Chris Eubank Jr has brother Sebastian watching over him as he vows to KO Conor Benn and secure nephew’s financial future
CHRIS EUBANK Jr has tragic brother Sebastian watching over him as he bids to secure a win over Conor Benn and his nephew’s financial future.
The 33-year-old fighter’s sibling —a fellow boxer, mixed martial artist and charity campaigner — died from a shock heart attack last year, aged just 29.
Sebastian’s son Raheem was only a month old when his father lost his life, so Chris Jr has unofficially adopted him as his own.
And Jr hung a giant portrait of Sebastian in his Hove gym to inspire him ahead of a catchweight O2 clash with Benn a week today.
This fight may have caught the imagination following the two iconic bouts their fathers shared — but for Eubank Jr it means so much more.
In his beachside training bunker, he said: “I was going to have the picture in my house but my gym was the perfect place.
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“This is where our family has been through so much, where we experience pain, where we get fit together.
“I wanted him to watch over me for this fight and the rest of my career. I want him in my mind every day.
“As a reminder of why I am doing this.
“It’s upholding the Eubank family that my father built for us.
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“My brother has a son who now grows up without a biological father — but he has a father in me.”
Chris Jr will help raise Raheem with regular trips to his Dubai home.
When the career middleweight talks about why he decided to delay his world title efforts and dehydrate himself to a career-low, he gives a new meaning to the term prizefighting.
He said: “For the rest of Raheem’s life I’ll look out for him and provide for him — and that takes money.
“So I have to make enough to get him everything he needs as he grows to be the man his father would have wanted him to be.
“Raheem is now my son and the reality of that is he is another mouth to feed.
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“I’ll have my own kids, too, eventually, so I have to make as much as I can.
“I have to raise the next generation of Eubanks — and do that as best as I can.”