There was a moment in the preparation for Chris Eubank Jnr’s fourth-round loss to Liam Smith when it felt all too familiar, the one I had last experienced before the previous match in which Eubank Jnr was up. calendar, came to me. To put it mildly, it was an unpleasant feeling; feeling in the wrong place, at the wrong time; or not belong to all.
The cause of this feeling this time was not the failure of the performance-enhancing drug test but the subsequent efforts of the promoters to keep fighting despite. Instead, the reason I feel out of place this time around working in a sport like boxing is largely because the ugly back-and-forth Eubank Jnr and Smith got together to produce at the final pre-match press conference. their middleweight match on January 21. Since it was during that press conference that the world had to listen to Liam Smith ask himself the question of Eubank Jnr’s gender, which made absolutely no sense, before that, in retaliation, Eubank Jnr retaliated by himself. how to accuse Smith of being unfaithful to his wife.
Given the current climate, it’s a more shocking moment than in previous years. Even so, to hear Smith stoop on those levels and speak like a teenager still living in the 1990s, is neither too upsetting nor disappointing. First, it was disappointing, simply because it did not reflect well on Liverpudlian’s sensitive intelligence; because who in their mind would really think of saying something like that on the public stage in 2023? Furthermore, as is the case whenever boxing press conferences turn green or threaten to turn violent, there is a general look of displeasure on the faces of everyone but those directly involved. , kind of shyly saying, “This isn’t what I signed up for.”
Personally, maybe because I was fed up with it all, or had heard it all before, that’s how I felt when I watched Eubank Jnr and Smith that day. I am disappointed with them professionally and I am ashamed to be associated with a sport that offers such exchanges for the world to see and hear. In many ways, it’s like picking your child home from bed only to be told by the parents of the child they’ve visited that night that your beloved son or daughter has entered their kitchen. and started going to the bathroom. on the floor.
How it ended: Liam Smith knocks out Chris Eubank Jnr in Manchester on January 21 (Lawrence Lustig)
However, such feelings rarely last in a sport like boxing. There’s often a fight that makes you forget – in this case, a good and dramatic one, with Smith providing the kind of ending that makes forgiveness an easy branch to expand. If not a fight, what also tends to happen is that there will be some other scandal that will make you quickly forget about the last one. For example, here, although not exactly a scandal, we caught the attention of Conor Benn on social media, he failed the PED test, which helped us. redirect his anger after the match Eubank Jnr vs Smith.
Meanwhile, my own perspective was eventually provided by an interview Smith gave to BBC Radio 5 Live afterward, in which one of its presenters, Eleanor Oldroyd, not only lured him in. he apologizes for what he said earlier in the week but does so with such condescension and determination one has to wonder if, in inviting him to the show, was the intention unique ever or not.
True or not, for a longtime boxing advocate and boxer, that particular interview was as hard to watch as Smith’s fight week press conference with Eubank Jnr. That was hard, at least for me, because aside from the confrontational nature of the presenter’s approach, a common way to try to embarrass, this BBC interview with Smith gave see total disregard for (a) the fact that a boxer has just won the biggest prize. The boxer of his career and (two) actual boxers, like every other human on the planet, are far from perfect.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that what Liam Smith said about Chris Eubank Jnr and homosexuality is true, far from true. But, sure, to expect perfection from professional laureates is extremely illusory. Indeed, expecting that ultimately means you know nothing about the sport or its participants.
Let me remind you that these funds are not Oxford or Cambridge-educated trusts. Instead, they’re usually working class, which means they’ve had a working class upbringing and working class beliefs, and some, that’s the nature of the profession. , will remain in their bubble until their careers come to an inevitable conclusion (which, for many, could be the root of their struggles).
In fact, a few years ago a former world champion told me that he believes that boxing, while it has given him so much, has essentially stunted his growth. as a human being. He says, socially, he hasn’t developed in the way so-called “normal” youths and also revealed that because of the isolation his profession requires, he has to working harder to both maintain relationships and understand and care for those you already have. jobs that don’t require punching people in the skull.
That conversation never left me. Moreover, that sad thing came back fondly in my mind in the morning as I listened to the BBC pretending to care about Liam Smith’s career-best win to actually be. ruin his career. They did so by trying to turn him into something he wasn’t in an apparent attempt to solve an issue that really cared about them as well as the British government.
By then, fortunately, I had made up my mind and therefore didn’t need a passively active presentation from a BBC presenter to help me. By then, I had concluded that Liam Smith, while not perfect, was still ours. In addition, humans.
