Chris Eubank Jr’s Twitter feed has been recuperating these past few days. Last week it pushed through the pain barrier to provide a stream of content before his title fight with George Groves. “Tomorrow night at 10pm,” read one punchy message, “we find out who’s the Real Deal & who’s the Fake Live on ITV Box Office.” Of the three messages posted since he lost the bout, none have included the answer.
His fellow boxing professionals have delivered their own verdict on Eubank these past few days. Billy Joe Saunders, the only fighter to have beaten the super middleweight before Groves won by unanimous decision last Saturday, made Eubank an offer of employment. “I need a man to clean my ball strap,” he wrote on Twitter.
Naseem Hamed, doing his bit to give pay-per-view customers their money’s worth, asked ITV: “Which camera can I look into to tell Chris Eubank Jr to finish? Because I don’t want to see him hurt any more.” The Former IBF super middleweight champion James DeGale joined the pile-on. Eubank Jr was “the biggest hype job I’ve ever known,” he suggested, adding that it might be time to “crawl back under your rock”.
Boxing without trash talk is like KFC without chicken. Or Jeremy Corbyn without a fair hearing from the right wing press. Anyway, the point is: boxers slam each other all the time. But the trashing of Eubank Jr speaks to a long held strain of opinion. It’s one that says he would not have made it without his name and, more specifically, the close and constant presence of his monocle-bothering father.
Chris Eubank Sr was in his son’s corner at the Manchester Arena and sent him to Las Vegas as a teenager to prepare him for a career in the fight game. Eubank Sr’s coach Ronnie Davies is also part of Junior’s camp, a further link to the 90s and the golden age of British middleweight boxing. Junior, for his part, insists that he trains himself. This is a proposition that begs many questions, from how he observes and corrects his own weaknesses to how he sprays water in his mouth when he’s got his gloves on.
While there are doubts about Eubank Jr’s boxing ability, there is no doubt about his determination, his commitment or, as with his father, his bravery in the ring. Neither is there question of his pull at the box office. Tickets for his fight with Groves, part of an ersatz tournament called the World Boxing Super Series, sold out in seven minutes, all 21,000 of them.
It seems that while fellow pros are suspicious of Eubank’s public profile, boxing fans are not. And if that makes him a member of Celebrity Fight Club, then he is hardly alone.
As it recedes into the rearview mirror, last year’s “Money Fight” between Floyd Mayweather Jr and Conor McGregor only comes to seem more ridiculous. A contest between two fighters matched in ego only, it was still by far the biggest sporting event of 2017. That, at least, is according to the metrics that matter in the modern era: prize money, betting receipts, pay-per-view buy-ins, page views and illegal streams.
At some point the prize “Money Belt”, made specifically for the fight from alligator leather and adorned with 3,360 diamonds, will be contested again. All it requires is the right storyline. Mayweather and McGregor have been Instagram-sparring this winter, hinting at a rematch in the UFC octagon. Each time McGregor posts on the subject he gets a million likes.
Given the public appetite and absence of a cross-discipline mutant mismatch to enjoy, it’s no surprise to see others hurling themselves into the ring, desperate to fill the void. First among the volunteers are those banal totems of internet celebrity known as YouTubers. In 2018 no monetised vlog has been complete without a call out for a fight.
Earlier this month two Britons, KSI and Joe Weller, fought at east London’s Copper Box Arena. Tickets went for £66 a pop and the stream of the fight has had 16m views. KSI beat Weller in a third round stoppage. The gamer, rapper and prankster, known as Jay Jay to his mum, immediately called out popular American YouTuber and all round boor Logan Paul, alongside his brother Jake, to be his next opponents. Jake appears willing to dance and proposed a mixed bout of MMA and boxing. Paul announced his trainer for the fight in a video this week. The man stood beside him in a marble-lined corridor? Floyd ‘Money’ Mayweather.
It’s easy to be cynical about such endeavours and perhaps rightly so. Boxing is a brutal sport that carries great physical risk. It can be nothing more than a bloody circus if the casting is insincere. That Celebrity Fight Club has the characteristics of televised wrestling is probably no accident either.
Yet as much as the age of celebrity is about image over ability, it’s also about integrity. If people perceive you’re not who you say you are, it’s over. Boxing, a sport that uniquely strips away pretence, might be well suited to the times. McGregor lost to Mayweather but burnished his reputation by staying with the great for 10 rounds. Weller also stoically endured a battering, posting thumbs up pics from his post-fight sick bed. On Saturday, meanwhile, Eubank Jr left the ring streaming in blood after 12 rounds of wild, full-pelt punches. His reputation as a boxer may have been damaged, but his brand remained intact.