Why boxing needs Chris Eubank Sr

Watching Chris Eubank Sr's Christmas Day interview with IFL TV's Kugan Cassius, I was reminded of the salient words of Oscar Wilde: "Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities."

Combining the style of a 19th century dandy and pride associated with a Roman gladiator, Eubank exists on a different plane than anyone else in boxing. He attracts ridicule for daring to try and elevate in word and deed the sport to its rightful place as one in which timeless virtues of courage, skill, honour, and resilience are reaffirmed. In this respect, he understands that when two highly trained and developed fighters meet in the centre of the ring, it is not only a battle of fists and wills that ensues but also a merging of the human spirit. In the process they transform one another and themselves, undergoing the kind of spiritual cleansing that can only come with pushing one another to the very limits of human endurance and pain. It is why when the Irish rebel Terence MacSwinney opined that it is not those who can inflict the most, but those that can suffer the most who will conquer, he could have been describing a sport that is as old as humanity itself.

It is this very philosophy - the philosophy of the ages, no less - that Eubank Sr has embraced in his approach to the fight game. In response he has attracted not only ridcule but even contempt from those for whom the sport is reduced to a a business and glorified scrap. Such a facile rendering of the sport has done much to push it towards the long grass of mediocrity and cynicism, forced to compete with MMA and WWE wrestling as a result.

This contempt for Chris Eubank Sr from some in the game has reached the point where promoter Eddie Hearn has seen fit to rip the piss out of the man by impersonating his voice. Just pause to consider how perverse it is to have a man who's probably never thrown a punch in anger in his entire life, laughing at one of the bravest and toughest men ever to lace up a pair of boxing gloves. Love or loathe the man, you cannot but respect the way he insists on ploughing his own furrow. It is why the likes of Hearn and Warren find him so difficult to deal with, the fact he refuses to bow down and accept anything less than the cream when it comes to managing his very able son's career.

Some of the points he made during his recent IFL interview were impossible to argue with - such as the fact that it is the fighters not the promoters who should receive the lion's share of revenue generated by marquee fights; such as the fact there is nobody better qualified than he to steer his son or be in his corner; such as the fact that promoters are in it for the money more than anything else; and such as the fact he has proved in his own career the wisdom of his methods, however "deluded" they may have and continue to appear to others.

Watching him take time to consider his words, his determination to articulate himself as powerfully and eloquently as he can, is a refreshing reminder that while undoubtedly a brutal sport, boxing does not need to be approached brutishly.

Eubank Sr is also quite correct to point out that his son is one of the most explosive and exciting fighters around. However as to him "wrecking Golovokin", this is debatable. Having said that, nobody thought he had a prayer going in against the wrecking machine that was Nigel Benn back in 1990, did they? With both he and Eubank Jr supremely confident of the outcome to this fight, when it eventually comes, it's already guaranteed to be a riveting prospect.

The sport of boxing needs characters like Chris Eubank Sr. After all, just as in life itself, for those who excel we are talking a game that is chess not chequers.

Bernard Hopkins v Father Time - there could only be one winner

The age-worn truth that in boxing Father Time is undefeated springs to mind with regard to the emphatic and sad end to the ring career of Bernard Hopkins, punched out of the ring by WBC International light heavyweight champion Joe Smith Jr in the 8th round of their clash at the Los Angeles Forum at the weekend.

It was an especially cruel denounement to the career of a fighter, in Hopkins, who goes out as one of the finest middleweights to ever grace the ring, and who over the last decade had successfully carved out a niche for himself as a fighter for whom Father Time was less a biological fact and more a minor inconvenience. To his credit, he had us all fooled into believing him - believing that, yes, he was so special and unique that he could go on as long as he wanted. We allowed ourselves to consider him a permanent fixture in the ring, convinced that someone so freakishly dedicated to the sport in all its various aspects, who lived the life like no other fighter on the planet, whose attention to every detail was obsessive and who was never less than in top shape, had managed to transcend the ageing process as no Beverly Hills plastic surgeon ever could.

We were wrong. And so was he.

His defeat, the manner of it, was a rude awakening. It brought us to our senses, or at least should have brought us to those senses, when it comes to the notion of putting a 27 year old in the ring with a 51 year old. No matter how dedicated, how great his career, such a notion could only ever be delusional, one that should never have been entertained for a second. And with due respect to Smith an in-prime, even past-prime Hopkins would not have lost a minute of any round in a fight against an opponent of this calibre. However this was not a past-prime fighter in there, it was a man whose pride in thinking he could defy Mother Nature proved his undoing. It bears repeating: in so doing he and those around him were guilty of lapsing into delusion.

Yet we find ourselves in an era in boxing which delusion is the new normal. Consider the evidence. Britain's Amir Khan believing he stood a chance against Canelo given the size difference - delusional: Kell Brook moving up two weight classes to face the hardest-hitting middleweight the sport has seen in generations and believing he stood a chance - delusional: Tony Bellew believing he can match David Haye for power at heavyweight - delusional: and worst of all, Conor McGregor believing he can transition from MMA to boxing and share a ring with Floyd Mayweather - utterly delusional.

The aforementioned does not describe boxing as the sport we all know and love, it describes boxing as a circus - a sport so fixated on PPV buys and generating revenue for promoters and TV networks it has lost touch with its soul.

There is a wider social and cultural issue involved here. Boxing, like every other sport, does not exist in a social or cultural vacuum. To a large extent it reflects the times we live in; and we are living in a time where spectacle is everything and integrity is nothing. In boxing this lack of integrity is not a malaise suffered by those who fight. Far from it. Fighters such as Bernard Hopkins and Kell Brook are the epitome of integrity, men who have earned every plaudit and every purse they ever won. But the system that controls boxing, never known for its purity of heart, has turned into a squalid corporate and money making racket, worse in many ways than it was under the mob back in the day. At least back then the sport and its fans were being humped by people with personality.

The woeful lack of honest boxing writing and journalism is another crucial aspect in boxing's decline as a sport and reinvention as a circus. Most of those we rely on to report on the fights are little more than PR secretaries for promoters and the networks. Holding the sport's powers that be to account on behalf of the fans is a thing of the past, with writers knowing that if they do they will suddenly find their applications for press passes denied and, with it, the privilege of being ringside and close to the action. The result is a chasm between what's being reported and what we see with our own eyes.

In boxing, despite what any promoter or fighter says, weight divisions matter, size matters, and age matters. Bernard Hopkins deserved better than to go out on the back of such a humiliating defeat. What he gave to the sport, his old school style, science, and ring smarts, married to a backstory that is the stuff of movies, elevated him to a venerated position in in the sport. But ulitmately, as clever and astute as he undoubtedly is, that bugbear of every fighter who can't let it go, vanity, got the better of him in the end. His fight against Joe Smith Jr was not boxing it was something else.

The sooner we get back to boxing the better.