Conor Benn dominated familiar and familial foe Chris Eubank Jr. on Saturday in front of another sold-out Tottenham Hotspur Stadium crowd in London. Seconds after the bell for the 12th and final round of the bout, Benn was being carried around the ring on the shoulders of his previously more famous father, former middleweight and super middleweight champ Nigel Benn. The dad and his boy were both beaming, and the piggyback parade made for a wonderful and poignant scene.
But Conor Benn is his own man now. So thorough was the beating he handed to Eubank Jr.—punctuated by two knockdowns in the last round—that it avenged, not only his April loss by unanimous decision in the same packed London venue, but maybe also the 1990 loss and 1993 draw Nigel Benn got from his two matchups with Chris Eubank Sr. As the younger Benn was reminded seemingly every few minutes this year, nobody from his family had ever come out of the ring with a win against a Eubank. But Benn’s finally had enough with the daddy stuff.
"It's done. Done!" Nigel Benn said when asked in the postfight press conference if he would take a trilogy fight with Eubank Jr., and all the cash that would follow running it back yet again. "I mean, listen, money always talks, doesn't it? But for me, for my personal, personal reasons, how much money do you need?"
Other than the combatants, the rematch had little in common with the April fight. In the spring, they put on a double-fisted brawl, the type of fight that favored Eubank Jr., the naturally larger man. This time around, Benn avoided a donnybrook and instead delivered a disciplined and calculated beatdown. Benn focused on jabs and body shots, not haymakers, and he largely stuck to the plan, which made Eubank Jr. look older, weaker, and slower by the round. Benn had Eubank Jr. stumbling around throughout the one-sided 12th, which was scored 10-7 on all three judges' cards. Had the fight gone another 30 seconds, it likely would have been stopped.
Promoter Eddie Hearn said that Benn "took [Eubank Jr.'s] soul," even in losing their initial bout. Because while Eubank Jr. came out comfortably ahead on the scorecards in that first fight, he had to spend a few days in the hospital afterward recovering from the savagery and effects of a drastic weight cutting routine to make weight. Hearn has often admitted he despises both Eubank Jr. and Eubank Sr., whose relationship is fraught with Freudian frailties. But after watching Benn wholly abuse Eubank Jr. in the rematch, it’s hard to argue with Hearn's brutal assessment. To put it plainly, Eubank Jr. didn't come ready to fight.
Even Eubank Jr., when asked why his feet appeared to be stuck in quicksand all night long, admitted he wasn’t himself this time around. "You guys saw what I was in there tonight,” the 36-year-old said in his post-fight press conference. "I thought that once those bright lights hit, I'd find something, and I tried. I tried hard, but it wasn't there, and Conor was strong, and he was fast, and he was tough."
Benn comes out of the weekend as the people’s middleweight champ. After all, how many fighters anywhere in the world can fill a soccer stadium as a pay-per-view headliner twice in the same year? But he’s also without a belt. Benn’s a career welterweight (147 pounds). He only jumped up two weight classes to meet Eubank Jr. at middleweight because of the commercial impact and family value a fight versus anybody named Eubank would have, especially with the boxing-mad British public. But because he previously never fought as a middleweight (160 pounds), he held no position in the middleweight rankings, and therefore no sanctioning body deemed him eligible for a world title.
Yet even beltless, the boxing world seems to be his oyster. As for what’s next, after a night in which he made himself about as marketable as any fighter in the world except for a couple heavyweights and Bud Crawford, Benn said he plans to drop back to welterweight (147 pounds), and called out a trio of Americans he wants to meet there: Ryan Garcia, Rolly Romero, and Devin Haney.
"All of them Yanks can get it any day of the week and twice on Sunday!" he said.
For all the father-and-sons poignancy of the bill-topping bout, the savage side of the fight game was on full display on the undercard. In the last preliminary, welterweight contender Jack Catterall knocked Ekow Essuman out of the ring and out of consciousness. Essuman, a 36-year-old Botswana native, had his nose broken early in the bout by an accidental but vicious headbutt that left him leaking blood on Catterall, the referee, and probably even some folks in the ringside seats. He later got floored by a left hook in the fourth round, but got up only to take an even more savage beating in the 11th, when Catterall chased him around the ring and landed a belly-to-temple barrage of haymakers.
The final left hook sent Essuman flying through the ropes and, for several seconds, the crowd, the PPV announcers, and even Catterall seemed scared by the damage that he'd suffered. Catterall, instead of celebrating, knelt on the canvas on the other side of the ropes while medics worked on his fallen foe lying on the apron. Essuman was awakened and back in the ring in time to officially be declared a loser but, as the referee raised Catterall’s hand, the beaten man’s face was as misshapen as a jack-o’-lantern that had been whacked with a baseball bat. What a wicked game they play.
