“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.
He had one aim that night in 1990 at Birmingham’s NEC: to prove that Eubank’s ring walk song, Tina Turner’s Simply the Best, was predicated on an imposture. How? By knocking the monocle-wearing popinjay’s head off. “I hated him,” Benn says.
But like George Foreman v Muhammad Ali almost two decades earlier, no matter how many blows the ex-squaddie unloaded into the preening challenger’s face, he couldn’t finish what he started. Footage shows Eubank, prancing in the ring like Mr Darcy impersonating a rooster. “I was trying to hit his head, but it weren’t denting it,” says Benn.
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.
That tooth detail alone clinches for me the case that boxing should be banned. But the makers of Four Kings detail many worse indictments of the alleged sport. There are gruesome tales of detached retinas, suicide attempts and brain damage, plus more toxic trash talk – some of it horribly racist – than the world in general and Black men in particular deserve.
This four-part documentary nonetheless celebrates what its makers deem the greatest era of British boxing in the late 1980s and 1990s. It was a time when four Black Londoners – each a proud child of Windrush generation parents, each haunted by private demons and scourged by our once and present nightmare, British racism – were world boxing champions. Eubank, Benn and the heavyweights Frank Bruno and Lennox Lewis, forced the rest of the boxing world to throw in the proverbial towel.
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.
But this documentary is dubious in suggesting that only after Minter did Black British boxers hit the limelight.
What about John Conteh, the Black scouse world light-heavyweight champion of the 1970s of whom no less an authority than Muhammad Ali deemed “too pretty” for the fight game? Conteh was also an outlier and this show should have realised as much.
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. Each claimed Bruno betrayed his Black community by not standing up for his people and for demeaning himself in HP Sauce ads as a latter-day Man Friday to a white Robinson Crusoe.
When Lewis and Bruno met in Jamaica recently for an interview, the former admitted the Uncle Tom jibe was trash talk to get under Bruno’s skin. It clearly worked. But watching this, you can’t help think that after all these years Lewis should retract that hurtful, hateful slur. He doesn’t, but he does something weirder, namely asking Bruno for forgiveness. Which, Mr Lewis, isn’t enough.
I am reduced to tears, too, when cameras follow Eubank on a recent visit to the home of Michael Watson. After beating Benn, Eubank defended his title in 1991 against Watson in a tragic bout that ended with the latter in an induced coma for 40 days. For six months Watson couldn’t hear, speak or walk. The hard work he has done since to recover his faculties is a greater achievement than winning any boxing title. Truly, Watson is the uncrowned fifth king of this documentary.
Eubank, now 58, often so risibly posturing and cocky, humbly presses his head into 59-year-old Watson’s chest, asking for forgiveness. Watson readily grants it. It wasn’t Eubank’s fault, he says.
Watson is right about that. Bigger and more venal forces were at play in Watson’s tragedy than Eubank’s devastating uppercut. Such as the fact that there were no medics in the White Hart Lane arena to treat Watson when he collapsed.
“This isn’t a sport,” reflects Eubank. “Some of us lose our lives. Some of us lose our ability to move, walk and talk.” Boxing, as Four Kings unwittingly shows, is no cause for celebration but a brutal racket, and its greatest exponents, often Black men, disproportionately its leading victims.
• Four Kings is on Prime Video now
