‘I’m Chris Eubank’s son – he would hit me with belts and canes when I was a kid’

Chris Eubank Jr has opened up about how he was beaten by his boxing legend father if he stepped out of line as a child.

Ahead of his rematch with Liam Smith this weekend, Eubank has recalled his childhood, which saw him regularly get into trouble at school, get involved in fights and commit petty crime. His behaviour incurred the wrath of former world middleweight king Chris Snr, who would punish his son physically, often using a belt or a cane.

“I don’t know if I would say it was unhealthy, [his fear for his dad] he was extremely strict, I got away with nothing,” said Eubank Jr, speaking on The Overlap, in partnership with Sky Bet. “If I messed up in school, didn’t do a chore or got into a fight with my brothers, there was physical punishment whether it was a belt, a cane, whether it was a slap.

“Back then, in the 90s, that was how you disciplined your kids, so that’s where my fear originated from, having to deal with that. Again, that type of punishment, that type of upbringing and that type of strictness made me who I am today, and it prepared me for the brutality of the sport of boxing.”

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However, Eubank Jr insisted his father’s approach to parenting did not constitute abuse. He admitted he needed a strict disciplinarian in his life as he regularly got into trouble as a child.

“Absolutely not. In my opinion, abuse is unwarranted, abuse is somebody doing something for no reason,” he added. ”Abuse is a parent coming home drunk and taking their anger out on their kids, that was never the case with me. I got punished when I stepped out of line, when I got into fights, when I messed up at school.

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“He was teaching me that for everything you do there are consequences, good and bad. When I did good things he rewarded me immensely, but when I did something bad, he punished me.

“These are life lessons and not abuse at all, I was still such a bad kid, I was a tearaway, I was in a gang, getting into fights. At 11 years old I spent two hours breaking into a sweetshop with my mates and emptied the place. We left the cash register but filled up bin bags with Cornettos and Cokes and Snickers bars.

“As a kid you’re not thinking about money, you just want your sweets, I’ve got a million stories like that, and I was doing that knowing that if I got caught, when I went home, I was in serious s***. I look at as, imagine if there were not consequences for what I did. Imagine I had a parent that was like ‘oh come on son, take a time out’, I would’ve been off the rails.”

Junior was so used to his dad’s punishment, he would take the precaution of tucking socks into his underwear in attempt to soften the blows.

“I remember getting into a fight at school and I knew the school was going to call my dad afterwards so I would prepare,” he recalled. “I would go into my gym bag and I would put layers of shorts and pants and socks tucked into my boxers because I knew as soon as got home, I was getting my ass kicked.

KSI takes on Tommy Fury at the AO Arena in Manchester on Saturday, October 14th as he hopes to cause an upset. Logan Paul will also be fighting at the event in front of what is expected to be a sell-out crowd.

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“That worked for a while and I had to pretend it was hurting when really I couldn’t feel anything, which was great. I did that for a little while. One time I’m rolling around [pretending to be hurt] and a sock falls out of my boxers, my dad found it. That was a bad day.

“At the time it’s scary and you hate it, but looking back on it, what would I have been like if I hadn’t had that discipline because I was still in gangs? There are videos of me even now on YouTube in street fights, and I was doing that every week.”

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