WHO is Chris Eubank Jr’s trainer? Chris Eubank Jr will say he answers to nobody, Chris Eubank Sr will say he’s the ‘influencer’, but the official trainer is Ronnie Davies, just like he was the official trainer of Senior many years ago.
A former Southern Area lightweight champion, Davies retired aged just 23 in 1970 after chances dried up for him in a division that included Ken Buchanan and Jim Watt. By the close of the decade he had opened up his own gym on the south coast.
In 1987, Chris Eubank walked into his gym in Brighton.
“We got on great,” Davies told Boxing News in 2014. “I thought he was brilliant. He’d just arrived from America. He’d had four or five fights and after a couple of weeks together he said, ‘I like you Mr Davies, I’m going to give you a three-month trial.’ I thought, ‘What a bloody cheek’.”
The rest is history. Behind the scenes, Ronnie became Alfred Pennyworth to Eubank’s Bruce Wayne, and chief-babysitter to the fighter’s son, Christopher. Christopher, like his father, grew up to be a fighter and Davies was, and still is, the man who guides him through training camps.
A great advocater of sparring as the main part of training camp, and not draining yourself to make weight, Davies – who always said Senior would have made a great light-heavyweight – recognised that Chris Eubank Jnr would be more effective as a super-middleweight several years ago.
“I don’t agree with walking around 10lbs over your fighting weight,” Davies explained to BN recently.
“You strip yourself of all your strength to make weight, then you try and put it all back on after the weigh-in. That’s not right – the best thing to do is keep the natural strength, and you will see how much natural strength Eubank has on the night against Groves, I promise you.”
