‘Even now, the hairs still stand up on my neck’
Steve Davis and Barry Hearn – snooker’s ‘old married couple’ – look back 40 years on the day that transformed British sport
‘Everyone who is playing snooker today, in same way as with Tiger Woods in golf, owes Steve Davis’
Forty years on from an achievement that would forever change British sport, the most trailblazing of manager-player partners are trying hopelessly to recall if they have ever had a dispute.
They settle, eventually, on the conversations between Barry Hearn and ITV over the potential participation of Steve Davis in the 2013 edition of I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! “I phoned him and said, ‘Steve, they want you on I’m a Celebrity’,” Hearn says, grinning proudly at his negotiating tactics. “He said, ‘Leave me out. They’ll get me jumping out of aeroplanes’. So I said, ‘Why don’t I ask them for so much money that they will say no. And, if they say yes, you’ll do it?’ Steve was, ‘OK, that sounds fair’.”
Five minutes later and Hearn’s number again flashed up before an opening gambit that Davis will never forget. “Do you know where the parachute shop is? You’re going to Australia.”
“Oh s----’,” replied Davis.
He was 56 by then but, in keeping with a 45-year relationship that involved only one contract in 1978 that neither has since looked at, there would be no going back. And so, to a CV that combines six world snooker titles with an appearance on Top of the Pops to sing Snooker Loopy, was added bushtucker trials.
Davis’s focus these days is psychedelic and experimental music – he has been a DJ at Glastonbury and has brought out a book with Kavus Torabi, with whom he has made four albums – after they met in Paris at the concert of Magma, an influential prog-rock band.
Hearn is delighted with his sixword endorsement on the book’s back cover – “I couldn’t get past the intro” – but does at least feign interest. “I do listen to his LPS … and then I realise we are on a different planet,” he says. “We’re like some old married couple. We don’t talk as much. We don’t go out as much. But, if we have a problem, or we get excited about something, we generally get in touch.”
Casually dressed, and sitting studiously on a sofa in front of drawn curtains at 4.30pm, Davis looks totally removed from the gingerhaired, tuxedo-wearing, ruthless winning machine of the Eighties. “I don’t associate with that animal anymore,” he says.
And yet, for the next 17 days, he will slip effortlessly back onto our screens as a pundit in a world he once bestrode like a colossus. Just driving past the Crucible Theatre still has a physical impact. “It’s like Mount Everest,” Davis says. “It’s overawing. I am still frightened of the place. How much heartache has gone on in that room? How many awful days when you want the ground to swallow you? But, every now and then, that place erupts like Mount Vesuvius. And magic happens. You want to be part of it.”
Talk of magic brings us back to 1981. Hearn calls it “without doubt, the greatest day of my life” and often still goes to sleep thinking about his 23-year-old protege’s triumph.
The footage of Davis clearing the decisive colours before breaking down into tears following a bodycheck celebratory hug from Hearn has gone into snooker folklore. The ultimate figurehead had arrived and, behind him, was a sports promoter oozing charisma and ambition. “I will never in my life get the excitement, that same pleasure, the pulse rate, the sweaty palms,” Hearn says. “I have been involved in thousands of top events, and to this day I’ve never felt anything like that. Even talking now, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
“I came from a council house in Dagenham. Steve from a council flat in Plumstead. We had a dream, and we were standing on the threshold of changing our lives. I kept saying to myself, ‘Don’t do anything silly’. But next thing, I’m out there. The look says it all. It wasn’t just, ‘We won’. It was, ‘We beat the world’.”
And what followed was truly extraordinary. Not just how Davis came to dominate snooker, but how snooker became so dominant in the British sporting fabric.
Key to their success, Hearn says, was understanding what the other did best. Hearn left the snooker to Davis and his father, Bill, and assumed complete control of what happened off the table. Before he knew it, Davis was being booked for exhibitions at £10,000 a night. He was endorsing a pair of slippers. He had his own aftershave. An iconic puppet and the whole persona – Steve “Interesting” Davis – was a mainstay of
Viewing figures would top 18 million for his 1985 world final against Dennis Taylor, and he would win Sports Personality of the Year. Hearn draws a comparison with how Mark Mccormack and Arnold Palmer professionalised golf.
“Barry went into his own – and we were very lucky – we had this anomaly of snooker growing.” says Davis, who also stresses that the whole ‘golden age’ description can be exaggerated. “The standard now is so much better – Ronnie O’sullivan is one of the most amazing personalities and most incredible players of any sport, and he gets beat in Sports Personality of the
Year by somebody who drives a car and rides a horse. The golden age of snooker is now.”
Hearn quotes an expected global audience for this year’s World Championship of more than 500million, compared to 100million in the Eighties. A £500,000 first prize also awaits in Sheffield compared to the £20,000 from 1981. It all supports a fairly blunt riposte to players, such as world No1 Judd Trump, who complain of a sport stuck in the past.
“We know what we’re doing,” Hearn says. “The global audience today slaughters the so-called golden days.” And what of the dress
code? Might he take up Trump’s suggestion of a more relaxed feel. Polo shirts and trainers, perhaps, at the Crucible?
Hearn winces and asks whether you would strip the Rolls-royce sculpture from the top of its bonnet. “There is a relaxation in several events,” he says. “One of which is the shoot-out. One frame billed for younger audiences that Judd decided not to play in. We are a global sport for people who expect certain values. On our blue riband events, the ones that have a history you can’t buy – you have earned something special. History is the whole appearance of the World Snooker Championship. With the dress code.”
Hearn then expands upon the history lesson. “Everyone who is playing snooker today, in the same way as Tiger Woods in golf, owes Steve Davis,” he says. “It was a parochial British sport. There wouldn’t be China, the Far East, Brazil and Japan without that drive we brought. We are still on that journey, but building on the foundations Steve provided.”
Hearn is again smiling. “Whoever wins on May 3 should have a picture of Steve Davis over their mantelpiece. And, when they walk in, they should lower their heads … because they’re not worthy to stare the great man in the eyes.”