While it was left to the last minute for Chris Eubank Snr and his son Chris Eubank Jnr to mend fences ahead of Jnr’s fight in April with Conor Benn, there will be no such cliffhanger with Snr by the side of his nephew Harlem.
Harlem Eubank takes a significant step up on Saturday when he fights the world-class Jack Catterall in Manchester, and Harlem’s uncle, British ring great Eubank Snr, will be by his side throughout.
Eubank Snr was one of three fighting brothers, along with Peter and Simon – Harlem’s late father – and he has thrown his support behind Harlem. Asked whether Eubank Snr will be by his side, Harlem told BoxingScene: “Most definitely. He’s excited. He’s been calling for me to have a big fight and he’s been saying I’m ready to become world champion for the last two years. This is the type of fight that will really place my name on the scene; [I’m] ready to go in there with anyone in the world.”
In April, when Harlem’s cousin Eubank Jnr faced Benn at London’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, Harlem, like the rest of the audience, did not know that Snr was going to show up and be a part of proceedings. The father and son duo had been estranged.
“I mean, the fact that Snr came, I was still unaware until I saw it play out,” explained Harlem. “Which was a beautiful moment… One of my favorite live TV moments I’ve ever seen. So much emotion. But once I was in the dressing room, I could see him [Snr] kind of pulling people to the side and telling them, ‘We need this song here,’ and, you know, engineering that beautiful ring walk. It was a night that will live down in history.”
April represented a very different side to the sport from the one Harlem – and for that matter Harlem’s late father Simon – has been accustomed to.
Harlem rose on the small-hall circuit, later signed with Wasserman and, at 21-0 (9 KOs), he’s ready for a showpiece event, but the red carpet still has not been rolled out for him as a pro.
His dad could fight but never graduated to the red corner. A junior middleweight, he was always the opponent and retired with a 7-20 (2 KOs) record, having won four of his first five but still having enough about him late in his career to stop the 15-1 Trevor Smith.
But Simon, who died in 2023 at the age of 61, had seen the darker side of the business.
Even with that in mind, he did not warn Harlem away from his chosen career. Chris Snr had famously asked Chris Jnr not to follow in his footsteps. But Jnr would not be denied.
“I think he [Simon] was more – he kind of left it to me,” Harlem revealed. “He never really opened the door for me to go into boxing in the sense that he never promoted it to me as something to do, or never kind of pushed me in that direction. I was always into other sports, and it came at the point where I had to ask him to come to the gym with me, and he stuck me on the jab for like three sessions. And I’m like, ‘Yeah, can we throw something else now?’ They have that kind of old school, drill the basics, and try and implant that into you. He never pushed me into it but he loved boxing, despite his experience in the sport, because it wasn’t a good one.
“There’s two sides to boxing. There’s the illustrious side and there’s the side where people don’t achieve success in the sport and sustain damage trying to do that.”
Simon boxed top British talent, like Kevin Leushing, Gary Logan, Del Bryan, Andy Holligan and Tony Ekubia. Perhaps if he had come along in the slipstream of Chris Snr, things might have been different.
“That’s it,” Harlem added. “Oftentimes as well [as an ‘opponent’], you’re getting notified a few weeks before a fight. And when you look at the record, there were a lot of very close decisions, and we know how the game is.
“I’m sure, by the politics and how close a lot of those fights were, and the fact that my dad was on the rough side of the sport, he could definitely fight. He definitely had talent. And my uncle [Chris Snr] reinforces that and tells me how good my dad was and how he was mistreated in the sport.”
