The Cult: Chris Eubank

The latest inductee to The Cult was a divisive British boxer whose bouts with Nigel Benn attracted huge TV audiences. You can (in fact you must) read our previous entries here.

In October 1993 Chris Eubank fought Nigel Benn in a WBC/WBO Super Middleweight Championship unification bout. These being the days before boxing had vanished behind a Sky Sports paywall, and thus into relative obscurity, their meeting at Old Trafford stadium was a significant moment in British sporting history. More than 42,000 saw it in the flesh, while 16 million watched live on TV. That is roughly a quarter of the British population, a figure utterly unimaginable for a boxing contest today. In the 21st century, only England's crucial World Cup fixtures command such undivided attention.

As a seven-year-old kid, I wanted Benn to win. Obviously. The Ilford-born fighter was the people's choice; he had lost a controversial points decision to Eubank three years earlier and this was his chance at redemption. He was no shrinking violet himself, but seemed more in keeping with 'what a boxer should be'. If nothing else, Benn respected the fight game.

The contrast between the two was stark. Benn's nickname was the 'Dark Destroyer', appropriately ruinous, whereas Eubank was 'Simply the Best', which even a seven-year-old knew was a Tina Turner song. Benn seemed ruthless yet professional; Eubank flounced into the ring and strutted about with his nostrils flared, glaring stony-faced into the baying crowd, seemingly at odds with everything about the sport.

Eubank was the meticulously self-styled baddie, a bizarrely cartoonish dandy full of bombast who spouted pseudo-intellectual bullshit and derided the sport that was making him wealthy. He had also been tarnished by his 1991 fight with Michael Watson, which had seen Eubank's opponent suffer permanent neurological damage. That fight was among Eubank's best – he somehow rallied from a dominant Watson performance to knock his opponent down in the 11th and win in the 12th – but it sullied him. Watson's injuries were later ruled to be the fault of the British Boxing Board of Control, but the already-unpopular Eubank bore the brunt of public anger.

So for a child not yet aware that good and evil are simply different shades of the same colour, it was obvious who should win.

But, more than 20 years on, I get Eubank; his whole performance – because that's what it was – makes sense. And, in a sporting landscape that is increasingly bare of genuine characters, good or bad, his presence is missed.

What I loathed in him then is what appeals so much now: Eubank's rebellion against his own sport, against the money men in boxing who he felt exploited fighters, feels less like petulant arrogance and more a righteous crusade. There was also the stage persona. Eubank dressed like an English country gentleman, all tweed and jodhpurs, bowler hat and monocle. He spoke like one too, that lisping upper-class stream of consciousness coming thick and fast.

The truth is that Eubank had emerged from a tougher background that most of us will ever know. He was raised in Peckham in south-east London, then moved to New York to live in the Bronx, where he really locked on to boxing as his path away from self-destruction.

Eubank alienated himself from his natural working class support base by aping a privileged section of society, a group that would also never accept him. He became the ultimate outsider and it helped to make him a huge box office draw. That he did it all to a Tina Turner soundtrack now seems oddly appropriate.

As a fighter Eubank was good, not great. A good European, yes, with an extremely strong chin and the ability to draw in fans, but not at the level of peak Roy Jones Jr. or James Toney.

But he was box office. With the bizarre style and the soundbites came the ability to back it up in the ring. He could knock people out – not the greatest fighters, perhaps, but watch him floor Reginaldo Dos Santos inside 10 seconds, as much for the pose he pulls afterwards as the punch itself. Before the Watson fight he was a dangerous man, though what happened that night at White Hart Lane undoubtedly blunted his finishing instinct.

The bombast was just part of the act. For a more truthful Eubank, listen to him speak in the snatches of conversation interviewers could grab after a fight – after his first bout with Benn in '90, for example. Exhausted by the nine-round battle, eyes swollen and struggling for breath, the South London accent and speech patterns come to the surface. "He hit me with everything, man. Karen, I done it; dad, I done it." This was Eubank dropping the character – the "one must" this and the "why indeed" that. This was Chris Eubank.

The English country gent styling was part of the act, too. "It's confused for something that looks Caucasian, or old English. That's why it was so much fun," he later explained. This is to mention nothing of his fondness for Shakespeare quotations, nor the 18-wheeler truck he drove around Brighton.

But what really grabbed people's attention inside the sport was Eubank's declaration that boxing is "a mug's game." He said he was there to make his money, then get out. He called it "barbaric", a view many outside the sport shared after what happened to Michael Watson (and Gerald McClellan, who suffered even worse injuries than the Englishman, after a 1995 bout with Benn).

It certainly didn't make him popular with fight fans. But Eubank's behaviour also opened him up to a more sinister backlash. Remember that his success came against the backdrop of racial tension in Britain's cities – the second Benn fight fell six months after Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death in London. Undeniably, Britain was not entirely at ease with its black population in the early '90s, with a portion of the country believing black people needed to know their place.

Frank Bruno was packaged to fit this stereotype. He clowned around with 'Arry Carpenter, acted the big, loveable fool, dangerous in the ring but harmless out of it. He was – and I'm quoting now – "an example of permissible black British subjectivity." The Bruno we saw on TV knew his place. Quite what the actual man was like I wouldn't claim to know, though after defeating Oliver McCall for the WBC Heavyweight title, he went so far as to repeatedly state "I'm not an Uncle Tom" to a bemused Sky Sports interviewer.

But what of Eubank, the overtly self-confident showman, declaring his sport exploitative and barbaric; defying conventions, projecting a confident, uncompromising and almost homoerotic image. To drop another quote, he represented the "intolerable other", a powerful black man who saw himself as every bit the equal of his white contemporaries, who would not do as they told him but rather railed against their norms.

And so when Eubank stood before the crowd, nostrils flared, silently staring into a sea of faces booing him and cheering for the other guy, it wasn't simply bravado: intentional or not, it was a powerful 'fuck you' to anyone who believed a black man should fall into conformity.

For a little snapshot of how big boxing was in the early nineties, here are Eubank and Benn signing the contract for their first fight live on ITV. Not fighting – at least not in a physical sense – simply putting their names on a piece of paper. You can feel the bristling hatred between the two, with Eubank refusing to even look at Benn throughout. No wonder so many tuned in to see them square up.

"My peers and the critics say that I was great. I don't think I was. I was just acting." Chris Eubank

Words: @jim_weeks / Illustration: @dandraws