Nigel Benn vs Sakio Bika: Brit on fighting for closure and finding peace

The 55-year-old former middle and super-middleweight world champion has confirmed he will return to face Sakio Bika in a 10-round fight in November

Benn is coming back for one more fight at the age of 55 (PA)

Nigel Benn leans back against the wall of the Thames-side nightclub from which he has chosen to announce his curious comeback and tries his best to stifle the tears in his eyes.

The 55-year-old former middle and super-middleweight world champion has confirmed he will draw a line under a 23-year ring hiatus to take on Sakio Bika in a 10-round fight at the Resorts World Arena in Birmingham on November 23.

The show has been billed 'One more fight for closure' and that, not money or anything else, he insists is what has driven him back into the ring.

“Afterwards, I might just break down and cry hard knowing it's really over,” he says, his voice trembling with emotion.

“I'm crying because I'm thinking of retirement. I know it's coming. I'm looking forward to the peace I'll get after this fight. I think that's what everyone really wants, peace in their life.”

It was hard for Benn, a merchant of violence across a high-stakes decade of professional fighting, to ever find peace. He says his career, which started in 1987 and appeared to end in 1996, was always under-pinned by drug abuse, adultery and deep depression.

“All through my career I have been in a dark place,” he says. “From the age of eight I was smoking, spliffing and doing everything else until I was 41. Then Jesus came and my life changed, no spliffing, no sexing, no Es, no cigarettes, everything changed, but I just need that one more fight.

“Now I really have it all. Me and the wife work at the church in Australia. Just finishing building a lovely mansion, paid for. But I never really had closure. There is something sitting in me, bugging me that I have to get out. I don't want to be someone who asks 'what if?' No.”

The British Boxing Board of Control have refused to sanction this bout meaning that Benn's comeback will be fought under the auspices of the British and Irish Boxing Authority, Biba. It will take place over 10, three-minute rounds at the light-heavyweight limit of 81kg. Benn and Bika will also wear 12oz gloves in what has been described as 'an extra safety precaution'.

The Board decided that, given his age and length of time since his last fight, it would not be appropriate to licence Benn under any circumstances. Bika, the 40-year-old Cameroonian, fought for a world title as recently as 2015 and represents an incredibly formidable opponent after such a long lay-off.

“The Board knocked me back but there is more than one governing body,” Benn adds. “I get what they are saying, I'm not going to knock Robert Smith, I understand, but some of these guys that get in the ring for the British Boxing Board are overweight, big gut... really?

“They are stringent, Biba. It wasn't easy. I had a brain scan, a neck scan, lungs everything. I am Nigel Benjamin Button Benn, it's not about age. I'm in training all the time, I have got that army discipline.”

Benn, however, is acutely aware of the perils of professional boxing having seen first hand the damage which can be inflicted inside the ring.

In what is considered his finest win, Benn stopped Gerald McLellan in the 10th round of a brutal, scintillating clash at the London Arena which left the American puncher with life-changing injuries. McLellan, now 51, is partially blind, deaf and unable to walk.

When put to Benn that he might have thought about the fate which befell the Illinois man before deciding his own perilous return to the ring, he says: “No. A few people have had that kind of attitude but that's not me.

“I'm not going to ever go in the ring with that kind of attitude, I can't. I have sympathy for what happened but I don't go in the ring and think that could happen to me, no. If I do that I'm taking my focus away from what I can do. I can't go in there thinking 'this could happen to me'.”

Benn announced his return on Thursday (PA)

One member of the crowd at Thursday's press conference was his fighting son Conor Benn, himself a 15-0 professional, who has described his dad's decision to return to the ring as 'madness'.

“I don’t want to see my dad fight, it is horrible,” 22-year-old Conor said. “Him getting in the ring? There is nothing nice about it.

“There is real concern as his son because I know what it is like getting hit, it is horrible, there is nothing pleasant about it. No one wants to see their dad get punched in the face.

“But I have said my piece, I have said ‘Dad, I really don’t want you to do this, because you are my dad’ but he is going to do it so I have to support his decision.

“What am I going to do, tell him I won’t support him? I could never do that.”

Instead, father and son will live together in Conor's Essex flat and train alongside one and other under Tony Sims at his Ilford gym. Benn will now not return home to Australia until after the fight, which takes place at the same arena where he lost to Chris Eubank in 1993.

“You can imagine what the house will be like when I am fighting on October 26,” Conor says smiling. “We will be clashing heads.

“He will be training and doing his early morning runs with me, he will be training with my strength and conditioning coach Dan Lawrence and he will do some work with my trainer Tony Sims.

“He has always trained like a lunatic, weights, cycling or squash but six or seven years ago he got right back into his boxing.

“When he moved to Australia he started training at the PCYC gym, the Police Citizens Youth Club, to help the young kids in the area. Around that time, I turned amateur and he was always holding pads and training with me.

“It was weird. I should have noticed it was coming then, I still can’t believe that this is actually happened, it’s crazy, it’s madness.”