The Fallout Continues from the Benn-Eubank Fiasco but the Beat Goes On

Six days have elapsed since Riath Al-Sammarai, the Chief sports feature writer at the Daily Mail, broke the news that Conor Benn had tested positive for a banned substance, aborting the big fight between the offspring of British boxing legends Nigel Benn and Chris Eubank, and the brickbats continue to fly with lead promoter Eddie Hearn bearing the brunt.

Hearn and his collaborator Kalle Sauerland were apparently aware of this development well before the story broke – Benn’s “A-sample” purportedly came back positive on Aug. 23 – but did not call off the fight until a last-ditch effort to salvage it and the heat got too intense.

Donald McRae’s chastisement typified the reaction. Writing in the London Guardian, McRae, an award-winning author, had this to say: “The shameless way in which efforts were made to sidestep the damning evidence of the Vada test…exposed the hypocrisy at the sick old heart of this promotion and boxing itself.”

Before the spit hit the fan, Chris Eubank Sr, who refused to participate in any of the pre-fight hoopla, encouraged fans to boycott the fight, a “catch-weight” affair. By his reckoning, his son, although the bigger man, was in greater jeopardy of being permanently injured because of weight-draining. Eubank Sr held no animosity toward Conor Benn who he believes ingested the banned substance at the suggestion of a member or members of his camp without realizing the ramifications.

Jarrell “Big Baby” Miller, of all people, has now added his voice to the chorus, blistering Eddie Hearn as a hypocrite on his YouTube channel. (Jarrell Miller has his own YouTube channel? The world has passed me by.)

Miller, as we recall, was pulled from his scheduled 2019 fight at Madison Square Garden with Anthony Joshua by the New York State Athletic Commission when he was exposed as a serial PEDs (plural) user. “He threw me under the bus,” said Miller of Hearn whose hands were tied when the adverse findings were made known.

Several months ago, Hearn said that Miller still owed him money which he intended to collect (an advance on Miller’s multi-million-dollar purse) and branded Big Baby a criminal.

Will Eddie Hearn seek reparations from Conor Benn? The influential promoter had a lot invested in him. As Sean Nam noted in a story that ran on these pages, the flashy son of Nigel Benn was emerging as Hearn’s most promising candidate to carry British boxing into the post-Joshua era.

Meanwhile, the beat goes on for Eddie Hearn who makes his first foray into Australia this weekend with an event in South Brisbane with undefeated Aussie super lightweights Liam Paro and Brock Jarvis colliding in the main go. Paro, the slicker boxer, is a consensus 2/1 favorite over the harder-punching Jarvis in a match that promises more fireworks than the more newsworthy fight the next day down the road in Melbourne (well, actually the cities are 1100 miles apart), the rematch between Devin Haney and George Kambosos Jr.

Crawford-Spence

According to various sources, negotiations between Terence Crawford and Errol Spence Jr have hit a snag and the hoped-for date of Nov. 19 is a no-go, pushing the fight into December at the earliest. A keen-eyed contributor to a rival publication notes that Crawford is now 35 and Spence is 32. Keep that in mind when the promoters tag this match with a steep pay-for-view price tag and hype it as the reincarnation of Leonard-Hearns I.

When Sugar Ray and Tommy the Hitman met at Caesars Place in 1981, Sugar Ray was 25 and Hearns was 23.

The biggest welterweight match since that classic was the 1999 meeting at Mandalay Bay between Oscar De La Hoya and Felix Trinidad. Both were 26. Granted, athletes don’t age as fast nowadays because of advances in nutrition and exercise science, but each month that this match-up stays on the backburner, the less likely that Crawford and Spence will meet in their respective primes.

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Dr. Bennet Omalu has been in the news a lot lately. Dr. Omalu is the Nigerian-American neuropathologist whose research into Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) in retired football players inspired the 2015 Hollywood movie “Concussion” and was instrumental in getting the NFL to institute “protocols” to prevent players who receive concussions from going back into the game with an eye toward diminishing the risk that they will develop neurological deficits later in life that will burden their loved ones.

Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa recently suffered apparent concussions in games spaced four days apart. Dr. Omalu, who believes that all contact sports for children should be abolished, ventured the opinion that Tagovailoa, who is 24 years old and is in his third season in the league, should retire immediately. The quarterback, he told TMZ, [“more than likely”] suffered severe long-term permanent brain damage.”

Dr. Omalu pops up in Tris Dixon’s important 2021 book “Damage” The Untold Story of Brain Damage in Boxing.” CTE is pugilistic dementia re-named to fit a wider set of precipitators.

While not wishing to denigrate the importance of Omalu’s findings, it’s worth noting that he isn’t held in high regard by his peers. For one thing, he continues to maintain the fiction that he discovered CTE. To the contrary, he did not discover the disease, nor he did he name it. A British neurologist first used the term in 1949.

Washington Post sports reporter Will Hobson “outed” Omalu for a 2020 story titled “From Scientist to Salesman.” The consensus in the brain science community, says Hobson, is that Omalu “exaggerates his accomplishments and dramatically overstates the known risks of CTE and contact sports.”

Dr. Omalu, noted Hobson, transitioned from being a CTE researcher to being an evangelist, cashing in on his fame to make public appearances at $25,000 a pop. CTE is one of the fastest growing fields of litigation and Omalu commands a fee of $10,000 for serving as an expert witness.

Omalu reportedly earned $900,000 in 2018, the bulk coming from courtroom appearances as an expert witness for the plaintiff.

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