Liam Smith vs Chris Eubank Jr II: How coping with a knockout shapes fighters in different ways
Ahead of this Saturday’s rematch between Liam Smith and Chris Eubank Jr, live on Sky Sports Box Office, Andy Clarke considers how confronting a knockout defeat can shape a fighter, something Smith has coped with before but which Eubank Jr has never previously faced
In January something happened to Chris Eubank Jr that he never thought would or could happen. He got hurt, dropped and stopped.
He didn’t want to stop but referee Victor Loughlin, whose job it is to save fighters from their own bravery, gave him no option.
How boxers respond to a stoppage defeat is fascinating. Even more so if it’s their first stoppage defeat, and even more so if they go straight back in with the same person who inflicted it on them, and even more so if they’ve always been adamant that there simply wasn’t an opponent capable of such a thing.
That’s the position Eubank finds himself in and it’s a difficult one.
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He now knows that he can be hurt. Although that will have been a sobering realisation, becoming aware of his own pugilistic mortality, even at this late stage of his career it could be a good thing.
I’ve been talking to fighters about this a lot recently. Carl Froch, David Haye, Tony Bellew, Ricky Hatton, Matt Macklin, Jamie Moore and Johnny Nelson have all been happy to discuss a subject that maybe they wouldn’t have been when they were boxing. Namely their attitude towards defeat, and not just any old defeat, but more specifically a stoppage or knockout defeat.
You could be forgiven for thinking that Froch, old granite chin himself, who never got stopped, or Haye, a Eubank-like figure in terms of the level of self-confidence he exuded, would have dismissed the prospect of that ultimate and most devastating sporting reversal as being something that could happen to other people but not to them.
But you’d be wrong. What they and the others all had in common was an acceptance that it most certainly could happen to them, that it could happen to anyone. They remained utterly determined that it wouldn’t happen each and every time they walked up those steps to the ring but they’d accepted that it could.
I struggled to get my head around it, if I’m honest. It appeared to go against all the mantras of positivity that had always seemed to me to underpin an athlete’s very existence.
But, as they explained to me, recognising such a harsh reality as a possibility wasn’t a negative thing, not for them. For them denial was much more dangerous. Because the unthinkable and the impossible are not the same thing and to refuse to think about something, to even contemplate it, however briefly, can breed complacency and that way can lie disaster, especially in boxing.
Furthermore, if the unthinkable then happens, you’re not nearly as equipped to deal with the impact of it as you would be if you’d allowed yourself to think about it, to entertain it as a possibility.
So while it’s true that the manner of defeat Eubank experienced in his first encounter with Smith could make him fearful or hesitant – and it’s had that effect on numerous fighters down the years – he could also find it liberating, strange though that might sound.
Make no mistake, he’ll have hated what happened in the first fight with every fibre of his soul, but it could well be that it hasn’t proved as difficult to confront it and get over it as he might have thought, now he’s been given no choice but to do so.
If that is the case then we could be in for a hell of a fight on Saturday. He looked and sounded the same as he always has at the workouts, our first fight week glimpse of our main eventers, but we’ll only find out whether he is or not when the bell goes.
Smith was supposed to be on last at the workouts, that was his right as the first name on the fight card, but due to the tardiness of his dance partner, he decided not to wait around, jumped up into the ring, smiled his way through some shadowboxing, did a few interviews and then disappeared.
My guess is that he’s a man who, as much as you ever can be, is completely at ease with the realities of the prizering and has been for a long time. As a young pro he saw his two older brothers, Paul and Stephen, on the wrong end of brutal stoppages. So he’s always known what could happen, because if it could happen to them, both very fine fighters, then it could happen to him.
It did subsequently happen to him, in front of over 50,000 people in a stadium in Texas, at the hands of a certain Saul “Canelo” Alvarez. He got over it.
I’m not saying it wasn’t hard, I’ve never spoken to him about it, but he must have done because that was nearly seven years ago, and he’s still here and headlining pay-per-views to boot.
We know what occurred when these two last met but the emphatic nature of his win won’t breed any complacency in Smith.
He knows that on any given night, anything can happen.
And, since January, so does Eubank.
Liam Smith vs Chris Eubank Jr II is live on Sky Sports Box Office on Saturday. Book it now
