On the 30th anniversary of his brutal and tragic fight with Gerald McClellan, Nigel Benn was on a stage in Manchester, England, suffering the indignity of seeing his son, Conor, get hit with an egg.

It was, given all it signified, perhaps the worst thing with which his son could have been struck, for it acted symbolically the same way as an anniversary of a sad and infamous fight. That is to say, the cracking of an egg triggered memories of something many would rather forget or wish was kept in the dark. It left Conor Benn, the target, with not just egg on his face, quite literally, but also then having to walk around wearing evidence of his past – a past he and those around him have for two and half years been eager to erase – until able to wipe himself clean. 

In choosing an egg, Eubank could not have planned it any better. Quite aside from the fact that eggs were once used as a potential reason why, in 2022, Benn failed performance-enhancing drug tests for the banned substance clomifene, there is also something persistent and stubborn about the very nature of an egg, especially once it has been cracked. In fact, rather than being easily wiped away, the yolk of an egg tends to stick around, linger, and on work surfaces will often require a sprinkling of salt to help it dry before it can then be cleaned. On the face of a human being, one suspects, it is quicker to remove – yet that still wouldn’t have made Conor Benn feel any better about what happened to him in Manchester on Tuesday.

Caught, as everything is these days, on camera, Benn, at the point at which the egg connected, would have likely preferred for it to have been a fist. For the presence of the egg, more than the attack itself, was the thing that really prompted the rancor of Benn and tipped both him and his father over the edge, one suspects. After all, now covered in his own excuse, there was no getting away from the thing Team Benn had been so desperate to get away from. It was right there, all over the fighter’s face. 

In an enlightening piece written by Chris McKenna for The Mirror, Benn, the egged one, was reported to have said to a member of the media ahead of Tuesday’s press conference, “If somebody starts asking me trick questions, I’ll throw you out the room, do you hear me? I’ll drag you by the neck outside.”

That threat was made during a series of roundtable interviews and offered an insight into how Benn was feeling ahead of Tuesday’s festivities. He was, for all his posturing, a man clearly on tenterhooks, wary of the inevitability of certain questions and certain ammunition being held by his opponent. He could not have foreseen eggs stored in a jacket pocket, no. But he surely knew that Eubank would eventually use the failed drug tests that scuppered the pair’s original date (October 8, 2022) as the stick with which to beat him. He also knew that while some members of the media are happy to forgive and forget in the hope of both access and clicks, not all journalists are either as shallow or as willing to turn the other cheek.

Which is perhaps why, according to McKenna’s piece, it wasn’t just Benn and his promoter, Eddie Hearn, present at Tuesday’s roundtable interviews. Rather, you had the boxer, the promoter, and the father, as well as “around 20 other people believed to be friends, family and team members which made it into an audience for a group of journalists looking to ask some of those questions that were needed. They were fairly put to the boxer but they were not well received.”

It was, for many of these journalists, their only chance. That is, their only chance to ask the questions on their minds for over two years now; the kind of questions to which they still believe they have not been given sufficient answers. Each would have known that once the pantomime – or press conference – kicked off and promoters and broadcast marionettes adopted the roles of journalists for half an hour, there would be no opportunity for them to get the answers they really wanted. At that point, the narrative would distort, becoming whatever Hearn, Ben Shalom and the two fighters, Benn and Eubank, wanted and needed it to become. 

And yet, one thing we have come to learn in recent years is this: Where there is Chris Eubank Jnr, there is a way – or something like hope. In other words, while everybody else in boxing appears to have undergone a collective lobotomy of late and both erased their memories and made friends of enemies to guarantee an easy life, Eubank remains one of the few who has either rejected this lobotomy or somehow managed to retain some traumatic flashbacks despite it. Whatever the reason, or his trick, Eubank has spent the last few years leading a one-man army against the sport’s various promoters and has, when given the platform, called them out at every opportunity. If he isn’t accusing one of them of robbing him, or suing him, or stalling his career, he is accusing them all of self-importance and wanting to make an event involving boxers all about them.

This was the accusation leveled at Hearn by Eubank on Tuesday. So insistent was he, in fact, that Eubank was unprepared to even let Hearn speak or fight his corner, causing a man typically at ease – not to mention verbose – to all of a sudden become emotional and acquiescent. It was, for Eubank, a small win.

A curious thing to behold: What makes Eubank’s current behavior so fascinating, and to an extent unexpected, is that it arrives at a time in his career when he has never been less powerful or in demand. He is in demand in the context of a fight against Conor Benn – of that, there’s no question. But beyond that, his roles have largely dried up. By now, after all, we know what Chris Eubank Jnr is and we therefore know his limitations and his value.

Indeed, it is almost as though, at the age of 35, Eubank has now given up selling himself and talking about goals that his ability could never allow him to achieve in favor of using all the knowledge and experience he has accrued, in a business sense, to put the boxing industry on blast and leave us with something more meaningful than a world title. Revelation, perhaps. Or the truth – his version of it. At any rate, with his career winding down, it is fair to say he is as much a danger to men in suits as men in gloves these days.

Still, for all his truth-telling, Eubank, a man of monologues and not monocles, should never be mistaken for a hero. Far from it. In fact, by way of emphasising this point, McKenna reported that Eubank left Tuesday’s press conference in Manchester alongside controversial advisor Mazhar Majeed, a man jailed over the Pakistan cricket spot fixing scandal. We should also know better than to laud a fighter as a hero for highlighting an opponent’s drug history when they are, by agreeing to fight said “drug cheat” and capitalize financially from the drama, only signaling their complicity. 

Here, in the case of Eubank, the real gesture of strength and virtue would have been to swerve this fight once and for all, and invest more in his own earning potential and supposed power at the box office. By just doing the obvious, and by accepting that he, like Benn, has relevance only when two famous surnames are linked, Eubank is neither making a stand against “drug cheats” nor leading by example. Instead, he is merely confirming what we already know: They are all in this together.

That goes for the two boxers – the one with the egg in his hand, and the one with it all over his face – and also the two warring promoters, Hearn and Shalom, whose condemnation of EggGate only concealed an inner happiness. They were not happy to have been blindsided, no, for these are men with coiffured hair. But there can be no denying that a dirty fight like this gives promoters the opportunity to really push the boundaries, make some noise and sell like never before.

To put it another way, so tainted is this fight in 2025, there is no longer a fear of anything related to it bringing the sport into disrepute. That box, sadly, has already been ticked. It was ticked back in October 2022, when, on a Wednesday afternoon, those involved in the event got creative and tried to figure out ways of making sure it went ahead despite having evidence that one of the two boxers set to fight had failed a couple of performance-enhancing drug tests. It was at that point that the floodgates opened. It was at that point that we knew anything goes.

A cracked egg, therefore, is the least of this fight’s problems, and any suggestion that the second press conference – set for Thursday – was in jeopardy because of one amounted to little more than a punchline. For if the presence of clomifene, a performance-enhancing drug, was not enough of a deterrent for men in power to immediately annul a fight between two boxers in 2022, a cracked egg wouldn’t be enough to stop the same two boxers – a welterweight and a middleweight, let’s not forget – now coming together to sit at a long table separated by a legion of minders and pay-no-minders.

Besides, never will a self-respecting promoter pass up the opportunity to build on controversy, regardless of potential danger. This, for most, is in fact when they feel really alive, and Hearn, in particular, appeared invigorated once his panic subsided and his legs had stopped trembling. In the aftermath, he spoke of Nigel Benn’s fury and he hinted that Thursday’s press conference – which may not even go ahead! – would now be a chance for retribution “on sight.” It was, though presented as concern, nothing but a sales pitch. 

As it turned out, the only real difference between Tuesday and Thursday could be measured in the distance between the two boxers when they were allowed to pose for the customary face-off. This time, rather than being within egg-cracking range, the boxers were kept several yards apart, with numerous bouncers ensuring they stayed that way.

Regardless, Eubank again had Benn where he wanted him. By then, he had talked and talked to such a degree – winding up both Hearn and Benn’s father – that Benn, when invited to speak, could only call a premature ceasefire for fear of either saying the wrong thing or inviting more of the same. “This whole thing’s just getting on my nerves,” Benn said. “There’s no question you could ask me. Eubank, I can’t wait to smash your head in.”

For once Benn spoke not only sense but for us all. He was right: As entertaining as it was at times, the charade had started to become ugly, tiresome and repetitive, with nobody courageous or powerful enough to take the lead and prevent it descending into Eubank putting the world to rights; hating on basically anyone other than Turki Alalshikh, the last man in boxing from whom he can take money.

Earlier, Eubank had been determined to explain to the audience how the Benn fight had come about, indicating in the process that there was essentially no reason for Hearn, or even his own promoter, Shalom, to be involved. He said that all they required to get the fight done was the money promised by Alalshikh, the Saudi financier single-handedly propping up the industry right now. The others, they were just political meat; cheerleaders. They need not be there and they certainly need not speak, as Eubank made clear, again and again, to Hearn whenever he tried to do just that. 

Even Nigel Benn, who has at least fought professionally, was rebuffed – more accurately, threatened – when he appeared to offer Eubank an olive branch at one stage. He was told then, in no uncertain terms, that should he ever again put his hands on Eubank, as he did after the egg-cracking incident on Tuesday, he would not get them back, at which point his son, Conor, responded with threats of his own. 

Eubank, meanwhile, a man with all the empathy of a big-tech billionaire, just continued his dead-eyed stare, seemingly detached from both the feelings of others and, refreshingly, the rules of the game. Quite happy to rewrite or break them, and happier still to narrate, his version was the only version of the story we had the chance to hear on both Tuesday and Thursday. Across the two days, he said things most fighters only think and he also shone a light on how unsavory this business – both the business of boxing and the business of Benn-Eubank – really is. 

Alas, it wasn’t just the egg that cracked this week. It was the whole façade.

Elliot Worsell is a boxing writer whose byline first appeared in Boxing News magazine at the age of 17. He has, in the 20 years since, written for various publications, worked as press officer for two world heavyweight champions and won four first-place BWAA (Boxing Writers Association of America) awards. In addition to his boxing writing, Worsell has written about mixed martial arts for Fighters Only magazine and UFC.com, as well as worked as a publicist for the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). He has also written two non-fiction books, one of which, “Dog Rounds,” was shortlisted at the British Sports Book Awards in 2018.