“The red-headed man with the cement fists smashed you to shit, Junior.”
It was a juvenile message to send him, and a deviation from character, but I took pleasure in Chris Eubank Jr.’s loss after having his blithe arrogance shoved in fan’s faces for years. Last February he mockingly sank to his knees, tensed his shoulders, and scrunched his face like a gargoyle, stalking the aborigine Australian Renold Quinlan around the ring in an ominous precursor to his inevitable victory. The title they were fighting for, the IBO Super-Middleweight Championship, is not recognized as a legitimized title by any official boxing commission. But Quinlan needed it. As a champion, he had mandatory challengers. And with challengers for his belt, Quinlan was never short of opponents and thus fights. With constant opponents comes constant income. Quinlan used this income to fund care for his ailing parents in their impoverished aborigines’ province of Australia. Throughout the fight, Eubank toyed with Quinlan to suggest that the opposition he offered was comical. He toyed with him to suggest— no—- make clear that he would be compromising his career by breaking off a chunk of his legacy to mend it to his own. And he did, except he broke off more than a chunk. A battered Quinlan toiled into irrelevance and thus poverty shortly after the Eubank fight.
Then he fought the prideful legend, Arthur Abraham. Abraham has weathered battles with the best of his division, and at the end of his career wanted to cement his legacy with a win over a rising champion. Eubank found Abraham’s meek wraith just as laughable as Quinlan’s. He brutalized him too, finding time in-between relentless combinations to make faces, posture childish motions, and actually laugh at the German-Armenian legend as to make clear that his best days were behind him.
Aside the antics in these matches (and countless others), Eubank’s misdoings extend beyond the ring. He and his father try to leverage further agency over contests by emphatically voicing that “Junior’s opponents need to be protected,” urging early-stoppages from the referee (to save lives). This is a tasteless reference to his fight with Nick Blackwell, whom Eubank beat into a coma years backs (and who remains there). And outside of his boxing career, grainy videos can be found of an adolescent Eubank beating men in parking garages from a decade ago.
Chris Eubank Jr. is not a good man.
So when he had dispatched of his first two opponents in the Super-Middleweight Super-Six Tournament for the Mohammad Ali trophy, fans were conflicted. This conflict stems from negotiating his distasteful character with the truth that he thrashes his opponents from pillar to post until knockout, stoppage, or a unanimous decision-victory. People were forced to face the reality that he was the most probable victor, but sought comfort that his opponent in the semi-finals was George Groves.
Groves weathered two wars with legendary Carl Froch, beating him on many dimensions before they ever fought. The ambitious youth permeated the veteran’s psyche by predicting pieces of the match with absolute confidence. He would solve Rubik’s cubes as a nervy Froch would ramble nonsense during the press-conference, communicating his superior intellect. He would explain how Froch would be defeated, emphasizing how it would catalyze his own career’s rise and Froch’s demise. He compromised Froch mentally, shrinking the larger, more experienced man so the opponent he would face against would not be the truest and most formidable version. And it largely worked. Groves manifested his predictions verbatim.
“The match will start off as a battle of jabs and I will win.” Groves did.
“I am going to give him a taste of my straight-right, just a taste, early in the first round so he respects my power.” He did that too.
He also predicted “I will finish Groves with my left-hook” and he knocked him down with it twice.
Groves fell victim to a criminally premature stoppage loss, but displayed a body of work so impressive, and withstood punishment so unbearable, that his future in the sport was assured to be bright. He endured career highs and lows, battering Froch in a rematch until Froch (shockingly) knocked him out cold, facing a grueling Badou Jack on Mayweather’s undercard where he fought a sound fight, but shied of doing enough to cinch the win. But on a career high, last May on Kell Brook’s undercard he fought a technical match to win the WBA Super-Middleweight Championship. He has navigated his career, the good and bad, courtesy of an incredible boxing intellect, a powerful jab, and two concrete fists. He fights strategically, patiently waiting for his opponent to allow him the freedom to manifest his game-plan. And win-lose-or-draw, he always does. His few losses were not courtesy of a more-skilled opponent, but by deviating from his discipline.
Groves skills are not only reliable, but antithetical to Eubank Jr’s form of uncalculated flurries, ambitious power-shots, and lack of any real strategy. So as many fans sought comfort in the pedigree of Groves, other boxers voiced that if he even deviates from strategy slightly, he’s done. And to heighten odds, despite the wide body of boxers, promoters, and judges who voiced Groves as a favorite, bookies had it heavily tipped to Eubank. Eubank had been ascending for years while Grove’s career was far from linear. The Eubanks’ and their team convinced the world THIS was the height of Junior’s ascension. Their indoctrination techniques seemed to plague masses, as even Groves offered a Freudian slip in a interview where he accidentally billed Eubank the winner. Doubt was nursed as a budding seed in the mind of Groves supporters, warding anyone from confidently asserting Groves as the winner. But when it seemed this doubt plagued Groves too, the world was afraid he was entering a dangerous match compromised to the same vain and degree that Froch was against him.
“Ginger is getting slumped”, some fan wrote in an ominous forum post.
Ginger didn’t get slumped. Not in the slightest. The red-headed man with the concrete fists smashed Junior to shit. Groves fought a match so strategically sound that it paralleled the ingenious of history’s most adulated military commanders. The naturally larger, stronger Groves, maintained distance from Eubank whose style is to rush into his opponents guard and bombard with attack. Each time Eubank attempted this, Groves met him with a sharp, punishing left jab.
Groves nullified each attempt at a combination by killing the momentum immediately, courtesy of either evasion or attack. As Groves began to pick up steam he would meet Eubank with a strong jab, then a straight-right. Eubank would shudder in pain. We shuddered in perverse joy. In the early rounds, Eubank tried to permeate his guard and received a shot that tore his left eye-lid in two. Blood seeped over each of their bodies in clinches, Groves shoving him out of intimate contact and continuing a barrage of attack. This affair increased in violence as the cut grew, because as the cut grew Eubank became more desperate and even less calculated. Instead of coming forward and addressing Jr. as the assailant, thus playing into Eubank’s hand, Groves always allowed Eubank to make the first move. Eubank continued to make the wrong move. And in this gory chess-match, with each wrong move he further felt the brunt of his downfall. A campaign of fear and bullying, a house built on a foundation of arrogance, collapsed on Eubank before the world.
I have been offering assistance to a close friend who recently fulfilled his military contract and has begun a city-college with the intention of transferring to a university. Immediately upon hearing about his plans, I urged him to set his sights as high as possible, UC Berkeley. I couldn’t help myself. My journey to obtain admission to their university was less than idea, frankly because I failed to. But the journey itself was shrouded in strategic consideration; understanding which classes I need to take, what grade I need to obtain in each course to maintain the GPA necessary, and what guidance counselors and advisers I should most trust to help facilitate such plans. I deviated from strategy upon the final steps of applying, impulsively changing majors to something I felt would statistically increase chances of acceptance. This costed me direly, and while some may argue this postures me to be the WORST adviser to my friend, I believe it deems me as the most fitting. By inheriting my strategy and critiquing it, obeying by a discipline I ultimately betrayed, he could achieve something I was unable to. And I write this with the utmost sincerity, I have never wanted somebody to achieve something so badly that I was unable to.
I have recently hear him voice deeply concerning things.
“I don’t think i’m STUPID smart, but I am smart.”
“I mean, I will try. I won’t get my hopes up and i’m definitely going to have a back up plan, but I will try.”
These statements do not concern me because they note uncertainty in character (although that does bother me too), but because he attributes success to inherent ability. Upon my revisions of strategy, my life and other, I have deemed three qualities necessary to achieve anything in this world. Strategy, discipline, and patience. Obtainment of these three abilities, working harmoniously together, can deliver man anything he wants.
I wrote this to the same friend after I formed this theor—- realized these truths about life.
“I was going to type this in a letter to you but I couldn’t find the words or time. But I think this is very important.
I think that man does himself a terrible disservice by believing that he is so much less powerful than he is. People fail themselves. We think we are so limited in what we can manifest in our own personal lives and this world. We’re not. You and I could be professional fighters in a year’s time. We could be studying to be astronauts. We can literally leave this planet. We could be humanitarians traveling the world or we could open a brothel in Brazil and have an endless supply of women or race sports cars around Miami or become professional chefs. Or you could become an astronaut and me a humanitarian or vice versa.
People, not some people, almost ALL people approach their lives as if they’re helpless and at the mercy of life and circumstances. “I’ll go where the waves take me.” Well you, I, Felipe, Andrew, we can control the waves.
There is a finite amount of criteria to get into UC Berkeley. It isn’t some aimless pursuit where one is just throwing meat at a wall hoping it sticks. There is objective criteria that would deliver you into one of the most prestigious universities on the planet, thus changing your life forever and you are capable of achieving that. Patience, discipline, and strategy will deliver you whatever you want.
DO you remember Fedrich? Fredrich is overweight and grimy because he chooses to be. Every day he chooses behavior that supports that lifestyle. Tomorrow he could choose behavior that supports hygiene and health, but he won’t because he doesn’t think he can. Felipe was fat because he supported bad dietary habits until one day he didn’t. He decided not to eat junk (strategy), didn’t eat junk (discipline), and exercised patience because he wasn’t going to be gifted an improved body overnight.”
The failure to achieve anything comes at the cost of two things; compromise and doubt. Both Groves and I were both burdened with countless places to falter. Groves could have retreated into pity upon hearing half of the United Kingdom predicting the bloody conclusion to his career (doubt). He could have abandoned strategy mid-fight to pursue a knockout or stoppage of Eubank and thus devolve the bout from a chess-match to a fight, Eubank’s domain of expertise (compromise). But Groves did not falter with compromise, and I did. And the results speak to the potency of those two beguilements.
We saw with George Groves what we will see with my friend. Groves operated outside of the pageantry of the event, by disregarding what it means and instead focusing on what he needed to do (strategy), waiting until circumstance afforded him the opportunity necessary (patience), and ultimately executed just as he needed to (discipline). And as he was announced as the victor and launched in the air, he rested not on the shoulders of his trainers but the body of incredible work.
We create our own realities and you have just as much power to create yours too.
(The quip about a brothel was purely for levity, fyi)