IF THERE was a prize for tenacity in sport, a strong contender would have to be Chris Eubank Jr. His impressive victory over Liam Williams in Cardiff last weekend brings the 32-year old to the point of finally challenging for a middleweight world title after 34 fights in a professional career that began all the way back in 2011.

Remarkably, for the bulk of his career, Eubank Jr more or less trained himself in what stands as an astonishing inversion of boxing convention, which holds that a fighter without a trainer is like a dog without an owner, forced to rely on blind instinct, will and luck to survive.

That Chris Eubank Jr managed to do that and more during this extended period is evidence of inordinate mental strength and pride, endowed with such by the example of his old man, whose own physical and mental fortitude earned him a legacy in the sport which still today looms large.

Making Jr’s toughness more impressive than Sr’s, however, is that where his father was reared in the hard streets of Peckham, where he was homeless for a spell, then later in the Bronx in New York, where he began boxing, Eubank Jr was brought up in a mansion in Brighton and attended private school. Not the normal rearing you would associate with a prizefighter.

Since teaming up was Roy Jones Jr, a genuine ring great in his prime, Eubank Jr has enjoyed a career renaissance, which in Cardiff saw him put Williams on the canvas four times on the way to a wide victory on points. He looked improved, no doubt, but will be looking to improve further if he is serious about challenging his next preferred opponent, Gennady Golovkin, for his IBF title.

But that’s subjective. The objective fact is that Eubank Jr’s first outing on the new Boxxer-Sky Sports platform saw him dominate the Welshman in front of a hostile crowd, with the fact that the fight managed to attract over one million PPV buys illustrative of the interest the Eubank name continues to inspire.

Adding still more impetus to Eubank Jr’s career at this stage is Conor Benn calling him out for a future clash at catchweight, which if it ever came to pass would almost certainly capture the imagination of the public beyond boxing, given the history of one of the greatest ever sporting rivalries between their fathers before them.

Speaking of rivalries, missing now from the heavyweight division is the prospect of a domestic rivalry between Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua. Since losing to Oleksandr Usyk in September last year, and since Fury stopped Deontay Wilder in their third clash in October last year, the wind seems to have gone out of the sails of the heavyweight division.

An April clash between Fury and Dillian Whyte has been mooted, but at this writing Whyte has yet to sign his contract for the fight and has slipped off the radar. Fury, meanwhile, is currently out in Dubai enjoying some warm weather training. If the state of his body is anything to go by in video footage of him training there, though, he’s been spending more time at the kitchen table than he has in the gym.

The talk swirling around AJ is whom of the various trainers out in the US he’s been meeting with will he choose to be the man in his corner next. But even more important than who his next head trainer will be are the worrying signs of a crisis of confidence and self-belief, what with him revealing that he’s been listening to motivational speakers, etc.

This is not the mindset of a man ready to face Usyk in a rematch, having been comprehensively beaten and beaten up by the former unified cruiserweight king first time round.

This is the stuff of a fighter who has had the hunger for the sport knocked out of him. Perhaps he no longer wishes to take the kind of punishment he received in his last outing against the Ukrainian, or perhaps it’s a simple case of having made more than enough money out of the sport and yearning for pastures new?

If so, there is no shame: a boxing multimillionaire has a different outlook on life than a guy struggling to afford the bus fare to the gym.

Whatever is going on where AJ is concerned, he seems like a man who’s now all over the place, knowing that things need to change in his camp but not yet sure what or who with. Up to this point he has come over as a fighter more focused on branding than fighting, with the result his defeat to Usyk. It is a loss that has severely damaged his status and standing in a sport where you are only as good as your last performance. 

Taking all the above in hand, the heavyweight division has in consequence lost significant lustre compared to the buzz that surrounded it this time last year. 

A man who also appears to have lost his lustre is Matchroom’s Eddie Hearn, whose decision to vacate Sky for the US streaming giant DAZN has so far proved a mistake in terms of his footprint in the UK. DAZN has not caught on this side of the pond, while Sky, with its football and news channels, continues to command a vast built-in audience.

Not that Hearn will admit that his decision to go with DAZN has been a mistake. This particular demarche was made with the US market in mind. However with AJ’s decline in fortunes, and with Matchroom having just lost the purse bid for the mooted Fury v Whyte fight in April, Hearn suddenly finds himself bereft of the promotional dominance he once enjoyed here.

He of course will, not that he’ll be struggling to find his next meal anytime soon. The problem is that for the man used to having everything, enough is never enough.