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What was your goal in boxing, just the money and the fame mostly? Because you certainly got both in your prime, didn't you?
No. At first, get good at it in the hope of my elder brothers accepting me. They were all boxers and had never accepted me from birth. When I turned amateur, it was win medals, belts and trophies to show my brothers. It sounds crazy, I guess? It was. And when I turned professional, it was to pay off phone bills and gambling debts!
I went to see a Roberto Duran fight in New York City when I was 16, I tagged along with the boxers at my club - and a certain Mike Tyson mingled in, and the fellow he was fighting was the best fighter who'd sparred in the gym I trained at. At that time, I'd only just started sparring and had three rounds under my belt. I looked at Duran as a God that night.
I was a light-middleweight, and the other world champion at my weight was Thomas Hearns, and being a beginner you're working on the jab and the right hand. I admired greatly the jab of Thomas Hearns, but soon realised I couldn't have a jab like that because I didn't have the same body structure. At the start of my amateur career, it was somewhat discouraging to look at the amateur record and professional accomplishments of Thomas Hearns and all his accolades, and then what he did to Roberto Duran was just astronomical and made me see him as a God. It was all astrononmical but at the same time set standards for me to aspire to and helped me be the best I could be.
When I told Thomas Hearns this in 1999 when I met him, he said Ali was the same for him. I'd like to think I was the same for fighters coming up like Naseem. Infact, I know I was. In most cases, boxing is a last resort, and I was for the boxers. I wanted to help the boxers, because I'd been there. All I could do was try to set standards, and I did. I climbed all the way to the top and had 20 world championship fights in four years and four months. I had 43 good nights in a row.
In regards to God's in boxing - to be a God you have to beat a God, or if a man is a God you don't have to explain why he's a God. Tyson became a God, and I'd been everywhere he'd been.
My thing was this - I'd taken out of the community in my youth, and I wanted to put back into the community, and becoming champion would allow me to put back into the community, but only becoming a God would allow my messages of good conduct and correctness to last beyond my tenure. So, in 1987, I decided I wanted to make champion, and in the back of my mind I wanted to become a God.
The fame, as you call it, and yes, okay, to an extent it was intense fame; that wasn't expected by me. When I won the world championship, I remember being interviewed a short time later and I said the man I really want to fight is Roberto Duran, because to be a God you have to beat a God and if he can win one of the other belts next year - as in the following year to that - then he's still a God; that's what I said.
The fame felt like a God-send because then my message of good conduct and correctness could last, and that's what it was all about for me. But why was I getting the fame in the first place? It was because I was world champion and fighting world championship fights every couple of months. You have to earn fame.
Nigel Benn, of course, became a God with his triumph in the Gerald McClellan fight; getting knocked down and battered, yet still winning against a vicious opponent.
Wow mate, I didn't expect that. Who promoted you in your early career, by the way, and was Barry Hearn promoting you before the Benn fight?
I used promoters to get me the fights I wanted. I was the fighter, I was primary. To be a promoter of barbarity is not a moral thing - I could never do it, so I had no morals towards them.
I was without a promoter from April 1988 to October 1988 because they wouldn't give me the money I wanted, but I used my former promoter Keith Miles to get me the fight with Anthony Logan.
After Logan, I told Keith Miles to get me Nigel Benn or Randy Smith. I wasn't prepared to hang around, I had standards to set. He got me Franki Moro. So I dropped him.
Barry Hearn gave me the money I wanted and got me the fights I wanted: Randy Smith, Hugo Corti and a world title shot. If I lost the Randy Smith fight, I walked away from boxing.
If I had my way, I'd have walked to the ring with no robe or theme song and in plain white trunks and plain white boots. My thing was truth and integrity, not gimmicks. It wasn't until 1993 that I thought about offering an idea, when I saw empty seats at my fight for the first time in two and a half years. I thought for months and came up with a monocle, just for a crack!
What I've observed is that entertaining is a good thing, because it broaden's audience and broaden's smile. So, I first started purposefully entertaining in about 1993.
Contrary to belief, I wasn't Apollo Creed. My business was the gymnasium. I was a fighter, it's all I knew. I left everything else upto Barry and Ronnie (Davies). I just took care of the training and fighting.
Before I did the rounds of London and Irish promoters in the late 80s, the only briefing I got was from my dad and that was: 'Don't watch the one's who take hundreds or thousands, watch the one's who take hundreds of thousands.' That was it.
I hooked up with allegedly Frank Warren when I made my comeback in 1997 because he was capable of getting me the fights I wanted. I used him.
Do you get Christmas cards from the likes of Nigel Benn, Michael Watson, Henry Wharton, Steve Collins, Joe Calzaghe?
No, we're lions, we keep to our own domains. But we respect each other. My respect for Michael Watson is humungous, on a similar domain to my respect for Nelson Mandela and Muhammad Ali.
When I saw Michael laying in the hospital bed [after their tragic fight in September 1991], his body looked like that of a Greek God. But that's kid's stuff compared to the man's fortitude.
And did that fight have an affect on you, I mean everyone said you didn't go for knockouts and stuff after that?
Absolutely.
And what about those domestic superfights, though? Do you think those epics will be matched again some day or some day soon?
Well, I don't really know. Let me say this - when you have two men completely psyched up for something more than a world championship, you have an epic on your hands. I know of four epic fights: Benn/Eubank 1, Watson/Eubank 2, Ali/Frazier 3, Hagler/Hearns.
There's no such thing as a superfight, because you can only measure a fight after it's happened or as it's happening. Watson 2 was live in China, live in America, live everywhere; and all of those watching along with the 15.9 million watching on ITV are saying to me: 'Why are you getting up?'. Watson was Superman on that night, giving me the most vicious of one-sided beatdown's for 10.9 rounds.
It was at a time when I had, probably, 500 times as many fans in the Bronx - where my family lived and where I learned to box - than I had in England! Me on my hands and knee's is what the country wanted, all because of the incorrectness they had read in the newspapers about me. And incorrectness would inject me, and when I was injected I would respond, you know?
And the great fight you had with Nigel Benn in 1990, despite so many fights after that, people still felt it was your best fight. Would you go along with that?
Watson 2 was my toughest, both mentally and physically, but also by far the most special fight of my career.
But yeah, I mean, Benn 1 and Watson 2, they are my greatest fights. To do what everyone perceived as the impossible - as in beating Benn with hands down, and to beat what I perceived as the unbeatable - as in Watson 2, it doesn't get better than that.
To get the best out of me, you needed to inject me with incorrectness. When I was stopped on my way to the ring against Rocchigiani, spat at and racially slurred at, I absorbed that negative energy and released it as poetic stylishness in my performance, which was positive. At the press conference for the Henry Wharton fight, Mr Wharton's manager, Mickey Duff, referred to me as 'scum' and 'lowest of the low'. Big mistake.
Oh and stylishness is good, by the way. You should do everything with style, I'm telling you people that as an aside.
You did overdo the posing abit though, didn't you mate?
However, it was something of a spectacle in the Benn fight because Benn was known as a ruthless killer. At moments in that fight he was. But the combination of my power and poise made for Benn to doubt himself. Until you saw this fight had you ever seen a man keep another man who was a wrecking machine tentative and afraid to throw, by being... tentative and afraid to throw, but looking threatening? I pulled that off in a big way. Posturing can be a weapon, sometimes a guy can keep another guy at distance just by seeming dangerous. In the boxing world I was the master of this - I think you can see the fight with (Renaldo) Dos Santos on YouTube! And keep an eye on how Dos Santos doesn't seem to know quite what to make of me or how to approach me because of my posture.
Do you think Amir Khan will demand the TV viewers that you and Nigel Benn did if he gets a world title shot? Or does he need a rival to make it more panto?
Well, let's hope so. He's a good role model. There's abstinence, there's ambition, he keeps his schedule, and he wants to set standards.
When I first came to the U.K. to box, people were talking hundreds and I was talking thousands. When people were talking thousands, I was talking ten's of thousands. When people were talking ten's of thousands, I was talking hundreds of thousands. When people were talking hundreds of thousands, I was talking millions. Just when people started talking millions, Eubank-Benn 2 was watched by a billion people. That was the pinnacle, from there I could go in any direction I wanted - promoter's around the world made me offers, TV station's around the world made me offers.
It came basically through ambition. People want normal. They want the gold watch at 65 and the little house with the little back garden. Very few want to challenge themselves and set goals that literally set the new standards. Looking back, I was one of them. Khan has similar potential.
Do you reckon he has the potential to become an all-time great, though?
There's no such thing as an all-time great, because you can't mix the era's. You can only be a great of your own era. And yes, there's potential, even more potential when seeing the fight where he was knocked down this year, but right now it's nothing more than potential.
Somebody wants to know, what's your favourite-ever TV show?
Uhhh. The Fast Show, I don't even know why. Why?
Just somebody wanted to know.
Well now they know, don't they?
The WBO organisation still comes under a lot of flack, if you like, and you were the one who kind of made that organisation. What are your feelings on that?
My feelings are that Nigel Benn was a shark - if he wasn't, I wouldn't have fought him, and if he wasn't I wouldn't be who I am!
After Corti, I was supposed to be fighting Julian Jackson - famous for his knockout blow of Herol Graham - for the WBC world title which was vacant and then WBA world champion Mike McCallum. But neither of them ended up signing the contracts.
In May 1990, I said I was willing to fight Michael Nunn in America as a last resort and I'd take $100,000. Nunn called me a nobody, a bore, said I'd fought nobody and that nobody would be interested in my ring style. A year later I was selling more tickets and drawing more viewers than anyone in boxing bar Mike Tyson.
My fight with (Eduardo) Contreras had been my first fight on American television since I based myself in Brighton, but I didn't realise how slippery he was and how much absorbance the guy had so I failed to impress.
Let's be right about it - Nigel Benn would have poleaxed every middleweight in the world in 1990 bar Contreras and Mike McCallum! On my scale of one to 10, the only other fighter who got 10 out of 10 for both power and aggression was Mike Tyson.
I wasn't prepared to hang around, I had standards to set and it took a £1,000,000 cheque being waved in front of Nigel Benn's face to get any middleweight in the world in the ring with me in 1990. And if the WBO world title was good enough for the astounding Thomas Hearns, it was good enough for me!
And you were a big underdog before the fight, weren't you? You hadn't really fought anybody before that...
No. It's actually opposite to that - I'd fought everybody! From my first amateur fight, right up until I fought for the world championship, I took the fights that nobody else wanted! That's why it was so rewarding for me, because I came up the hard way.
But during your reign, you were often accused of not fighting the best. Do you think you could have gone out of your way abit more and fought some of the better guys?
No, again, it's opposite to that! It was a case of them having to go out of their way to fight me, because I was the champion, you understand? Marvin Hagler, who I have the utmost respect for, gave up his WBA world title when Herol Graham was mandatory challenger so that he could fight Sugar Ray Leonard for $12,000,000. I decided to embark on a £10,000,000 World Tour instead of face Michael Nunn or Roy Jones, who weren't even at No. 1 contender rank and so weren't mandated, and I get this stick? If it was alright for Hagler, why wasn't it alright for me?
But you didn't challenge yourself - I mean once you actually got there sort of thing - as much as most other champions it seemed, or after the Michael Watson fight shall we say.
Well, that's nonsensical. Opposite again. Sorry, but, you know, I ask any champion of any era - this is fantasy, I know - but I ask any champion of any era to defend their championship six times in one calender year, against world top-ten contenders and mandatory challengers, half of them against southpaws, half of them in lion's den's, two of them undefeated, one of them 6,000 feet above sea level, and get six W's in the bracket. Barely mortal... at all in actual fact. Infact, this isn't fantasy, and that is go and ask any of today's champions to do that - if I was a betting man, and I am, I'd bet the house I have in Hove that none would succeed, and I'd bet in a friendly way that none would come close.
You fought Joe Calzaghe 10 years ago and he stills holds the title today, and his career has really, really picked up lately, or the last few years then. A lot of people tend to think he's the greatest British fighter, possibly ever, what do you think about that?
It's not what is said during your career when you are being hailed by the critics for better or for worse, or at the start of your career when you're all the rage, it's what is said at the end of your career that matters, (that's) how you are remembered. And Calzaghe is still enduring his career and the varying things that are said, it has chapters left. He's yet to taste defeat, for example.
We've got some people who want to know if you were a fan of Ali growing up?
No, I thought verbally he was incorrect and wanted George Foreman to punch him out. But at eight years old, you don't understand what the man achieved outside the ring, or outside of pugilism itself. When you're 18, you're more informed. And Ali's integrity humbled and humbles me.
One should always bow to their elders, those who come before them. I bow to Ali, Hagler, Duran, Hearns and so on. And I expect to be bowed upon by those who come after me or came after me. I don't expect to be disrespected, as Naseem did to me. I expect to be clapped out, as Hatton did.
And any chance of a comeback?! No disrespect, but we know you're not exactly loaded like you used to be!
None at all. My dignity is much more precious to me. And if I was a tramp, I'd have hold of my WBO middleweight belt because it's a symbolism of sacrifice for me, which is superiorlistic, though the WBO super middleweight belt was auctioned off a few years back to support Michael Watson. I've also got the New York Youth belt, the WBC International belt, the Old Buck Belt and the Spanish Golden Gloves trophy. I'd happily give the Old Buck Belt to Dan Schommer if he asked for it, because in my opinion he beat me, even if it was the last thing I had on Earth. My integrity will never be broken.
