Back in his pomp as an era-defining, generational dog-torturer, the great Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov did an interesting experiment with shapes. This involved showing a dog called Vampire a combination of circles and ovals. Circles meant he was about to be fed. Ovals meant no food and possibly, maybe, at a push, being electrocuted.
Before long Vampire was showing the familiar conditioned response, salivating when he saw a circle, shying away from the oval. At which point Pavlov began to show him shapes that were weirdly pitched between the two, not quite an oval, not quite a circle, half a food promise, half something else, until eventually Vampire snapped, yelping and running around in circles, unable to interpret the truth of the thing in front of him. So, top work there everyone. Another dog successfully confused.
I was reminded of this weird tableau watching the buildup to Saturday’s catchweight fight between Chris Eubank Jr and Conor Benn, object of an astonishing full-wallpaper level of media coverage, and not just a grotesque event, but a deeply confusing one.
What is this thing? What are we looking at? Actual sport? Boxertainment? Circles? Ovals? Total bullshit? Semi-bullshit? Here we have a fight that carries the trappings, the talk, the styling, the salivating advertisements of a legitimate sporting event, sold on TalkSport radio as “a moment of British boxing history”.
And yet of course the briefest glimpse behind the staging reveals a spectacle that leads nowhere and is made of nothing. These two fighters are different weights, years apart in age, and on entirely separate career trajectories. Sport doesn’t need them to intersect. Without their fathers’ surnames there is zero chance any of this would be happening.
At least with a Jake Paul event you know what he is, an expertly drawn cartoon, a provocateur, the perfectly evolved internet-human, with a face that is both simultaneously infuriating, moreish and global‑logo recognisable, a button you just have to click. By contrast Eubank Jr-Benn feels like a category mistake, bad TV pretending to be good sport.
Even talking about who might win seems pointless. Aguy who has starved himselfagainst a guy who probably isn’t ready. Who cares? And yes, it could still be a good fight, because both are gifted boxers. Benn’s best chance is to go for the blitz, to get those high-speed angles and combinations going early. Eubank, if he’s not too drained, can probably wear his man down.
But it already feels like everyone gets to lose here in the end. Even the strap-line Fatal Fury is tactless, alarming and inaccurate. Tactless because both men’s fathers were involved in properly-matched, deeply scarring fights that almost led to actual fatalities. Alarming because in order to make this novelty show happen Eubank has had to agree to a “rehydration clause” that makes his brain additionally vulnerable to injury.
And inaccurate because there is no meaningful fury here. This is perhaps the most nauseating part. There is no logical reason for this fight to exist. To fill that hole it has been sold as “a hatred that’s in the blood” and a genuine family feud. “Thirty years in the making it all boils down to this!” Does it though?
This is now an event that rests entirely on whether to believe two people who have no reason to hate each other nonetheless genuinely hate each other. The most frustrating aspect here is that their fathers have made it clear in the past they actually love each other, that they feel like soulmates, bonded for ever by that brutal shared youth, one of the most moving stories from that badlands era of boxing history. Eubank Sr has said things such as “I have tasted his blood and he’s my brother”. Even if the two sons have somehow managed to summon up some actual hate for each other it still means nothing. Nothing is at stake, no actual shared history. No career paths are on the line, no title shots. This is just fake hate retailed for clicks. One of the radio stings has Benn saying “I’m going to end his career live on Dazn!” Really? Why?
The key lies in the last part of that sentence. It is no mystery why this is happening.Boxingis entertainment staged at great personal risk. It is, in its pure form, the greatest sport, all hard edges, extreme skill, non-negotiable heart and bravery. Take the money when it’s there. And good luck to all involved. The question is: why is this particular fight so particularly everywhere?
The answer to which is a very modern confusion of ownership, staging and product. The fight is being sold as a pay-per-view event by Dazn. The fight is also being promoted furiously by the Sun and by TalkSport. Only last month Newscorp, which also owns the Sun and TalkSport – keep watching the moving cups – took a 6% stake in Dazn, with a lot of chat about their new joint mission. Well, here it is. Every single click the News International side can eke out of the buildup to this fabricated event is money in the bank for their mutual ownership.
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Boxing is of course perfect for this overlap of interests. The people deciding what is important, what gets to happen, are basically agents. This makes sense up to a point, just as it is very hard not to like Eddie Hearn on a basic level.
He’s really good on TV. He’s handsome and convincing and probably really good fun at a barbecue. He looks like the sort of bloke who shouts out “Oi Oi!” when he walks up to a crowded urinal. But pretty much everything he says now sounds hilariously inauthentic, from “This is unequivocally the greatest card we have ever seen in the sport”, over the most recent Big Thing in Saudi, to the recurrent PR pump for Riyadh.
And Saudi is of course the key here. One hand always washes the other. But right now Saudi washes everyone’s hands, as an owner of Dazn, and thus de facto partner of the Sun and TalkSport, and mainly as the propaganda-state home of boxing’s world level future.
You can hardly blame Hearn and Warren for clinging on by their fingernails to the only train leaving the station. But that meshing of interests is also dangerous. Without actual jeopardy, without robust and open competition, as entertainment product intrudes, the whole spectacle basically starts to collapse.
So we have Fifa staging its own Dazn-sponsored Club World Cup, and telling us this is the greatest and the realest, because it has to be, because we say so, because Messi and perhaps even Ronaldo now have been gerrymandered in through the door.
This is the greatest threat to elite sport right now, the controlling whims of our billionaire overlords, the moment where suddenly all the circles and ovals start to look the same, when everything can be real if it makes enough noise and light. The conviction that, like dogs inside Pavlov’s box, we don’t actually need sustenance or hard content to make the juices flow, just enough of the staging.
In the end perhaps the most amazing thing about this Eubank-Benn is the way it makes the original, back when boxing really was untamed and dangerous, look noble and pure by contrast. By now even Eubank Sr’s deeply-felt refusal to turn up to the fight has been transformed into promotional energy.
I really hope he doesn’t go. Right now he seems like the only person with any sense around this event. Not to mention the only one pointing to its biggest giveaway, mismatched weights and the needless danger of a manufactured show.