3 hours ago
10
You do not, I would hazard, expect to be moved to tears by a documentary about the Eubank family. But I suspect I am not the only one to find myself unexpectedly moved by The Eubanks: Like Father, Like Son, which follows Chris Sr and Chris Jr (also a successful boxer) as the latter prepares for a fight against Conor Benn, son of his father’s great 90s rival Nigel Benn, and tracing the rapprochement between the Eubanks after four years of estrangement.
Eubank Jr has all his father’s gentleness and none of his eccentricity. He also has less of his need to be noticed, and the patience of a saint. He treats his father with such quiet respect – absorbing all his performative flourishes, and clearly trying to keep his mind’s eye and his heart fixed on Eubank Sr’s underlying love – that your own heart is semi-pulverised long before we get to the meat of the programme.
The men’s estrangement began when Eubank Jr sacked his father as his coach. It was a wholly understandable decision – at least if you weren’t Eubank Sr. The son felt he had gone as far as he could in the sport under his father’s guidance and he needed people with new advice, new strategies, new ways to take him to the next level. He also felt that he needed to separate himself as a person as well as a boxer from the man who had, one way or another, dominated him until then.
We see footage of Eubank Sr as his coach talking – performing, really – at various press conferences. “I hear people say I am stealing my son’s limelight. So someone else should be in my position? Who is more qualified than I?” Any teenager who ever complains that a parent is embarrassing them should watch it and never speak again.
Asked about his son’s decision now, Eubank replies that he was “deeply, deeply, deeply hurt … Yes, it’s control. There’s nothing wrong with that. ‘Let him have his own career.’ That is such nonsense!” We are so used to the showboating celebrity that this sudden unvarnished honesty is quite disarming. More follows. At first, it is more evidence of the disciplinarian his son remembers at home: “I brought him up with the cane, I brought him up with the belt … I was fierce as a father.” As a coach: “He was under my spell. And my spell was sweet and loving.” But it gives way to something deeper as the pair recall Dad’s resistance first to his child getting involved with boxing (“I did not want him to suffer. I was fearful it was going to get him damaged”) and to the grudge match with Conor Benn. “He is my son and they are going to take him away from me because he will not listen,” says Eubank Sr, his voice shaking with the very specific anger that comes from parental terror.
Eubank’s older son, Sebastian, died of a heart attack four years ago at the age of 29. “I think it consumed my father,” says Eubank Jr.
“Sebastian, six years before he passed,” says Eubank Sr, “said to me: ‘You’re too extreme.’ I am extreme, because I love my children.” And it is this, we can see, that is behind his public disapproval of Eubank Jr in the days leading up to the Conor fight (“You’re a disgrace … The money will get you killed”), unhelpful though it is to his son as he prepares.
On the day, however, and in a notably undramatic way, he turns up to support his son in the fight. Afterwards, you can see the pride outweighed only by relief that – although needing hospital treatment for the severe dehydration his father warned about – the boy has survived. It’s clear Eubank Sr hopes that this will be his son’s last fight and that his unprecedentedly unstinting praise (“Everywhere you go now – YOU’RE the superstar!”) is partly in the hope of making it so. “I’ve lost a son,” he says to camera, every vestige of artifice gone. “I will not lose another one. I will not lose another one.”
It really is enough to make you weep, as the camera unobtrusively captures these men so loved by each other trying to connect, to understand and make each other understand, watching them reach out and pass each other, missing only by inches. But still close enough to matter, close enough to keep trying. “You will always be my baby,” says the father. “I will always be your son,” his child replies.
The son, the child, the baby has a rematch with Benn on 15 November.
