Boxing promoter Eddie Hearn has warned that the sport “changed tonight” after the incident in which Chris Eubank Jr slapped rival Conor Benn with an egg as their personal enmity boiled over in a press conference in Manchester ahead of their middleweight clash in April.
Hearn, who represents Benn, told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on Wednesday: “I’ll choose my words carefully [as I’m on the BBC] but I wasn’t overly happy with it if I’m honest. I never feel like you should lay a hand on a fighter at a press conference, especially not with an object.
“It was always going to be a volatile build-up and it just turned up a notch. All bets are off now because I didn’t like what I saw from Eubank. It’s the fight game and everything with Eubank is premeditated and it will go viral and some people will like it but just understand the game changed tonight.”
During a heated exchange on Tuesday night, Eubank had already made reference to two drugs tests Benn failed in 2022 due to what the World Boxing Council called a “highly elevated consumption of eggs” – an offence for which he has since been cleared.
And as the fighters faced off on stage, Eubank pulled an egg from his pocket and smashed it against Benn’s face, sparking a brawl as Hearn and Benn’s father Nigel tried to get at Eubank and his team.
Eubank and Benn will fight at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on April 26th, but had originally been due to face off in October 2022 before Benn’s failed tests forced the fight to be called off.
“Conor, I have been meaning to ask you how many eggs you had to eat to fail those drugs tests,” Eubank said during the press conference. “All you and Eddie say is, ‘We are cleared’, but you don’t say how. I am not an academic, but I know one thing – you are a drug cheat.”
Benn originally tested positive for the female fertility drug clomifene.
The 28-year-old, who has a 23-0 record, was cleared to fight in the UK in November last year after the UK Anti-Doping Agency announced it would not appeal against a decision from the National Anti-Doping Panel to lift his ban, with the British Boxing Board of Control also declining to appeal.
It remains a sore point for Benn and before the main press conference he was involved in an angry exchange with a journalist when asked if he was going to use a foreign licence for the fight.
“If somebody starts asking me trick questions, I’ll throw you out of the room,” Benn said. “I’ll drag you by the neck outside and put you outside.”
It all added to the bad blood between the two fighters, whose fathers Chris Eubank and Nigel Benn twice fought each other during the 1990s and whose rivalry has grown to something that the latter said was “very personal”.
Benn promised he would force the 35-year-old Eubank into retirement when the pair meet in a fight that will take place in the latter’s division, at 160lbs, rather than at a catchweight.
“What I have been through is very public but I want to just get in there and end this man’s career,” Benn said. “I just can’t take him seriously, every time he stepped up, he failed. This is the end [for him], I am 28. He chose to fight a welterweight over all of the middleweight world champions.
“I am going to render you unconscious, just like Liam Smith did, had you dancing all funny. You can retire off into the sunset with this retirement fund. Because you are done.”
Eubank, who has a 34-3 record, said the contest was a fight between “two bad guys” given his own reputation.
“The bad guy is back again, he never cheats or lies but he is still the bad guy,” he said of himself. “For the first time in boxing history, in a mega-fight, there are two bad guys. I have been booed into all my fights since 2014, 11 years of being a bad guy, I’m a veteran. A super-villain. It’s a cold dark moment when you realise thousands of people want to see you hurt and lose.” – Guardian
