Chris Eubank - Chris Eubank - The Autobiography

To Ena, Irvin,

Christopher, Sebastian, Joseph,

Emily and Karron

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

PART ONE: LEARN THE ART

1 A Hard-knocks Life

2 Designer Thief

3 Posers, Bullies and Triers

4 Golden Boy

5 Doctor Johnson

PART TWO: APPLY THE PHILOSOPHY

6 Homesick

7 Hate me, but don’t Disrespect Me

8 It’s a Mug’s Game

PART THREE: ACQUIRE THE FINANCIAL SECURITY

9 WBO Middleweight Champion

10 The Warrior Within

11 Godspeed Shattered

12 This Spartan Life

13 The Showman

14 Destroying the Destroyer . . . Finally

15 Tyson

PART FOUR: ACHIEVE THE FAME

16 The Sky’s the Limit

17 Max

18 Community Spirit

19 Psychologically Challenged

20 Luck of the Irish

21 Style on the Nile

PART FIVE: EARN THE RESPECT

22 Winning the Lottery

23 A Sweet Tooth and Swollen Eyes

24 Samantha

25 A Heavy Heart

26 Just Being Me

27 At Home with the Eubanks

Picture Section

Epilogue

Career Statistics

Index

Copyright

About the Publisher

Mandela

To whoever it may concern:

There isn’t any bigger slavery than the slavery of compromise and acceptance of all the wrongs perpetrated against the African and Africa.

I never thought thoughts to make me otherwise than what I am, so my obliviousness to what you have been taught to think I should be is a statement of my humanity. As a footnote to that, it is a fact that human character is independent of colour and creed.

‘Ice cream, jelly and a punch in the belly.’ Dorothy used to say this to me every time I went round to her house. She was a very old, German Jewish lady, aged 93, whom my mother worked for as a live-in nurse in New York. I was only 19, negotiating my way through life in one of the toughest cities in the world. I had been sent to the Big Apple to distract me from the life of delinquency that threatened to pull me under back in England.

I loved Dorothy; she used to call me ‘sonny boy’. She accepted me. She was wheelchair-bound and I used to pick her up to put her into bed. I would sit and talk to her while my mother, a kind and extremely generous woman, busied herself. The house was crammed full of nostalgic bric-a-brac from over the years. There was also money lying around.

In those days, I never had a penny, so I started to take $20 bills from Dorothy’s room. This went on for about two years and added up to over $2000. I knew it was wrong, but I assuaged my guilt by telling myself that Dorothy wasn’t using the money and my mother didn’t notice.

There are certain things you do in your life that you regret but, if you put them right, you feel so much better. I knew I had to give that money back, especially when it became clear Dorothy was becoming progressively more fragile. By now, my fledgling boxing career had progressed quite nicely and I was taking bouts in England, flying back and forth between Brighton and New York. At that point, I was earning a small weekly allowance plus £700 a fight, so I saved up the equivalent of $2500 over a period of months and the very next time I visited Dorothy, I put the money back in her home. If I hadn’t done that, my indiscretion would have weighed very heavily on my mind. Thankfully, I paid her back.

Dorothy died two weeks later.

My father, Irvin Eubank, was a great storyteller. One of the many anecdotes he recounted described how he acquired his limp. When he was just a toddler, his own father had put some breadfruit in the stove. He was told not to take the breadfruit out and eat it, which, of course, was exactly what he did when he found himself alone for a few moments. When his father found out, he slashed the youngster’s lower leg with a machete. My father had a severely hard life, but he would have told this tale to one person one way and told another person a totally different story! Another version had him being cut out of a terrible car wreck and losing his calf muscle in the process. He was such a character, and I see some of that in myself.

He was born on 28 August 1929, in the district of Mount Airey, Clarendon, in Jamaica. He cut sugar cane in the fields for most of his younger years. That is where he met and eventually married my mother Ena who was then, and always will be, deeply religious. She was well known in church circles in Clarendon. She had been married previously and had five children, my older half-brothers and sisters, whom I rarely see. My mother was born on 15 March 1931 in Clarendon. She left school aged 17 and became a nurse’s domestic helper. She met her first husband and married him at the age of 2 5, but unfortunately he died only three years later, leaving my mother on her own with their five children. Then, in 1960, she met my father.

My father saved diligently for many years for the plane fares to migrate to the UK, stuffing his hard-earned cash under a mattress until such a time as the move could be made. They settled in south London and life was very difficult, an endless grind of poverty and hard work. I was born in East Dulwich on 8 August 1966, their fifth child, after David, the twins Simon and Peter, and Joycelyn. My mother told me their main goal was to get their own home and to do so with five kids around was very hard. So, we were sent to Jamaica to be with our grandmother, on my mother’s side, when I was still only a baby. My earliest memory is of being pulled on a banana leaf in the hills by my cousin Woodia. Other than that, I have no recollection of my time there. My grandmother was called Constance, but we called her ‘Uncun’. She has passed away now. When she was still alive and I had become world champion, I hired and flew in a helicopter packed with supplies of clothes and foodstuffs to Callington, the mountain-top village where she lived. To this day, when I travel to Jamaica, they say, ‘You’re the man who came in the helicopter.’

My mother visited as often as she could and was always sending money over too. On one of these visits, she came with the good news that they now had a house in Crystal Palace Road in south east London. Taking fright at how ill we looked, she convinced herself that we were malnourished, knowing as she did how tough life can be in the countryside of Jamaica. She immediately rounded up the four boys, packed our belongings and took us back to England, leaving Joycelyn to stay with grandmother.

I don’t remember coming back from Jamaica, but I have clear recollections of my early life back in the UK. We lived in various council estates in London, including Crystal Palace Road, Peckham, Stoke Newington, Hackney and Dalston. My first memory in the UK was of my mother slapping me senseless for pretending I had a stomach ache, when I actually had four packets of Wotsits shoved underneath my coat that I had stolen from a sweet shop while with her in Stoke Newington. I was also quite adept at stealing from the bread van owned by the nearby bakery.

I started smoking at six years old. I used to follow my brothers and go round to Old Ed’s house nearby. He must have been in his late eighties and used to give us cigarettes. If he wasn’t around, I would make roll-ups by stealing Old Holborn from my father’s tobacco tin as he was sleeping on the settee.