CHRIS EUBANK JNR has never been a fighter to hold back when it comes to saying his piece, regardless of the consequences. The son of bona fide British boxing legend, Eubank Snr — himself renowned for putting multiple noses out of joint — Eubank Jnr’s is a career that has been punctuated by the propensity for refusing to go along to get along.
This is the context in which his most recent controversial outburst should be appreciated.
It came at the recent press conference in London to promote his upcoming fight on October 12 in Riyadh against Poland’s Kamil Szeremeta. On the undercard of the highly anticipated battle between Artur Beterbiev and Dmitry Bivol, this is viewed as a “gimme fight” for Eubank — an exercise in getting rid of the ring rust accrued over a year and more’s worth of inactivity — preparatory to moving on to potential lucrative clashes with Canelo and Conor Benn in early 2025.
Present at said press conference were Frank Warren and Eddie Hearn. When asked by the host why he had decided to sign with new kid on the block — Ben Shalom’s Boxxer promotional outfit — the Brighton-based middleweight did not hesitate to get stuck into the aforementioned, mercilessly slating both for alleged past transgressions.
The fallout was both instant demonstrable. Warren, sitting immediately behind Eubank at the presser, quickly became volcanic, his face that of a man about to implode. Elsewhere on the platform, Eddie Hearn’s hair weave began to unravel as he struggled to maintain a brave face.
The wider impact within the boxing fraternity was near unanimous support for Chris Eubank Jnr. In fact, more than support, he was verily showered with compliments across the internet for having the courage to stand up and speak truth to boxing power.
That order was swiftly restored in the aftermath — with threats of legal action resulting in Eubank issuing a public apology in a prepared statement — did not serve to diminish that sense that this had been a “the emperor has no clothes” moment within this most rarified of sporting landscapes.
This is not, of course, to state that either of the promoters slated in Eubank’s diatribe — messrs Frank Warren, Eddie Hearn and Kallie Sauerland — were deserving of the verbal that was thrown their way. What it did do, though, was resurrect the less than stellar stereotype that boxing promoters have long been victim of and subjected to. It was a reminder that the role of the promoter in professional boxing has always been controversial, and for mainly justifiable reasons historically.
Boxing promoters at the top level have always received most of the marbles and few of the plaudits. The fleecing of fighters has been a common theme in boxing, running through its history like an unbroken thread to the point of becoming part of the sport’s folklore. All you need to is think back to when the mob in the US had boxing by the throat under the auspices of the New York-based International Boxing Club (IBC).
Headed up by Frank Norris and Arthur Wirtz, the IBC gained such a stranglehold on boxing that it promoted 47 out of 51 championship fights between 1949 and 1955. In truth, the IBC was run by the mob at the time — specifically by Frankie Carbo of the Lucchese New York crime family — and that many of the fights promoted by the organisation were fixed with gambling in mind.
In the ’70s and ’80s — all the way up and into the ’90s — the flamboyance and charisma of Don King belied a ruthless operator for whom fighters were not measured in flesh and blood but in dollars and cents. Even The Greatest himself, Muhammad Ali, wasn’t spared King’s tender mercies when it came to getting shafted.
Ali’s lawyers filed a lawsuit against King in the wake of his 1980 drubbing by Larry Holmes. The charge was that King had underpaid Ali by $1.1 million dollars for the fight. Ali was by then a shadow of his former being, with the Parkinson’s that would eventually take his life already evident in speech and mannerism.
King, it was revealed, took advantage of Ali’s condition to the point of sending a personal emissary to the former heavyweight champ to resolve matters. Said emissary took along with him $50,000 dollars in a bag, which he offered to Ali on King’s behalf in return for dropping the lawsuit, which he did.
Such chicanery has been the lived experience of so many fighters down through the years that your average boxing promoter receives about as much goodwill from the boxing public as a tiger shark. It is a tradition that has been handed down from one generation to the next, this disdain, that you could be forgiven for believing that the sport’s money-men should be drowned at birth.
Will it ever go away, this common perception of promoters — the assumption that they are all rip off merchants out to amass as much wealth as they can by any means they can? Well, not if Chris Eubank Jnr’s outburst and the way it lit up the boxing firmament is anything to go by.
Just to be clear though: there are many fighters who have been and are promoted by Frank Warren and Eddie Hearn et al and who sing their praises, crediting them with giving fighters the opportunity and platform to earn life changing sums of money.
In no other business will you find such a vast gulf between the satisfied and the dissatisfied. And in no other sport would you accept the fact.
