How Hearn ensured snooker was ready to go live on day one
Veteran promoter savours exposure as players prepare to perform in a biosecure ‘bubble’ in Milton Keynes
‘If you’re walking around the desert at midday, you’re going to pay a fortune for half a glass of water,” says Barry Hearn, nimbly extending his love of metaphor to the feat of putting on snooker in the middle of a pandemic. For in the post-apocalyptic wilderness of professional sport in 2020, the wiliest of promoters understands that his punters will be grateful for whatever they are given.
Amid all the jostling by sports to revive their seasons, it is on the green baize, at a biosecure arena in Milton Keynes – as well as at Newcastle Racecourse – that the UK’s first live televised action since lockdown restrictions were loosened will be staged tomorrow. At 71, and as indomitable as the day he bought his first chain of Essex snooker halls in 1974, Hearn is not about to let the satisfaction of the moment slide. “In the land of the blind,” he chuckles, “the one-eyed man is king.”
Even by the audacious standards of Matchroom Sport, where Barry’s son Eddie is seeking to lay on global heavyweight boxing in the gardens of the family’s Brentwood mansion, this week’s Championship League snooker in Milton Keynes is a production almost baroque in its complexity. To satisfy the Government, all 64 players must test negative for Covid-19 before entering the building and cannot leave until they are eliminated, a rule enforced through their exclusive use of an on-site hotel.
“At the moment, I can’t trust the players to make their own arrangements,” Hearn explains. “Some might want to sleep in their cars or go around to friends’ houses. We have insisted that all the catering and cleaning staff are isolated throughout. It’s a complete wraparound bubble.”
Perhaps not since Dennis Taylor potted the final black at the Crucible in 1985, before a midnight TV audience of 18.5 million, will snooker have savoured such exposure. This is no tinpot tournament: Ronnie O’Sullivan has signed up, as have world No1 Judd Trump and three-time world champion Mark Selby, all of them desperate to purge the frustrations of lockdown.
It matters deeply to Hearn that snooker is among the first out of the traps, setting a template for how, even within an environment of daily deep-cleaning and mandatory swab tests, sport can still find a place. “We have seven hours a day on ITV4, so I’m expecting, initially, a real burst of ratings success,” he says. “Later in the summer, we are going to be in conflict with lots of other sports, especially as the Premier League comes back.
“But we had been in discussions with the Government for weeks.
I must have driven Anna Deignan, head of sport at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, around the bend. Eventually, we were ready to go on June 1, so why go June 2?”
By rights, Hearn should be affording himself a quiet summer. He had a heart attack last month, a frightening echo of a far graver episode in 2002. As ever, it did not stall him for long. “I was slightly embarrassed to end up in hospital,” he reflects. “They stuck a couple of stents in and I was out after four days. If you’re ever in Basildon General, don’t miss the apple crumble and custard. Special.”
In the weeks since, Hearn, an inveterate marathon runner in his day, has not only been tearing through 2½-hour gym sessions but cajoling his Matchroom staff to conjure a vision of sport for the Covid age.
“Necessity is the mother of invention,” he says. “We are an events company that suddenly has no events.
Not a good job description, is it? So, I began the process of saying: ‘OK boys, we’re supposed to be the best in the business, the most creative. So, create for me. Tell me what we’re going to do.’ In snooker, with the World Championship coming up in late July, we realised we had to meet the problems head on, because they’re not going away. Snooker can be played with social distance, easily. Plus, nobody has gone as far as us in making it safe.”
Hearn has confronted no shortage of battles in his career, from his frequent skirmishes with O’Sullivan to his 19 years as chairman of a floundering Leyton Orient. Nothing, though, has challenged him quite like the task of defending his empire against the depredations of a virus.
“I’ve never known anything like this,” he acknowledges. “I was born after the end of the Second World War, but this is a war mentality. You have to adapt to circumstances that you’ve never even considered before.
“That’s stage one. Stage two is about coming through it financially. For many sports, the question is, ‘Where did the money go?’ They don’t have funds to run their business without going to the Government, asking for a bail-out. It’s beyond my comprehension.
“I’m an old-fashioned person, I set aside money for a rainy day. You can see our figures at Companies House, and it’s no secret that we have substantial cash reserves that will survive 10 years. We owe our people to tell them that their jobs are safe. Our sponsors and broadcasters need to know that we’re in a position, whatever the situation, and even in the midst of an absolute disaster, to deliver.”
Beneath this pragmatic outlook, Hearn harbours a philosophical streak. Sport, he argues, is no mere frivolity but potentially the most potent unifying force that exists at this juncture. “It is a crucial factor in the mental health of a nation,” he says. “It unites a country, irrespective of race or colour or size or sex. I am the one responsible for creating opportunities. I didn’t know how many would play my snooker event. But you can’t take away the desire of the sportsman to play. They are all saying: ‘I’ve missed this. This is what I was born to do.’”