WELCOME TO MY EMPIRE
Barry Hearn revolutionised snooker and darts, became a boxing big-shot... but he is not finished yet
‘Davis and I had no money... just charm, mouth and ability’
BARRY HEARN, 70 next June but as trim and ebullient as ever, sat behind his desk and declared: ‘You said you wanted to come to talk about my empire, which was the right way of describing it, because I am into world domination … of a sporting sense.’
Political correctness is not Hearn’s style. He coruscates shambolic politicians. He extols meritocracy. He evangelises about sport. He relishes fun.
He says his heart-rate still rises every time he turns into the car park of Matchroom Sport, now his imperial headquarters in Brentwood, so to speak, though once the family home. Its corridors are lined with pictures of events he has staged across the globe over the past 40 years. His own chairman’s office overlooks rolling, rural Essex. A pair of Muhammad Ali’s boxing trunks hang in a frame on the wall.
Boxing is big in the stable, with Hearn’s son Eddie, 38, directing a cast of box-office pugilists headed by Anthony Joshua, the world heavyweight champion who sold out Wembley and Cardiff’s Principality Stadium faster than hot cakes.
Hearn Snr has predicted that AJ will be a billionaire if he can get through the next 10 years unbeaten, a dizzying prospect that would be decidedly good for the family funds if it is born out.
Add in their ownership, management or promotion of 10 other sports headlined by snooker, darts and pool — all of which are soaring — and it is boom time.
‘I enjoy the game,’ says Hearn of the snakes and ladders of his vocation.
‘I don’t need to work. I enjoy winning the same way as a sportsman enjoys it. My winning and losing is profit and loss accounts and staging successful events. My wife asks when I am going to pack up. Never.
‘The interesting thing is that I am developing a more socialist- capitalist approach to life. As you get older you realise that you have fundamental obligations if you have been lucky enough to do well. But, at the same time, you can’t take away the reason you succeeded — the exploitation of assets: talent, ideas, television deals.
‘Take snooker. We took it over again (he is chairman of World Snooker) six or seven years ago. It was like meeting an old girlfriend, and she’s gone a bit rough. We took snooker to a health farm, we injected a bit of Botox, and now she is a beautiful woman again.
‘But we took the prize money from £3½million to £14m at the same time. It makes money too — the perfect situation.
‘I have been asked if I am worried that English players have too much competition. No. I’m thinking about not having enough Africans and South Americans, and what I can do about that. our grass is the whole world. I hate barriers to entry. I’m having therapy for it — I’m getting better. I came into chartered accountancy when there were so many barriers to overcome from my background. My dad was a bus driver; my mum cleaned houses.
‘I fluked it. And I was obviously f****** good.’
Hearn’s big break came when Steve Davis walked into his snooker club in Romford in the mid-Seventies.
‘We were council-house boys,’ says Hearn. ‘We had no money at all. Plenty of charm, plenty of ability, plenty of mouth, but no money. Then in 1981 Davis won the World Snooker Championship and, suddenly, he was massive.
‘We’re still best mates. I think it’s the longest relationship in world sport. I’ve managed him for 42 years.
‘When we went out for dinner we would toss a coin to decide who paid the bill. Then, from 1981 onwards, if I lost I would pay the bill but if he lost, inevitably the restaurant would say, “Mr Davis, it is a pleasure to have you here”, and never charge him.
‘I thought, “They never did that when we were skint”. That is how life is. People kick you in the nuts
‘Snooker was like an old girlfriend who’s gone a bit rough. We took her to a health farm, put in some botox ... and now she is beautiful again’
when you are down, but roll out the red carpet when you don’t need it.
‘Anyway, from then on, Davis asked for the bill and, if they charged him, I’d pay. Fame opens doors to freedom. You can get criticised along the way by you guys in the papers, but now social media has taken over. There are some scumbags on there.’
Politicians get it in the neck, too. First, the Olympic Stadium debacle. He wanted Leyton Orient, of whom he was then chairman, to share the ground with West Ham. That never transpired and several bungles followed. The stadium lost £24 million this year alone — a bill footed by the taxpayer.
‘They don’t know how to run a newsagents, let alone the country,’ says Hearn of the politicians, turning his fire more widely on our rulers. ‘Brexit and Trump came about because they didn’t listen to their audience.
‘We live in this liberalised society where people think they are more intelligent than another human being — I’ve got the right answer; you’ve got the wrong one. Sorry. We live in a democracy. I’ve got the same vote you’ve got.
‘Successive governments on a variety of issues, from tower blocks to Brexit, haven’t listened. My business is based entirely on listening to people: what is the difference between you coming to my event and not coming?
‘It comes down to a fact like if you overcharge people for a pint of lager, they’re not having it. Or “I like the music”. Or “I like a family area”.
‘Football has to start listening. They are charging too much for tickets and suddenly you start seeing empty seats and no waiting lists. I’m not talking about television rights — that’s an artificial world. Government pay lip service to sorting out football, to giving something meaningful to the grass roots, but they don’t have the guts to appoint an ombudsman and really do what needs to be done to protect our national game.’
The avalanche of words continues. Davis should be made a knight as ‘the best sporting ambassador we have ever had, talking to governments all around the globe for 40 years.’
He waxes lyrical about darts, whose PDC World Championship will conclude tonight at Alexandra Palace with a final showdown between 16-time champion Phil Taylor and outsider Rob Cross.
The sport’s overall prize money has risen from £500,000 to £15m on Hearn’s watch. TV figures are good and the sponsorship goes up.
‘It is as old as archers in ale houses in medieval times,’ says Hearn. ‘Suddenly, it’s the fastest growing sport in the world. It has the second highest TV ratings in Europe behind big football.
‘A very ordinary game played by ordinary people with extraordinary ability. They are not super athletes, but they are earning millions of pounds a year.
‘At the world darts they outdrink the Munich Beer Festival per head. We did last year — 10 pints average, and if your girlfriend is on halves, you have to have 15 pints yourself. It’s a lot, but spread out over the whole day. And we have security there in case anything gets out of hand.’
Hearn has a helicopter and his best clients are flown into his offices. It is a sliding scale from there. A car might be sent. Or, at the bottom of the rung, you make your own way from the station. It’s meritocracy, he says. His staff get no lunch hour as such, but can use the gym and swimming pool on site, an encouragement to live out an enthusiasm for sport in their own lives. Several of them have been with him for 30-plus years.
Hearn uses the sports facilities regularly, and pulls out a dogeared piece of A4 paper on which he has recorded every one of his gym visits since 2008.
‘That’s how sad I am,’ he says. ‘It is the chartered accountant in me.’ He weighs himself daily, records his weight weekly in his diary, and has regularly fasted for 36 hours when he veered too high on the scales, sipping only coffee and working out two or three times in that day and a half.
Whether they were helicoptered in or not, a big- time Chinese delegation ‘talking about a figure over the rainbow’ recently came over to buy the business.
‘I told them I wasn’t selling,’ says Hearn. ‘Their expression did not change and they told me everyone sells at the right price.
‘I wouldn’t. Matchroom Sport is a private company and has been owned 60 per cent by me, 20pc by my son and 20pc by my daughter since 1982. And that won’t change in my lifetime.
‘I was telling the Chinese I just wasn’t interested when Eddie leaned forward and said, “But the moment he dies, you ring me”.
It was a nice line from Eddie, who was tested out by his father as a 16-year-old.
Hearn, by his own admission, had a chip on his shoulder about public schoolboys and wanted to be sure that Eddie, educated at Brentwood School, was ‘capable of holding his end’. So he decided to get him in a boxing ring.
Eddie decked his old man twice in the second round. Point proved, father and son delighted.
‘I don’t require money,’ added Hearn. ‘A couple of quid and some maggots to go fishing for the afternoon is about all I need. I don’t want exotic boats or a Philip Green lifestyle. That’s not me. It’s not my wife. We’ve been married 47 years.
‘This year Matchroom have done 585 event days and 40,000 hours of television. The empire is flourishing. And we come from under a billiard hall in Romford with one girl and a part-time Jewish bookkeeper.’
‘At the darts, they out-drink the Munich Beer Festival’