“I’d Like To Go To The Maldives And Ride On A Stallion Naked… That’s Retirement”: Conor Benn’s Got Fighting Spirit

A boxer whose sporting alias is “The Destroyer” talking about how sensitive and emotional he is? Away from the ring, the Londoner isn’t the pugnacious provocateur he masquerades as when the cameras are rolling. As he switches lanes professionally and becomes a father for the third time, the 30-year-old is primed for reflection.

Like any bloke who has earned their fortune by hitting other blokes in the face, it’d be easy to find Conor Benn intimidating. Known colloquially by his menacing moniker “The Destroyer”, when the Greenwich-born fighter is in the media, it tends to be in the run-up to or in the aftermath of punching the living daylights out of an equally fearsome adversary to entertain an audience of millions, all craving a dramatic, devastating knockout. 

But the reality of the man behind the hostile fists and volatile press conferences is a different story. He’s a maverick, an outsider, an anti-hero, but also a sensitive, sincere feeler who’s increasingly aware of the power of his own duality. Benn, the braggadocious boxing behemoth who’ll spar anyone who dares to challenge him in the ring, and Conor, the discerning husband, caring father, loyal friend and humble son who adores his family and wants nothing more than to be the best version of himself for them. “Do I strike you as an angry geezer with no control of my emotions?” he asks with a boyish grin, already knowing my answer. “It sells. I just do my job.”

A sun-kissed Monday afternoon in early October. The restaurant of a plush five-star hotel in Marylebone. A largely empty dining room but for one of Britain's most infamous boxers. Benn, donning grey track trousers and a plain white T-shirt that holds his sinewy physique tautly, is 5′8″ tall, but sitting down he feels much more. Rather than the buzzcut he has sported for much of his adult life, his hair is now grown out, curled and dyed blonde, which suits him. What is visible of his body is embellished by a panoply of tattoos, colouring his arms and upper torso up to his chiselled jawline. Just beneath his chin, the phrase ‘Fear is a Lie’ is inked in cold, clear lettering: a perpetual mission statement for all to see. 

A few weeks prior to our London rendezvous, Benn was in Las Vegas losing a boxing match for only the second time in his 27-fight professional career. Having had to drop weight drastically – a gruelling transformation from around 185 to 147 pounds that “almost killed” him – he came face-to-face with current World Champion welterweight Ryan Garcia. The lean, mean American retained his title, defeating Benn with a second-round technical knockout. “I thought I could beat him, but he caught me with a good shot,” the Brit shrugs, sipping his flat white. “It was brutal, but I would rather give people value for money than have a boring fight.” 

However gracious in defeat, you’d imagine that for a self-defined “beast”, the loss would anger him and compel him to return to the ring as soon as possible. But Benn appears nonchalant on his next move. It was his 30th birthday the week before our tête-à-tête, which he spent in Paris with his wife Victoria, and their three children. He’s enjoying the well-earned time off with family. “My son is five. He’s my twin,” he tells me warmly. “My daughter is two, and my baby boy is nine weeks. I look at my family unit, at my kids, and think how proud I am to be raising them. I look at where we are at in life, and I’m really content. Everything else is superficial, fake. It’s about what’s gonna be there in 10, 20 years.”

Shirt & waistcoat EMPORIO ARMANI

Boxers typically compete professionally until their mid-to-late 30s. As he begins his fourth decade on earth, I wonder if this momentary respite is the calm before an ensuing flurry in Benn’s sporting career – a mid-way marker? He scoffs playfully. “I’d say it is more towards the end. I know what Conor Benn has got left inside. I’ve been hitting it hard for 10 years physically, and I’ve gone through a lot emotionally. It’s not sustainable. No matter how much you take care of yourself, you get to an age where your body goes, ‘Hold on, I can’t do what I used to do. I’m not who I used to be.’” 

In April of this year he did sign a two-and-a-half-year, five-fight deal with Dana White’s Stateside promotional powerhouse Zuffa Boxing – of which the inaugural event was the Garcia loss – leaving his long-term British promoter Eddie Hearn’s Matchroom for the bright lights and bigger bucks of the US industry. It’s a decision that, it’s fair to say, ruffled a few feathers on this side of the Atlantic. But Benn is defiant in his decision, someone who “likes change, likes not knowing”. He’s proud of his past achievements, and gives off the impression that everything to come is a bonus. “I've headlined three stadium shows on the bounce. I’ve done everything [people] said I couldn’t. I’ve got to the top of the mountain; not just in my boxing, but commercially, financially, and with my family. So I sit down, and I go, ‘Is there anything more I could have done over the past 10 years?’”  

It’s hard to argue with the sentiment. He picked up the mantle from his father, Nigel “The Dark Destroyer” Benn, a double World Champion at the sport’s pinnacle in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And since his professional debut in 2016, the younger Benn has been constantly in and around the big leagues of British boxing. With an explosive, front-foot-forward fighting style and often eventful pre-match weigh-ins, he’s a daring, disruptive and divisive figure. “Some people think I’m a cock. Some people think I’m a hero,” he announces as if it were a badge of honour. “I’m in the middle, you know? I’m a bit of both.” 

Benn has been the selling point of some of the most talked-about bouts this decade; none more so than his notorious two-legged battle with Chris Eubank Jr. Eubank and Benn’s fathers famously locked horns twice in the early ’90s, resulting in a vicious familial feud that has bled into and shaped their sons’ respective careers. After years of trash talk, speculation, and obstacles away from the ring, the first Jr face-off finally went ahead at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in April 2025. The contest was bloody and belligerent, earmarked as fight of the year by many of the sport’s top award givers, and ended with Eubank narrowly coming out on top, winning via unanimous points decision. “It was a weird moment, because there was relief that I’d done it, but also, in the same breath, there was disappointment because I didn’t win,” Benn remembers.“It was a hard pill to swallow. It was my first ever loss, and the fact that it was him made it ten times worse.”

Less than six months later, though, Benn had his revenge, dominating Eubank in the November rematch, winning via unanimous decision in a scintillating career-high performance. With a victory each to the name, is there potential for a trilogic showdown? Benn thinks about it for a long time, contemplating his next words more acutely than any he’d uttered to me previously. Eventually, definitively, “No,” he affirms. “It’s a closed chapter. I was going to say something that probably would have gotten views right now, but I’m not going to say it. Because, really, I don’t need to.” As for his relationship with Eubank Jr, any hope for reconciliation doesn’t look promising. “He’s still a sausage,” Benn chuckles. “A bad sausage.”

Shorts EVERLAST; timepiece AUDEMARS PIGUET gem set Royal Oak Conor’s own; yellow gold mount asscher cut diamond tennis chain Conor’s own; earrings Conor’s own; ring yellow gold asscher cut diamond band ring Custom made by A Jewellers

There’s a sense that the second Eubank Jr fight was the climactic point in the first 30 years of Benn’s life. All roads led to that finishing line – beating his dad’s biggest rival’s son with Benn Sr by his side. But where did it all begin? Born in London in 1996, when he was still an infant, his mother and newly retired father decided to uproot their life in England in favour of sunny Mallorca. “It was a beautiful life, a beautiful upbringing, very luxurious,” he nostalgises. “I had both my parents at home, went to a private school, grew up in church.” You’d assume that his father is the reason that Benn began boxing, ostensibly having been conditioned from young to carry on the family’s legacy. But in fact the opposite is true.“Boxing wasn’t a subject in our house,” Benn recalls. “I didn’t even know how my dad made all this money. For all I knew, he could have been an OG gangster.”

When he was into his teen years, Benn and his family once again upped sticks, this time to Sydney. The move Down Under was the seed that sowed his sprouting fascination in boxing’s violent vivarium. He “struggled” with adjusting to his new geographical setting, he admits. “It's a hard age to move, and an influential one. I didn’t really fit in at all. So I got involved in the wrong crowd.” His difficulty in adapting eventually led him to the ring, where he amassed an impressive amateur record of 20 wins and 2 losses. Then, at 19, he left his family in Australia, returning to England in pursuit of a professional boxing career.

Twenty-six fights later, Benn holds an exemplary record and is a household name in British sport. But his time in the spotlight has been far from smooth-sailing. In October 2022, just days before his first face-off with Eubank Jr was originally supposed to take place, news broke that he had tested positive for the banned hormone-enhancing substance clomifene in the preceding months. He was suspended, ostracised, shunned by the sporting community, before finally being acquitted, conclusively, in 2024 by the National Anti-Doping Panel. It was a process that took years, keeping Benn out of the ring for 525 days. “The case absolutely broke me. I mean... I was so fragile,” his voice cracks, visibly overwrought remembering the period. “Sorry, even talking about it… I was in such a bad way. I couldn’t save myself. I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror. I couldn’t look at my son. I felt ashamed to be his dad.”

(Left) Jacket EMPORIO ARMANI; trousers STUDIO NICHOLSON (Right) trench coat STONE ISLAND

His career resumed after the decision fell in his favour, but not without first having to face his demons. “Going sober,” he replies frankly, on how he overcame the darkest chapter of his life. “I kept running away, looking to numb the pain, just trying to survive. I looked at myself in the mirror one day when the verdict was coming up, and I just thought, irrelevant about how this case goes, this isn’t who I am. This isn’t Nigel Benn's son. This isn’t who my kids deserve. So I’ll never drink again. Then the case went my way, and I haven’t drunk for two years.”  

There’s a remarkably raw and refreshing honesty in the way Benn talks about his mental health. Beneath its drama and extravagance, boxing is afflicted by a hyper-masculine, long-standing culture of silence. Plagued by a stigma towards any show of weakness, it’s a toxicity built into the foundation of its appeal. Benn is sick of it. “See all that bravado? It’s all fake,” he says. “[Boxers] are more broken than most [people]. They just put this thing on. The reality is, a lot of them come from nothing. A lot of them struggle with their own demons. But they won’t talk about it. Of course they won’t. It’s all an act, all a front.”

His love/hate relationship with the boxing world feels rooted more in rationality than passion. His career represents the chance to make more money than he could ever dream of, and set his kids and their kids up for life. Yet he will no doubt be back in the ring before long, continuing his deal with Zuffa Boxing for at least another four fights. There are more twists and turns still to come, but his legacy, in some ways, is already cemented. When it comes to Conor Benn, one thing you cannot doubt is his authenticity. 

“I like to think I’ve given my fair share of entertainment to the British public in the last ten years,” he muses, cheekily. And as for the next ten years? “I’d like to go to the Maldives and ride on a stallion naked and send all my close people a postcard. That’s what retirement looks like.”