So I'd be in assembly and it would be like: ‘ and now the Sports High Achiever Awards, sponsored by Matchroom Sport’. “My Dad used to sponsor awards to keep them sweet, because of my behaviour. And my lifestyle was getting picked up from school in the limo, right – which was so cringy looking back – then going to the gym, to see Bruno, or Nas or Eubank.”īeing “a horrible prat” at secondary school eventually led to Hearn being told he couldn’t return for sixth form, despite his father’s chequebook. But my dad was from a council estate and made money – new money. We didn't have 100 staff around the house and gold cutlery.
This created the strange dichotomy that defined Eddie's early life: attending a stifling private school during the week, fully engaged with the spit and sawdust world of professional boxing at the weekends. gave his son a nickname, ‘Silver Spoon’, and tried to instil in him the principles of hard work and discipline embodied by boxing. “And I think he had a fear that Eddie, who he sent to public school, was going to be this posh kid who just hung on his coattails.” And actually he’s a highly intelligent, smart businessman,” Don McRae, the UK’s foremost boxing writer and author, says of Hearn’s father. “He has always had a chip on his shoulder because he's a working class kid from Essex, who was seen as a second-hand car salesman or a bit of a flash git. In the ’80s and ’90s he transformed the image of sports like darts and snooker, making his own fortune in the process. He has also – in a way that he says he did not plan, but embraces with open arms – become a celebrity in his own right, better known than most of his boxers, a one-man meme machine to whom there is a dedicated ‘No Context Hearn’ account (370k followers on Twitter, views incalculable, merchandise available), which means even if you’ve never watched a boxing match in your life you’ve probably seen a clip of him saying “Oh, you cheeky little fucker!” and wondered: just who the hell is this guy?īarry Hearn came from nothing and founded the family business, Matchroom Sports, under a snooker hall in East London. He conquered America with a $1 billion broadcast deal with DAZN in 2018, and has driven his family business to an estimated valuation of £700m with a roster of the world’s best-known fighters: Anthony Joshua, Katie Taylor, the Mexican pound-for-pound great Canelo Álvarez. He’s masterminded some of the biggest fights in the world, from heavyweight bouts to YouTube novelties. In recent years, 43-year-old Hearn has reshaped the sport in his own image in Britain, injecting it with a sense of fun, mischief and glamour (the music between rounds was a Hearn innovation so was the ringside VIP box). And he has stories about boxing itself why this fundamentally insane sport is the most exciting in the world, how it saves more lives than the ones it tragically ends or destroys, which he has seen happen, up close, since he was a child.Īnd it’s taken him a long way – further than almost any other boxing promoter in history. He has stories about his fighters – the time Derek Chisora threw a table over at a press conference then delivered a rousing mea culpa to the boxing authorities to spare himself a ban the time he first found a young, troubled Anthony Joshua almost taking a heavy bag off its hinges in a Watford gym the time Katie Taylor walked into his office and told him she wanted to sell out Madison Square Garden, the Mecca of boxing.
He practises telling stories over and over, making minor adjustments, adapting to his crowd. If a boxer can perfect the jab, it can cover up weaknesses they have elsewhere, rescue them when they’re in trouble and carry them to riches and glory.Įddie Hearn is a storyteller. But really it involves the smooth pivot of the entire body. Like all movements in boxing, it looks to the untrained eye just like an extension of the arm and fist, something rudimentary and crude. It is a simple action refined by repetition. A boxer perfects his most important weapon – the jab – by throwing it over and over.