This horrifying, tear-inducing documentary about Chris Eubank, Nigel Benn, Frank Bruno and Lennox Lewis has awful details of detached retinas, brain damage and racism. It’s a real indictment
“That man is the most terrifying man I have ever met,” says middleweight boxer Chris Eubank of his first bout of organised unpleasantness with Nigel Benn 34 years ago. Benn, then the world middleweight champion, went by the nickname the Dark Destroyer. “I’m dark and I destroy,” he explains for the dimmer bulbs of Prime Video’s demographic.
Three and a half decades later, Eubank can still recall one punch that did get through. For some reason, Eubank wasn’t wearing a gum shield over his lower teeth so Benn’s upper cut in the fourth fractured a wisdom tooth. “The tooth split and left a half-inch gash on my tongue,” remembers Eubank, who nonetheless fought on to knock Benn out.
The context for the celebration was that, in 1980, a white Briton, world middleweight champion Alan Minter announced before a fight that he wasn’t going to lose his title to a Black man. Getting battered in three rounds by American Marvin Hagler proved otherwise. Yet, this series makes me do something I have never done in many years of watching boxing – cry. Twice. First when Bruno, himself tearful after winning the world heavyweight crown at the fourth attempt, sobs to interviewers ringside: “I’m not an Uncle Tom. I love my people.” It was a reference to charges made by two fellow Black boxers – Lennox Lewis and the man he had just beaten, Oliver McCall.
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