"Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing."
Eubank
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The autobiography, Chris Eubank, London, Willow Collins, 2003. ISBN 0 00 712232 2
The book tells the story of Eubank’s early life of petty crime, discovering boxing and becoming world champion.
On page three of the book he writes of his mother that she had a strong Christian faith. Throughout the book there are many references to his mother’s prayers for him, something which is clearly important to him.
His own faith is rather ambivalent with an early statement: “I promised myself I would stop smoking, go to church and try to start behaving myself”. He refers to certain incidents in his life as happening because of his mother’s prayers and indeed wanting to have other people praying for him. He describes his successes in religious terms: “I had what I called ‘Godspeed’. This was a subconscious feeling that providence was on my side, a deep-rooted yet peripheral faith that things would work out for the best. When you keep on winning as much as I had I felt it was God-given right no one was going to beat me”. Yet he sums up his own religious philosophy as “Be considerate towards your fellow no matter what his religion or non-religion”.
His fight with Michael Watson which left Watson semi-paralyzed affected him deeply: “Mentally coming to terms having done that to a person is not something that easy is to explain. Living with it was not good at all, a horrible experience. I was in touch with my human being and it could not have been more exposed it was so raw”.
Boxing made Eubank rich and famous yet he always had an ambivalent relationship with it: “I later said in a television interview, ‘For anyone who is going to call this “sport”, go and have a look at Michael Watson. This is not sport it is a blood business. Yes, it is. Yes, it is barbaric.’ Surely my detractors who sniped at my ‘mug’s game’ comments could no longer disagree with me?”
Even when Watson recovered – to some extent – Eubank described himself as ashamed: “Because I’m part and parcel of what happened”.