Inside the court of king Eddie – boxing’s ‘beast-mode’ operator
Matchroom boss Hearn, preparing to put on a post-lockdown show at his Essex home, admits fight game is easy to fall in love with but difficult to defend
‘There’s no excuse for boxing, is there?” asks Eddie Hearn, rhetorically. For a man whose entire raison d’etre is to talk up the fight game and condone its excesses, this counts as quite the epiphany. “The aim of the sport is to punch your opponent in the head. The aim of skiing is not to fall down a mountain and land awkwardly. So, it’s very difficult to defend.”
It is a side to Hearn we seldom glimpse, the reflective soul who recognises the perversity of the world he has made his own. Over the past 10 years, he has become Britain’s most famously motormouth promoter, a compelling hybrid of Ari Emanuel and Canning Town fruit-and-veg merchant, accentuated with lashings of Brentwood brass. Sometimes, though, when he is confronted with the extremes of boxing’s brutality, he cannot help but recoil.
“It’s only a few months ago that a young man died on one of my shows,” he says. That man was Patrick Day, a 27-year-old American who died from brain trauma in a knockout loss in Chicago last October. Hearn was distraught, in tears, even though he had only known Day for a matter of minutes. “It’s not right. It’s horrendous. He was promoted by Lou Dibella, who had asked me to put together the card. I had met the guy for the first time at the press conference, a beautifully polite person. If it had been one of my fighters, one I had a personal relationship with, I’m not sure there would be a way back from there, to operate in the same way ever again.”
And yet there is a relentlessness about Hearn, a conviction that his role in life is to take the business that his father Barry built and transform it into an unstoppable global behemoth. He is nothing if not adaptable to the times. Back in March, the family’s Matchroom empire was conquering all before it, as Hearn plotted Anthony Joshua’s route to a fight of the century with Tyson Fury, while preparing to open offices in Berlin, Sydney and Toronto. Then the pandemic struck, and his horizons shrank to the point of arranging fights in the back garden of his Essex estate.
What seemed an absurd flight of fancy finally takes wing today, with the start of a four-week camp that will transform the Hearn mansion into “Matchroom Square Garden”, a name he should patent. It is costing £5million, a price that Hearn is comfortable to pay so long as the production, aided by drone cameras and firework displays, reflects his usual chutzpah. “I was asked recently, ‘Shall we just do it at York Hall instead?’ The bills were mounting up. But it would have been naff. And I don’t do naff.”
We conduct the interview in two parts, each with an ambience that evokes this year’s descent into darkness. The first reveals Hearn in full lord-of-the-manor mode, master of all he surveys in a conference room at Matchroom headquarters. The second has to be conducted remotely, with Hearn confined to the less opulent surrounds of a room at the Holiday Inn Brentwood, awaiting the Covid test result – negative, it turns out – that will allow him access to his own event.
Although he seems nervous about his brainwave’s prospects of success, he talks with a salesman’s relish about how visceral the viewing experience will be. “There will be microphones around the ring amplifying the punches,” he says. “You’ll hear the fighters breathing and wincing, you’ll hear every word said in the corner. I’m proud of what we’ve done. It could be one of my best achievements to date, pulling this off.”
This points to one of many fascinating contradictions about Hearn. On the one hand, as after Day’s death, he is under no illusions about how slender the line is in boxing between theatre and tragedy. On the other, it is the violence that thrills him, energises him, makes it impossible for him to look away. “I’ve been around boxing since I was eight years old,” he says. “Boxing’s easy to fall in love with.”
It could have gone the other way. In 1991, Hearn was in the audience at Earl’s Court when Michael Watson sustained his lifechanging neurological injury at the hands of Chris Eubank. Two years earlier, he had seen Jim Mcdonnell, a hero and the man who retired Barry Mcguigan, carried out of the ring on a table. “I was back in the changing room with him,” he recalls. “His eyes were still open, but he was unconscious for 15 minutes. I thought he was dead. I was 10.”
At a deeper level, Hearn yearned to be a fighter himself, a dream that did not take long to be thwarted. “I had three fights as an amateur. I was at Billericay Boxing Club, hanging around with Eubank, Frank Bruno, Naseem Hamed, thinking I was really talented. I was absolutely useless. All the gear, no idea. It was
‘You’ll hear the fighters breathing and wincing. I’m proud of what we’ve done. Pulling this off could be one of my best achievements’
‘My dad was obsessed. He didn’t want me to become the type of person he hated. He particularly resented kids with wealthy parents’
only after my second fight that I realised they were introducing me as Eddie Hills. My dad had said, ‘I don’t want them to know he’s a Hearn, because they’ll batter him’.”
Undeniably, there was sporting pedigree among the Hearns: while Eddie played grade cricket for Essex between the ages of 12 and 16, his sister, Katie, fenced for England. What rankled with him was that his every achievement would be framed in terms of his paternal inheritance. To this day, the incorrigible Barry nicknames him “Silver Spoon”. It is taken in good humour, but it reinforces his resolve never to be underestimated.
“In everything I did when I was growing up, I was Barry Hearn’s son. That’s the chip on the shoulder that I carry with me today, where I’ve had to go well beyond anything he has ever done to get the credibility and recognition. I’ve taken it much further than he had presumed I would take it. That’s the only way my success can be measured. If I had plodded along as a reasonable promoter, doing eight shows a year on Sky, it would be, ‘Yeah, but his dad did that’.”
A criticism often levelled at the son and heir is that he is lairy, brash, so shameless that he is the subject of a cult parody account on social media, “No Context Hearn”, lampooning his cringeworthy, geezer shtick. But there is a streak of self-awareness, too, highlighted by the memory of his private-school days at Brentwood.
“I was a brat,” he says. “Imagine, you’ve got this guy whose dad’s on TV all the time. I was a jack the lad. It wasn’t like there was anyone tough at the school. But I ended up going to a college in Romford that was quite lively, and I hated it. I just stayed in the classroom. You adapt to the environment you’re in. I’m a bit of a chameleon, I guess. I’ve got enough
about me to deal with most people. It doesn’t mean they all like me.”
What can never be gainsaid is Hearn’s Stakhanovite work ethic. For all that he grew up amid the trappings of privilege, he has cemented a reputation as a tireless grafter. Even as he beat a bleary retreat from Riyadh last summer, having been pilloried for “sportswashing” over his decision to hold Joshua’s rematch with Andy Ruiz Jnr in Saudi Arabia, he headed straight off to orchestrate a show in Barcelona. “I’ve got the working-class mentality,” he says. “That’s probably Dad’s greatest achievement. He was obsessed,
when I was little, that I didn’t become the type of person he hated. He grew up on a council estate in Dagenham. Anyone with money, he resented, especially any kid with a wealthy parent. He’d make me clean his shoes, his car. I would sell the programmes at the boxing at 10, 11, on the front door at Bethnal Green. He would send me down to Leyton Orient to paint the fences.
“We were so competitive that we had our first full sparring session when I turned 16. The age limit was supposed to be 18. I was too big and he was too old, and I ended up giving him a pasting. He tells it differently, saying, ‘I came out and whacked my son straight on the chin’. You can see people thinking, ‘You’d get arrested for that nowadays’.”
Hearn’s philosophy on promoting has been to put himself front and centre, stirring enmities and igniting bad blood. The approach was so brazen that he would arrange, when building up Merseyside hero Tony Bellew, for David Haye to walk into a room full of riled-up Liverpudlians. Haye fought back by deriding Hearn on his own stage, caricaturing him as an “apple and pears” Cockney barrow boy. If it looked all too contrived, then, by Hearn’s admission, it was. “David actually called me a couple of hours later and asked, “How do you think that went? Good, wasn’t it? I tore into you, didn’t I?’”
Just occasionally, though, the animosity is so palpable that one fears for Hearn, not least when Dereck Chisora, piqued by a relationship of genuine cross-london loathing with Dillian Whyte, flipped a table mid-press conference in 2016 and aimed it at the promoter’s head. At a subsequent TV interview, the two fighters ended up grappling on the floor.
“Dereck was ready to take my head off,” Hearn says. “That was street bad, it was dangerous. So, you’ve got to be careful. These are not normal individuals. Anyone who is willing to do this for a profession has something about them that separates them from others. There were times when I sat between Joshua and Jarrell Miller and thought, ‘One backhand and my jaw’s broken.’”
These days, we tend to perceive Hearn as a figure of limitless exuberance, as he bounces between continents and swats off controversies with hardly a backwards glance. In response to the Saudis’ complicity in the murder of columnist Jamal Khashoggi, which dominated the preamble to Joshua-ruiz II, he says simply: “I know about the journalist, but my job is to deliver the most amount of money and the best event possible.”
But there was a moment when the brickbats challenged even his powers of endurance. “It was in 2018, when I had taken a call to say that Miller had failed a drugs test. Understand that people always want me to fail, to fall off the train. I can’t let that happen. It’s a bit of a sick mindset, really, but it works. Only this time, I had to stay in New York for a week for a Gennady Golovkin fight. It was my 40th birthday. I woke up on the Saturday, June 8, and it was just me. I had a card from the kids. That was the one point where I was, not depressed exactly, but flat. I started thinking to myself, ‘You don’t need this.’”
Except ultimately, Hearn does need it, the sheer exhilaration of trying to keep his juggernaut on the road. You can sense it by the restlessness that the Covid lockdown has caused him. “For the first month, I was a bit lost, doing the home schooling, pretending it was great to spend time with the kids,” he says. “And it was, but I’m all about going from event to event. It’s what I love.”
It is also what he feels a duty to keep doing. “I have a responsibility to continue what my dad built. I know what this business means to him, I know how hard he worked to build it, and the sacrifices he made.” At what cost to his health, one wonders. During his manic circling of the globe, Hearn was told by his wife, Chloe, that he was risking a heart attack. “My dad had his first heart attack at 48, my granddad died at 45, and his dad died at 44. I’m nailed on, aren’t I? I had a scan the other week. I’ve got to be careful.”
While the pandemic has enforced a hiatus he could never have foreseen, Hearn has plenty to live for, ensuring that this month’s garden-party boxing is a spectacle worth celebrating before he mobilises towards Joshua versus Fury, an occasion that he assures will be “monstrous”. He will, it seems, have no problem flicking the switch. “Most people are going to find it difficult to slip back into that driven, entrepreneurial ‘beast mode’,” Hearn says. “It makes me think I’m going to go way past everybody else. What you will never do is outwork me. Impossible.”
He considers this, then adds with a grin: “The truth is, that’s what makes me so dangerous.”