To slow down and break down bit by bit, day by day, is not exactly one of the great joys of life. But it largely beats the alternative.

In most walks of life, people are afforded the opportunity to decline from their prime gradually. But boxing is not like most walks of life. In boxing, sometimes you go from spirited to spent all at once.

“You saw what I was in there tonight,” Eubank said after losing a lopsided decision to Conor Benn in their rematch. “I thought once those bright lights hit and I was in there I would find something — and I tried, I tried hard. It wasn’t there.”

Those are the words of a shot fighter — a shot fighter who gave no indication of being anywhere near this far gone previously.

Sure, Eubank’s absolute prime appeared to have concluded in January 2023, when Liam Smith clipped him and stopped him in the fourth round. But he bounced right back. He stopped Smith in 10 in the rematch eight months later. Then he stopped Kamil Szeremeta. Then he won eight of 12 rounds against Benn in a contender for 2025’s Fight of the Year.

And one fight later, the 36-year-old Eubank showed up with absolutely nothing — no spring in his legs, no sting on his punches, a low volume of shots thrown, a depleted ability to absorb shots landed on him.

This sort of thing doesn’t happen in most careers. Rare is the lawyer who shows up in court one day suddenly unable to string a compelling sentence together, or the math teacher who can do long division on a Tuesday but not on that Wednesday.

But in boxing, in an occupation that involves getting punched in the head, repeatedly pushing your body to the brink and often draining yourself to make an unnatural weight, it happens. And not infrequently.

And Eubank should know this, because it happened against him. Twice.

In 2019, when Eubank’s career was under threat to be defined by close losses to domestic rivals Billy Joe Saunders and George Groves, he got a third chance against James DeGale. The 2008 Olympic gold medalist was certainly past his best at 33, but he’d only lost one of his previous 17 fights, an upset to Caleb Truax that he immediately avenged.

Nobody foresaw DeGale looking quite like he did against Eubank — boxing tentatively from range throughout, knocked down in rounds 2 and 10, left to offer afterward the cliched, “I’m going to go back, talk to my team and talk to my family.” Those talks, along with this performance, convinced DeGale to retire.

More recently, Eubank was the man across the ring when “Beefy” Smith went from Grade A to cooked seemingly overnight. Smith had stopped Eubank in the fourth round in January 2023. They rematched eight months later, and Smith, 35, had nothing to offer. Eubank dominated, scoring a knockdown in the fourth and a stoppage in the 10th, after which Smith admitted, “I was flat as they come from the get go. I couldn’t move my feet, and Chris was sharp.” Beefy has fought once since, losing a near-shutout decision in becoming a name on the record of young Aaron McKenna.

Sticking with British examples, flyweight Sunny Edwards said after his fight in November 2024 against Galal Yafai, “I don’t have the same energy for the sport,” and it showed. A year before that, Edwards was still undefeated. Then he was stopped by Jesse “Bam” Rodriguez — no shame in that. He bounced back with a comfortable win over Adrian Curiel.

But against Yafai, Edwards, just 28, looked like he didn’t want to be in the ring, and was dominated for all six rounds that the fight lasted.

The fall of British heavyweight Joe Joyce is an odd case, as here was a fighter whose seemingly impervious chin was at the core of his ascent, but the moment that chin cracked, everything attached to it shattered.

Joyce’s first loss was actually not so much a matter of a weak chin, as Zhilei Zhang upset him in April 2023 by doing damage to “The Juggernaut’s” right eye. But in the rematch five months later, Joyce, 38, crumbled in three rounds and he hasn’t scored a meaningful win since. It seems there is much that a slow-fisted behemoth with a granite chin can achieve that a slow-fisted behemoth with an ordinary chin cannot.

But Joyce soldiers on, as did — going back much further in British boxing history — Lloyd Honeyghan after his three-round KO loss to Mark Breland in 1990. Honeyghan fought five more years and went a respectable-sounding 9-2, but he never again troubled anything approaching a world-class fighter.

Coming into his fight with Breland, though, Honeyghan, just 29, was still perceived as a serious welterweight contender. “This is the old Lloyd Honeyghan,” said the broadcaster as the opening bell rang, reflecting the spirit the Londoner showed in the stare-down. He should have commented, “This is an old Lloyd Honeyghan.” Honeyghan couldn’t get close, couldn’t take Breland’s punch, had no legs, and went down six times — once from a jab — in eight desperately sad minutes.

Hitting the wall in a single fight is not the exclusive domain of the Brits, of course. The most high-profile example this century came in 2008, when a 35-year-old Oscar De La Hoya squared off against Manny Pacquiao.

Oscar’s prime was in the rearview, certainly. He’d lost narrowly to Floyd Mayweather in part because his body was breaking down in the late rounds, and in his next fight, De La Hoya was wholly unimpressive in outpointing overmatched and undersized Steve Forbes. But he was still perceived as a fighter on the fringes of pound-for-pound consideration.

And then Pacquiao battered a lifeless De La Hoya for all eight rounds that the fight lasted. Yes, Pacquiao brought extraordinary speed and energy that highlighted all of Oscar’s shortcomings, and yes, like Eubank Jnr last weekend, draining himself to make weight surely played a role in De La Hoya’s performance. But nobody could have imagined he would show up that night looking half as shot as he did.

The U.S. Olympic golden boy of a generation prior, Sugar Ray Leonard, had a similar experience when he took on Terry Norris in 1991 at age 34. He, too, was slipping — probably lucky to escape with a draw against Tommy Hearns two fights prior, and lucky that old rival Roberto Duran was more faded than Leonard was for their third encounter.

Nevertheless, Leonard was installed as about a 3-to-1 favorite to defeat the much younger Norris. Two of the scorecards tell the tale. Though a 116-110 tally makes it sound vaguely competitive, the other scores — 119-103 and 120-104 — indicate just how suddenly gone Leonard was that night at Madison Square Garden.

A more recent U.S. Olympic medalist, Deontay Wilder, was a tad older by the time his “Bomb Squad” bombs turned into duds. His stoppage losses in the second and third Tyson Fury fights took nearly everything out of him, but he was able to mask that in a one-round destruction of Robert Helenius.

At age 38 and a healthy favorite to dispatch Joseph Parker, though, Wilder’s skinny legs were suddenly gone — and notably, he couldn’t uncork punches, one of the most common signs of a fighter whose “low fuel” light has come on. That wide decision defeat in December 2023 was followed by an even worse KO loss to Zhilei Zhang, and though Wilder fights on, all signs point toward him not having another meaningful win in him.

The same month Wilder lost to Parker, junior welterweight Regis Prograis, then 34, suffered a similarly troubling defeat to Devin Haney. Two fights prior, “Rougarou” looked as devastating as ever against Jose Zepeda. But against Haney, he was dropped early, lost every round, threw a grand total of 363 punches in 12 rounds according to CompuBox and landed at a less-than-10-percent clip, connecting with just 36 blows all fight — three per round.

Since then, Prograis has done nothing to dispel the notion that he’s toast. Like Wilder, he fights on, but a wide loss to Jack Catterall and a narrow win over Joseph Diaz in which nearly every punch wobbled Prograis suggest there was nothing fluky about the Haney bout.

For the late Diego Corrales, the fall came fast. In his fourth-to-last fight, he rallied to stop Jose Luis Castillo in arguably the greatest fight anyone has ever seen. In Corrales’ third-to-last fight, Castillo blew the weight and blew Corrales out. In “Chico’s” second-to-last fight, Corrales was the one who couldn’t make weight and he lost a split decision to Joel Casamayor.

None of which quite prepared anyone for what happened in Chico’s final fight when, at just age 29, he was dropped twice late and could barely last the 10-round distance against fringe contender Joshua Clottey, desperately depleted despite weighing in 10 lbs heavier than he ever had before.

Corrales had much in common with contemporary Arturo Gatti, both in terms of the thrills they delivered in the ring and their tragic deaths. There was also some similarity to the way both went from contender to concluded in a single fight.

For Gatti, yes, he was coming off a bad TKO loss to Carlos Baldomir, but at least that was against the lineal welterweight champion. Reality-TV star Alfonso Gomez was lined up as a soft touch for the 35-year-old, but Gomez controlled nearly every round of the fight, gruesomely split Gatti’s lip and stopped him in seven hard-to-watch rounds.

We can’t talk about thrilling warriors of the early-2000s without talking about Israel Vazquez and Rafael Marquez. Together they produced the Fight of the Year twice in their first three fights. But by the time they agreed to square off a fourth time, in 2010, the 32-year-old Vazquez was all but blind in his right eye and just looking for a farewell payday.

Some suspected the man who, just two fights earlier, topped future Hall of Famer Marquez in their rubber match, was spent going in, but we didn’t know it for sure … until the opening bell rang. It was all over inside three rounds, everyone’s worst fears confirmed about how little Vazquez had left to offer.

There have been countless others who to varying degrees fit the “suddenly shot” description — Gabriel Ruelas vs. John Brown, Roy Jones vs. Glen Johnson, perhaps Errol Spence Jnr vs. Terence Crawford among them.

Sometimes there’s retrospective evidence we should have recognized. Sometimes it truly comes out of nowhere.

Every fighter has to confront the aging process eventually. But for some, the aging process is something they aren’t given any time to process.Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.