The rebirth of one of boxing's biggest rivalries: Benn vs. Eubank espn.com

Chris Eubank was making his way to the ring for his first fight with Nigel Benn in 1990, when he was caught by a sucker punch he never saw coming.

Eubank was getting in the zone in the final moments before the biggest fight of his life and first of 24 world title fights, expecting to hear his entrance song of Tina Turner's "Simply the best."

But Eubank's focus was interrupted when someone — under instructions from a member of Benn's team — pulled the plug on the sound system at the NEC in Birmingham, England.

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Without his usual entrance song, which had become as part of watching Eubank fights as his posturing mid-fight, Eubank walked to the ring without music and to the sounds of mostly jeers.

Eubank might have been familiar and comfortable with the role of the heel, but being victim of a prank like this, by Benn's team, was an unwelcome deviation from his pre-fight routine. But this was typical of the hostility between Eubank and Benn, which made for good publicity and compulsive viewing.

No matter how explosive pre-fight events get this week ahead of Saturday's fight, relations between Conor Benn and Chris Eubank Jr. will seem amicable compared to how their fathers interacted with each other in the 1990s. Conor mocking Chris Jr's self-imposed sex ban, and Chris Jr. posting social videos of him eating fast food, is tame compared to the belligerence and, despite Eubank insisting he never detested Nigel Benn, utter hatred they had for one another.

"I find the man intolerable," Eubank said 32 years ago. "He has no class as I see it."