Perhaps there is innocence still trapped, like the haunting outline of a desperate face beneath the ice searching for escape, in the Englishman’s story? Maybe, Conor Benn believes everything he says with sufficient vigour that to him, and those closest, it is a truth forced into existence. A Frankenstein world in which everything continues, careers unfold and dissenters are despised whatever the truth of the transgressions they spotlight.
Benn’s opponent on Saturday night, the American dandy Ryan Garcia, is a brother in arms in this particular psychological endeavour, both have toiled to different extents against the available evidence and the reputational damage accrued by cheating. Although, does that damage really accrue any more? Boxing’s institutions are easily manipulated and share a willingness to forgive, if the dollars are sufficiently stacked. Punters have grown increasingly apathetic too, such is the epidemic of failed tests.
Garcia’s own battle has thus far not been as emotionally depleting, if the parade of interviews Benn has done in recent years are to be believed, but the handsome champion has also wrestled with the dedication required to fulfil on his luxurious talent and clearly uttered a fib or two on his readiness for battle as a result.
True, most prize fighters exist in a peculiar subverted reality of one dimension or another. An isolated ecology where damage is exchanged for money, pain for glory, where 12 stone men starve themselves to fight at 147 pounds in the name of, well, I’m not sure what to name that other than just, boxing but I think the answer is meant to be advantage.
Denying wrong doing, as Benn and Garcia have variously done in their careers, is just another feint, another of these bluffs. As much a lie as the stuck out tongue when a fighter catches a hard blow, the facile pre-fight karaoke of “best ever camp” or the misjudged comeback when the physical decline is stark and middle age lurks.
The shadow of Conor Benn’s failed drugs test now, largely, fall behind him. No longer cast across his future. A world title fight is now in his hands. An opportunity farmed from the publicity first afforded to his surname, then his performances and then the furore around two failed tests. A title chance built on algorithms and a collection of wins undermined by the potential for the advantage Benn accrued through enhancements in period before his failed tests and aborted dates with Chris Eubank or, more simply, the limitations of his opponents in the aftermath.
When the knockouts stopped and foes were more modestly equipped, or in the case of Chris Eubank Jnr, crippled by absurd weight loss and rehydration clauses. And that omnipresent figure, Old Father Time.
However, as analogue marketing lore dictates; there is no such thing as bad publicity.
As fight week has unfolded the focus has not been on antagonism between the pair, though weigh ins and conferences will promote the possibility. The weird physiological pornography of watching Benn draw the fat, water and muscle from his body to try and make 147, remember the supposed advantage of starving yourself below your natural weight, is not for me. There is precious little prospect of him being replenished to optimal for fight night and stories of Garcia also running out of excess to remove strongly suggests that one or both men will fail to reach the Welterweight limit.
Leaving the WBC belt uncontested.
Inevitably, those limits, such as they are, will be being negotiated as the days unfold. Whatever the risk imposed by dehydration and the vulnerability excessive weight cutting insists upon, the fight will proceed.
Whether that is 147, 150 or more remains to be seen.
Along with Benn’s aptitude to box at this level, against a talented, world-class opponent in his prime.
BOXINGWRITER.CO.UK 
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