985 – ask a man called Steve Farhood who was ringside. And then, my good friends, do the math.”
He’s also keen to point out that he never referred to “simply the best’ as a boxer, but as a person! However… “Outside of the subject mind, I was simply the best in many avenues. For example – not showing pain, not pulling strokes, throwing a left hook, taking a body shot, in each of these avenues I score a Perfect Ten.”
But he also uses undamaged hands as an argument. “Muhammad Ali, Thomas Hearns, Robinson’s, Hagler’s, these fighters brought arm punches in due to bad hands. Jones Jr, Mayweather Jr – my hands were never damaged, because I actually knew how to throw punches perfectly and correctly. Even when I hit the man in the street – that jewelry thief in The Lanes, or even when I
hit with two tonnes, my hands were always unscathed.
“I never even thought about hurting my hands because I had faith, an inerrable and omnipresent resolve in my skills. Doing everything the correct way, not taking shortcuts. Had I thought about hurting my hands, I’d have hurt my hands.
“I’m not saying I was the most gifted. But I understand the craft 360 degrees and have done since 1990. That’s not being arrogant, that’s being honest.”
Taking a body shot? I reminded him that Nigel Benn in their first fight almost broke him in two on occasions. “Exactly!” was his reply. “If Benn hit anyone else with any one of those body shots they’d have been down and out, most probably.”
A master of reverse psychology is Eubank! He explains his famous tapping of the gloves as what was his nervous twitch, but turned into a confidence trick!
If you study his fights, he tells you to look at the ring generalship. “Maximo Pierret will tell you there’s not been a fighter who mastered the ring generalship better, and he gives the fighters he has in his stable today videos of my fights and asks them to study the ring generalship. How did I hone my ring intelligence? Simple, merciless bang-ups. Hundreds and thousands of merciless bang-ups.
“That was the law of the ring in New York. One must spar four or five days a week without fail, and by that I mean full contact, hard-as-you-can sparring at all times. Only that allows you to hone your ring intelligence. In my opinion I showed the ring generalship best in Benn 1 – in my opinion.”
He also bigs himself up in other parts of our chat, mentioning a fight of his with Eduardo Contreras. “I challenge anybody to find a fight where more perfect punches land. And this was the most slippery, evasive fighter I came across in my entire career, so that makes it all the more impressive. You may ask, “if so many perfect punches landed, then why didn’t you stop him or knock him out?’.
“The reason is simple – Brazilians and Argentinians are the toughest racial people in the world when it comes to punching them! That’s my experience of them, anyway. You can get all your weight behind a punch to a Brazilian or Argentinian and connect with the two correct knuckles, and they’ll just digest it and shake it off.”
And the fights with Michael Watson. “The first half of the first fight, I was picking my punches beautifully and barely took a punch in return. I made it look easy. Watson was an elite operator who, believe me, was doing everything he possibly could to work through his moves.
“It was me who made it look like he was doing nothing. At the point I was winning 6-0, I was by far the number one middleweight on this planet at that point. But then I ran out of strength because I lost 19lb in four days.
“The return? All that needs to be said is that Michael was unbeatable that night, and I beat him.”
I reminded him of some seemingly arrogant remarks he made in the first half of 1991, between the Stretch and Watson fights, that there was nothing any trainer could teach him and that he was the closest thing to unbeatable in boxing. He doesn’t hesitate to confirm, “I trained myself from January 1988 to July 1998 and taught my supervisor, Ronnie, how to be a better trainer.
“I said I was the closest to unbeatable only because I had been to school and had common sense. Before I was beaten, I had the longest unbeaten record in boxing so it was, in actual fact, a fact.
“You would come across fighters like James Toney, Naseem, Steve Collins – who loud and clear thought they would beat anyone. The dictionary tells you that’s not true – logic tells you, the law of averages. That’s why I was so superior to other boxers. I wasn’t going to fight, say, a Toney until my last fight.”
I asked him about not taking on the better opponents. “I didn’t want to fight southpaws and I didn’t want to fight fighters who didn’t just tap but tapped and weren’t tapped back. Herol Graham and Michael Nunn were pointless because I couldn’t have beaten them. They wouldn’t have been able to induce the animal. If you’re a brilliant fighter, atleast be able to induce the animal.”
And Mike McCallum? “I was chasing McCallum for 14, 15 months before signing to fight Benn – he didn’t want anything to do with me, didn’t want to know. So I wasn’t going to give him a shot when I was on top, making more money in 10 months than he did in 10 years.”
And James Toney? “He’d have probably beaten me on points. But I was always interested in fighting him because he was a pig. This guy seemed to hate the world and that’s the kind of guy who can induce the animal or even potentially induce the warrior.”
American-TV? “It was some irony that Benn 1 wasn’t screened on American-TV who basically controlled world boxing until I came along and therefore took their picks of the most competitive fights.
“As hard as he tried though, Barry Hearn couldn’t convince them that I’d do any better than Benn’s earlier victims, so in true Pete Best style they walked away from arguably the most competitive fight ever seen away from their shores.
“So my attitude was why should I win viewers for them, when they were so pig-ignorant towards me?”
I asked him to elaborate on “induce the animal’ and “induce the warrior’ and found myself fascinated with his replies. He puts his animal instinct down to being a Leo – and having the personality of a lion. “I do think, but I mostly talk from the heart. I’m very bold of heart – I’m a fighter, I’m courageous, I’m still a fighter. I am insensitive to what people say to me and I think a lion is like that. After all he kills other animals and eats them raw.” A wicked gleam comes into his eyes and you suddenly wish he’s joking!
He also feels there is a warrior living inside him, which he seperates from the animal. “It took a certain degree of malice to awaken the animal. But it took a severe degree of malice to awaken the warrior, and the warrior being awoken only ever happened to me once, with tragic consequences. By malice I mean malice from the crowd, the opponent, or both.”
He gives examples. “In Benn 1, the animal was induced because he wanted to humiliate me. In Watson 2, the animal was induced because he wanted to humiliate me but also the warrior was induced because he did humiliate me.”
Whenever Walter Johnson would talk to Chris about the Samurai of the past, he says it was as though he knew those things and was just being reminded. Like a knowledge of which he already had and just needed to be reminded of. He says not until after the second Watson fight did he realise [or believe] he had a warrior living inside him.
Chris believes only very, very few people have a warrior living inside them because there aren’t enough Samurai to go round, and it’s not a conscious thing. He believes it can only possibly work for you if you are truly honest in an extreme circumstance. It may all sound silly, but you can tell these are his honest beliefs!
Changing subject, after his fight with Contreras Chris realised he had to change his “operation’ because he was too much of a perfectionist. He watched the fight on video 60 or 70 times in the first fortnight after it took place and criticised his every move, he watched it so much in that fortnight that he’s only watched it two or three times since.
He felt he would be burned out before long. “I had to start re-programming my ring operation, where basically my character in the ring would, rather than perform in the way my mind wanted it to perform, would perform in the way my body told it to perform. That just made me one or two steps more unorthodox, which is a good thing, by the way.”
I put it to him that Jim Watt said he was novice-like because when he missed with a punch he, according to Watt, wouldn’t have the balance to come back with another one. “See, that’s why I’m two steps ahead of the boxing mentality in Britain in regards to the practical elements of fight technique and stratagem. In Britain, they want you to step in and keep throwing punches while in range, I was superior to that because I actually learned defensive moves in regards to escape, moving away from an opponent when exposed.
“When you miss a punch, and I very rarely missed a punch, you’re exposed. And that I very rarely missed a punch is proved in that when I did miss a punch it was more pronounced, with me.”
And what of Barry McGuigan accusing him of not learning how to cut off the ring? “What you have to understand is my stance and poise wasn’t like other boxers, it was superior because I actually understood positioning and escape. I wouldn’t distribute the weight evenly, ofcourse I’d vary the weight distribution when I was preparing to strike but the actual stance and poise was 97% of my weight on the rear foot which meant I was always in position to skip out of range or sway out of range, when I wasn’t preparing to strike, ofcourse.”
In direct reference to Joe Calzaghe or maybe Herol Graham? “I could have tapped my opponents silly if I wanted to and looked out of this world, but I was so obsessed with correctness that I couldn’t be able to.”
I put it to him that his best performance was perhaps Henry Wharton. “It’s an overrated performance because I couldn’t stop him in his tracks. The Board monitored my weight for six weeks which didn’t allow me to use the hydrate technique, the first three, four weeks of sparring I was boxing poorly but then my body got conditioned to the lack of food and it came together alright.
“But I was hitting Wharton as hard as I could, all the time, and couldn’t stop him in his tracks. He disheartened me with his heart and my adrenalin nearly stopped running, which was actually the case in Watson 2. So this was dangerous, it was close, and even without disheartening me if he had surveryed the terrain, philosophised the situation a little, strategised perhaps, he may well have had the beating of me. Wharton – certainly a superior fighter to Steve Collins.”
He clearly feels he has a lot to offer other boxers, particularly British boxers coming up, and seems to feel it’s his duty to provide advise. “When I was 18, I fought in front of 15,000 people at the Madison Square Gardens and TV cameras which I had never seen in my life. These cameras were alien to me, I didn’t know what to make of them.
“When I was 19, I was making my professional debut on a big TV card at the Atlantis Hotel. When I was still a bare, primitive novice I was beating an established, world-class and highly rated fighter in Anthony Logan in front of millions of viewers. I’m the one who’s been there, I’m the one who’s seen it, I’m the one who’s smelt it and done it, and I’m the one who conducts himself
correctly.
“Naseem didn’t seem to want to listen to me, and Amir Khan didn’t seem to want to listen. And that’s fine, you don’t listen you learn the hard way. But I’m approachable as they come you know and I have an awful lot of nuggets and snippets to pass on to young boxers, you know it’s there if they want it.”
He takes you back to the day of his first professional fight. “I was serene on the day of my professional debut and confident, probably because I was the golden boy – the golden boy to my mother, to the block, to the church – and because I had guys around me from the gym saying “You da man Eu-ey!’.
“But then I was left in a room in the Atlantis Hotel by myself for probably only half an hour, but it seemed like an eternity because I had started to get worried, and soon petrified! I went through a searching, emotional self-examination. I really put myself through the mill: “Are you going to do this or are you going to bottle it? Are you going to have courage or are you going to be a wimp?’
“My heart was pounding almost out of my chest. I was going into the unknown, something that has always made me uncomfortable. The hardest part about boxing is the unknown. But when the referee said “Box’ I was more serene than ever, because I knew the territory, which was chess with muscles. The cameras, the crowd, not having headguards or vests, that was all irrelevant. This was just a game of physical chess, and I didn’t realise that until the referee said “Box’.”
His “resolve and conviction’ became delusional, “demented even, at one point”. And that only stopped “when I saw a dead man in the street caused by the instrument I was handling,” [in reference to the A23 tragedy one week after his fight with Sugar Boy Malinga, when the Range Rover Eubank was driving accidently killed a roadworker]. Then he knew he wasn’t invinsible, which he says caused an unbelievable fear and focus going into the John Jarvis fight and how that’s why he was so sharp in mind and body in that fight by comparison to the Malinga fight.
He makes it clear that he’d cut his arm off if he could give that roadworker’s mother her son back, but that the A23 tragedy gave him something vital in his boxing career: “Fear of losing”. Had the accident not happened, he says he’d have surely lost one of his next fights, possibly even against Jarvis.
If you wonder where this resolve and conviction came from, Eubank explains “Put yourself in my position: 28 fights and 28 wins, the former undefeated champion of the world, 24 years old with seven-figures on my bank statements, and then I won the fight I couldn’t win!
“I only had to show up for the Malinga fight. I only had to go through the motions in training, show up for Malinga, be honest and I’d won. It was a full-gone conclusion. Notice that before the announcer reads out the third judges score, I’m already waving my arm in victory!”
He then seems to give what he seems to consider various landmarks “in accordance with’ how he got his “resolve and conviction’. Starting with a fight of his against, I think, a guy called Greg George. “When I fought a light heavyweight on a few hours notice, I was 11 stone and needed money, and he hurt me and shoved me over into the ropes. He was so big and strong so as far as I was concerned the fight was lost at that point, all I had left was honesty. I got straight back up only because I could, and threw
punches straight back only because I could. 10, 15 seconds later and I’d won!”
He then moves to his ex-wife [future wife at the time]. “When I started dating Karen, I wasn’t confident she’d fall for me so all I had was honesty. I told her all about me and all about my past and she fell in love with me!”
And then the Jamaican fighter Anthony Logan. “When I fought Logan I was totally resolute, he caught me with his most solid left hook in the third round and my nervous system twitched, and I only stayed on my feet because I could. Had I taken a standing eight-count, I’d have lost – I still believe that to this day.
“By the way, if you watch the Logan fight today, you’ll see that I look novicey with the way I positioned my arms and elbows, whereas in Benn 1 they were much more tightly tucked in and correct.
“Anyway, I then had it in my mind that as long as I trained correctly and contested truthfully, whatever I thought would happen would happen. And with each and every win, my conviction just got stronger.”
The first fight with Nigel Benn. “When going into Benn 1, I wasn’t even thinking about the win, it was more about the impossibility of him knocking me out! That was because I had a complete, absolute conviction in my skills, knowledge of stratagem and knowledge of the applied philosophy.
“Even though my gift was a granite constitution, had I not had total resolve against Benn’s punching power he may have knocked me out. What allowed me to have that total resolve against his punching power was that conviction in my ability, knowing that it would take care of itself.
“I only wanted to beat Benn with truth and love, but didn’t want to be knocked out at all only through stubborness and pride.
“Now you listen to this – getting in with the hardest puncher around with your hands down and keeping your hands down is a conviction, but focussing solely on the impossibility of him knocking you out is an absolute conviction.”
And the second fight with Watson. “When in round 11 of Watson 2, when my nervous system was knocked out and he put me down, having been in survival mode since the 4th and having accepted defeat since the 6th, and even though my body came back to me when my knee hit the canvas through a certain degree of honesty, I felt my opponent was still strong so I was only getting up to take yet more punches!
“That severe degree of honesty caused me to have a flash of awareness after I spat, and that flash of awareness was honesty itself. Before I even moved in to strike I was absolutely, 100% cocksure that I was going to land a right uppercut. Had I hesitated, I’d have lost. Honesty was why I didn’t hesitate.”
I drew a breath and admired the speech!
He is quick to point out that youngsters should avoid substances such as marijuana. “Unless they are cocksure that they have a strong will inside them!” – asked to elaborate on that particular statement he says “I was into the Rastafarian lifestyle when I was growing up. When I was 12, I’d smoke week before reading proverbs.
I only had a handful of friends – some Nigerians in their early teens and some Rastafarians in their late teens, and they always told me that weed was a herb of wisdom. And I agree, it is a herb of wisdom, but only from the viewpoint – my viewpoint – that it allows you to appreciate your focus when you give it up.
“Within a few months of giving it up, my eyes burned with savage focus, and this helped me succeed in school and boxing. It was because I smoked it so heavily.”
He says for the first 16 years of his life he was let down by everybody in the world, and this affected him for a while. “In my second pro fight against Kenny Cannida, even though I dominated every round, before the scorecards were read out it was 50/50 in my mind whether his name or my name would be announced as the winner.
“You see similar when the bell rang to end the Anthony Logan fight, even though I’d beaten him cleanly and clearly in almost every department I was waiting for the referee to raise his hand!”
Eubank closes by explaining the importance of conduct to boxers. “You must go to school, you must stay in school, to succeed in boxing. I didn’t stay in school for something to fall back on if my boxing failed me, I stayed in school to keep me away from the street, because if I kept the wrong company in the South Bronx I would be killed – it’s as simple as that. I heard gunshots all the time, some areas of the South Bronx were like a warzone and I don’t want any part of the UK to end up like that.
“When I started roadwork in January 1984 – working my way up to seven miles a day, seven days a week – I’d be lying if I said I didn’t come across dead bodies in my path on occasion. I couldn’t run at 5 or 6 in the morning because I feared for my life, I had to run at about 7 and rush home to get ready for school. I needed my warzone to be the ring in the Jerome Gym.
“I spent three-and-a half-years of intense study at Morris High School in the South Bronx, subjects such as Spanish, Geography and North American History and the subject matters haven’t helped me in life at all. I also had five years of studying in word processing at SOBRA College of Technology in New York, until I was able to type 60 words in under a minute. I’ve never needed, never required that skill in life. But without that studying, I would never have made it in boxing.
“The objective was to graduate while conducting myself as well as I could and that would allow me to succeed in boxing, not because I’d have anything to fall back on but because it would keep me away from bad company and allow me to hone my fighting skills to a degree where all I needed was to streamline from there to succeed. ”
He says he can sum up life in three words: “Application is key.”
