Conor Benn: ‘I understand Dad and I don’t blame him for his mistakes’

The tears come from a wound deep inside Conor Benn. His eyes swim with hurt and his mouth crumples while he tries to stifle his crying. I reach out to touch the 26-year-old-fighter’s arm in sympathy as his wife, Victoria, consoles him too. Benn meets Chris Eubank Jr in the ring on Saturday night at the O2, in the most heavily hyped British fight of the year, but this is very different. Benn has been pulled back into his childhood and raw emotion tumbles through him.

“I battle things every single day,” Benn says, trying to gather himself. He wipes his eyes and looks up with a tangled smile. “As we all do.”

His voice is thick with pain. “It upsets me because I remember how I felt. I would be petrified of going to bed when I was a kid because I was always scared of the devil coming and whether I’d go to heaven or hell.

“I remember watching Tom & Jerry and I know it’s just a kids’ show – but there is a part where he died and the escalators went to heaven or down to hell. I had nightmares for a week. I used to wake up, screaming, thinking I was going to hell.

“I had this nightmare over and over again, of me standing on this all-white floor, while I saw this thing spiral towards me from far away. It got closer and closer and I saw it was a snowball with horns and there was nowhere to run. It was terrifying.”

Benn is unbeaten after 21 bouts and he meets Eubank Jr in a lucrative fight that will return boxing briefly to mainstream sport. On Sunday it will be 29 years to the day since their fathers, Nigel Benn and Chris Eubank Sr, filled Old Trafford for a bitter rematch. That contest ended in a draw, after Eubank Sr had won their brutal first battle in 1990.

The contrasting characters of Eubank Sr and Benn Sr fuelled a festering