TWENTY-SIX years later, how do you reflect on your rivalry with Nigel Benn?
At the time, you think it’s personal, but you’re young and ambitious, and you’re hungry for success. You see the guys who are getting the opportunities; you see the guys who are successful, and they’re the people you aim for. It’s not actually a personal thing; it’s the position they hold, and Nigel Benn was the big name. I was established in America; I was promised title fights, and then Nigel Benn arrived on the scene and bashed everybody up and took the titles out of America, which no British fighter had ever done, and it more or less left me unemployed in America. I was over there, ranked in the top 10, and all of a sudden I had to leave and start my career all over again in Britain to get a title fight, so I blame Nigel for that [laughs].
“Resentful” is probably the word. In saying that, I’ve great respect for Nigel Benn as a fighter and as a person – he’s almost like a friend. I’m nothing but positive about him. At that time, he was not so much the individual, he was in the position – an object in the way that I wanted to remove and take his mantle. I didn’t know him personally. It wasn’t personal. It was just that Nigel Benn was the name there. He came from Europe. He’d done, totally against the odds, Doug
