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Tina Turner's song "Simply The Best!" blasts out as the brash upstart donning yellow and red leaps over the top rope to a chorus of boo's. He strutted. He postured. And he somehow always managed to find a way to keep his title. He held his chest high. He put a smug look on his face. He used slow-paced patience in his posturing. And he spent a lot of his time looking down his nose at ringsiders. 'Simply The Best' was his motto, not without reason, he claimed to be the best fighter in the world and challenged anybody to prove him wrong - only they wouldn't fight him.
Chris Eubank was a very special addition to British boxing. In the public eye, the celebrity Eubank comes across as being provocative, lispingly verbose, dapper, haughty and overly pretentious, as well being very eccentric, expensively dressed and not too adverse to the odd poetic quotation. Everybody knows about his wearing of jodhpurs, his use of a monocle, his carrying of a cane and his driving of a truck. But for me, that is not the real Chris Eubank. The Chris Eubank that I loved to watch while I was growing up was the sharp-dressed boxer - 'Simply The Best'. The man who kept winning just as everybody expected him or wanted him to lose.
He was charasmatic, he was super-confident, and he was controversial. But above all, from 1988 to 1994, I remember sitting watching Eubank fights live on terrestrial ITV at prime time (and later in his career on Sky Sports) and just marvelling at what a good boxer, entertainer and showman he was. Despite the emergance since then of the likes of Naseem Hamed, who projected themselves in a similar way, I feel that Chris Eubank was a genuine one-off, and the void left in British boxing when he retired is one that is still left largely unfilled.
I feel it's due to conduct an interview with Eubank about his BOXING career, to focus on Eubank the BOXER, because after all it was BOXING that brought this unique man into the public eye.
Chris Eubank was a very special addition to British boxing. In the public eye, the celebrity Eubank comes across as being provocative, lispingly verbose, dapper, haughty and overly pretentious, as well being very eccentric, expensively dressed and not too adverse to the odd poetic quotation. Everybody knows about his wearing of jodhpurs, his use of a monocle, his carrying of a cane and his driving of a truck. But for me, that is not the real Chris Eubank. The Chris Eubank that I loved to watch while I was growing up was the sharp-dressed boxer - 'Simply The Best'. The man who kept winning just as everybody expected him or wanted him to lose.
He was charasmatic, he was super-confident, and he was controversial. But above all, from 1988 to 1994, I remember sitting watching Eubank fights live on terrestrial ITV at prime time (and later in his career on Sky Sports) and just marvelling at what a good boxer, entertainer and showman he was. Despite the emergance since then of the likes of Naseem Hamed, who projected themselves in a similar way, I feel that Chris Eubank was a genuine one-off, and the void left in British boxing when he retired is one that is still left largely unfilled.
I feel it's due to conduct an interview with Eubank about his BOXING career, to focus on Eubank the BOXER, because after all it was BOXING that brought this unique man into the public eye.
(I wonder why).
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