Chris Eubank: ‘I had the balls to fight an Irishman ...!'

Chris Eubank doesn’t do interviews. He gives talks, he muses, he quotes. A bitter man might say his philosophies are borrowed from the life-affirming slogans of a refrigerator magnet, a cynic that his dandy clothes and affectations a piece of frivolous performance art, posed, manufactured and unreal.

He’ll tell you that world champions don’t come without heart and hurt and he’ll say that many of his performances with the monocle, cane and jodhpurs back in the Steve Collins and Nigel Benn days were both real and pretend, Eubank acting out his real self.

“I was being myself in the act of being myself, which was real,” he explains. He has never denied being convoluted.