Chris Eubank Jnr hadn’t spoken to his father in four years. This documentary about his fight with Conor Benn – the son of his dad’s great rival – charts a reunion. It’s heart-pulverising stuff
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ou do not, I would hazard, expect to be moved to tears by a documentary about the Eubank family. But I suspect I am not the only one to find myself unexpectedly moved by The Eubanks: Like Father, Like Son, which follows Chris Sr and Chris Jr (also a successful boxer) as the latter prepares for a fight against Conor Benn, son of his father’s great 90s rival Nigel Benn, and tracing the rapprochement between the Eubanks after four years of estrangement.
Eubank Jr has all his father’s gentleness and none of his eccentricity. He also has less of his need to be noticed, and the patience of a saint. He treats his father with such quiet respect – absorbing all his performative flourishes, and clearly trying to keep his mind’s eye and his heart fixed on Eubank Sr’s underlying love – that your own heart is semi-pulverised long before we get to the meat of the programme.
The men’s estrangement began when Eubank Jr sacked his father as his coach. It was a wholly understandable decision – at least if you weren’t Eubank Sr. The son felt he had gone as far as he could in the sport under his father’s guidance and he needed people with new advice, new strategies, new ways to take him to the next level. He also felt that he needed to separate himself as a person as well as a boxer from the man who had, one way or another, dominated him until then.
