For the only time in almost three hours, the father has stopped nodding to the words of his son. The serenity Chris Eubank works so hard to perfect and project disappears when his eldest says he is prepared to pay the ultimate price in the ring.
There are no frills in the pronunciations as Chris Eubank Jnr says: ‘I’m willing to die to defend my record.
‘When I say I am willing to die, I mean if I feel like something is wrong or I’m in a type of pain that no one can describe, I am not going to stop.’
With a jolt, the ring legend so deeply affected by the coma he once inflicted on Michael Watson looks up and puts a hand on his son’s left arm. It’s a pragmatic move from someone who admits he is ‘not a doting father’; his instincts are to ‘steer’.
‘Christopher, they will headline the interview with that,’ he says. But then he considers what ‘Junior’ said and smiles.
‘You know, I thought I don’t want those comments. But actually I do. Because that is how serious this business is. The readers of your newspaper need to know what kind of man will be representing the United Kingdom in the ring.’
Eubank Jnr stares straight ahead in the lobby of Brighton’s Grand Hotel. The 25-year-old is not a raconteur like his famous father, nor is he is wearing a pair of pointed Jeffrey West shoes with jodhpurs. ‘It’s the fashion of his time,’ Junior says.
The 48-year-old responds: ‘I wear jodhpurs now and I wore them then. Let me tell you, the jodhpur in the world of fashion is a formidable adversary to the trouser. It gives automatic swagger to anyone who wears them.’
It’s as close to a light-hearted exchange as the conversation will manage. This a double act of differences but also tremendous intensity and parallels, right down to Junior taking a fight many think he cannot win against Billy Joe Saunders for the European, Commonwealth and British middleweight titles a week on Saturday.
People say he is arrogant and untested in his 18 wins from 18 fights. Many said similar about his father before he took Nigel Benn’s world title 24 years ago.
But the former two-weight champion would not have revelled in the bad beating once taken by his son in a sparring session in Cuba if he did not think he was capable of rising to become the world’s best pound-for-pound fighter’.
This is a man who has always set painful challenges for his son, from putting him up for adoption and ‘throwing him to the wolves’ in America. To most it’s unconventional parenting; Eubank argues he has ‘built’ an indestructible and willing fighter out of hardship and tough love.
Suffice to say, it’s a complex family dynamic.
The tale goes back to 2004, when 15-year-old Eubank Jnr, the oldest of four siblings, went to a local boxing gym in Brighton. It was the streetfighter’s first time.
His father never encouraged it — this is the sport he once called a ‘mug’s game’. When Eubank was home he expected to be obeyed.
Eubank says: ‘It is an unconventional relationship in as much as boxing is an unconventional way of life. Being a warrior means we are not like some people. I was not a doting father.’
Eubank Jnr adds: ‘The public perception of him as a fighter isn’t how he would walk around the house. But he was strict. You couldn’t get away with anything — you had to be respectful, no bad language.’
Eubank Snr says: ‘My mother imparted on me that I must be a good custodian of my father’s name and that is what I ask of my children. One should conduct themselves in the correct manner, respect one’s elders and do the right thing.’
But those must be subjective standards. Eubank Jnr didn’t match his father’s record of 18 suspensions in a school year but did manage ‘two or three’, mostly for fighting. ‘My name made me a target sometimes,’ Eubank Jnr says.
After numerous fights in streets, he decided ‘I’m good at this when there are no rules so I’ll probably be better with them’.
That first trip to the gym went badly. ‘It was a grungy little place,’ he says. ‘They knew my name and put me in with a 19-year-old who had 20 amateur fights and won most of them. He battered me. I remember going home and thinking, “I’m never letting that happen to me again”. I used to do rugby, swimming, athletics, football, badminton — after that I focused only on boxing. Two months later I got in the ring with the guy and I was on top of him. That is when I knew I could do this.’
Eubank was yet to be convinced. He says: ‘Christopher refused to take my advice at 12 when I told him, “This is not for you”. At 15 or so I would watch him in the gym and think, “He is what he is”.
‘But then at 16 he said, “This is what I want to do, whether you are with me or not”. I had to go with it. But that meant no cushions. If you make cushions for a fighter, he will lose, he will get hurt.
‘The only way to build a fighter is to throw him to the wolves. “Go out there, deal with it. You have a bad hand? Deal with it. You can’t run in the morning? Walk your run. Don’t complain to me”. I sent him to the school of hard knocks to see if he would get through it.’
Influenced by the trouble they kept finding in Brighton, Eubank sent two of his sons to live with someone they barely knew in Las Vegas.
Eubank, who was divorced by the mother of his four children in 2005 and declared bankrupt the same year, had met Irene Hutton by chance in a Paris hotel lounge in January 2006. Reportedly, his introduction was: ‘Hello, I am Christopher Livingstone Eubank. I am an ambassador.’
Within eight months Hutton, at Eubank’s request, adopted Chris, 16, and Sebastien, 14, and looked after them in the US as they pursued respective careers in boxing and American football. Less than two years later, in July 2008, they returned to Brighton after Hutton went public with the secret arrangement, claiming she wanted ‘the world to know what he (Eubank) is like’.
She said Eubank visited his sons once in two years; Eubank always maintained it was a sporting and lifestyle choice, not abandonment. It was a bitter situation of contested claims. ‘I wanted to go,’ says Eubank Jnr. ‘The only way to learn boxing is to go to a hard place.’
The result was two years of often-brutal sparring with world champions and ambitious prospects. He became the amateur champion of Nevada after just six fights. ‘The hardest spars would be against 17- or 18-year-olds who knew the name and wanted to take me,’ he says. ‘I took some beatings.’
Eubank smiles. ‘I like his hardship,’ he says. ‘Hardship resonates with me. It catapults you.’
Eubank’s memory goes back to Cuba in 2011. ‘I took him to Havana as an amateur and saw him get a real beating from a heavyweight from their Olympic team. I saw him take that bad beating and I started to think, “Good, he can take a beating”. I knew he would be special.’
Eubank is incredibly cavalier in statements about his son these days. He talks of ‘perfect movement, punching ability the likes of which I’ve not seen since Mike Tyson’.
The limited quality of his opponents means the depth of his skills cannot be fully judged. By contrast, Saunders is unbeaten in 20 fights against bigger names. But there is a YouTube video that shows Eubank Jnr giving Carl Froch a hard time in sparring and the whispers from numerous gyms are that the son is for real. The father talks of Gennady Golovkin, the middleweight world champion and most destructive fighter on the planet, and says: ‘I believe Christopher beats him now.’
His justification, repeatedly asserted, is that as a fighter who won 19 world title fights he knows his stuff. ‘If I am crazy, then work with my crazy because it is crazy to do what I have done in terms of 19 world championship wins,’ he says.
With that, they are back in their element of intensity and cold purpose. ‘He is an old-school warrior,’ says the father. ‘Soon people will see what I see. I have steered him to this point. He is armed and dangerous and ready.’
The son has a lot of words and a big name to live up to. How armed, dangerous and ready he is will soon be apparent.
