Look closer, you’ll find the first Eubank Jr - Benn fight was secretly a sermon on fatherhood

With Chris Eubank Jnr and Conor Benn due to box again this week-end - Augustus Gomez looks back to their fight in the summer and what it says about fatherhood

In 1990, Chris Eubank Sr. and Nigel Benn met in a clash preceded by years of animosity. Simply put: these men just didn’t like each other.

Chris Eubank: a flamboyant showman. Nigel Benn: raw aggression embodied. Their temperaments conflicted with every interaction — Eubank, boxing’s aristocracy, Benn, a clenched jaw and glacial stare that articulated explicitly he was not to be tried.

Now, 35 years later, their sons, Chris Eubank Jr and Conor Benn, exist as a personification of their father’s legacies. Beyond their fighting styles or personality types, in the tension between the two. It appears the disdain their fathers once held for each other was passed down, like a generational inheritance.

A father’s calling

Every facet of this fight — the build-up, the violence, the aftermath, the generational thread — points to a deeper truth: the Bible never treats fatherhood as a mere biological relation. It presents it as a spiritual calling — to nurture, correct, and bless; to bring children up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

even the Saviour of the world was entrusted to a human father

Jesus, in both his divine and human nature is quoted in John 10:30 as saying he and the heavenly father who never fails ‘are one’, yet in God’s perfect plan to salvage the world was Joseph, an earthly father who would nurture him as his own.

God chose to place him under the roof of a carpenter. Not perfect. Not divine. But faithful. That tells us everything — that even the Saviour of the world was entrusted to a human father.

And when that calling is missed, the fallout is profound. Equally, when it is embraced, the impact is ……