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Snooker / Darts News – Barry Hearn to save Snooker?

“Darts is working-class golf” is one of his. And “at my age I don’t stand for office, I get invited”. And, perhaps most pertinently given his present preoccupation, “I don’t have people fighting against me, I find they give up very easily.”

At 62, Hearn is at the top of his game. Though as it happens, without peers as a sporting promoter across 10 sports, he is probably the only one in his game. Sitting at his billiard-table sized desk in the Essex headquarters of his Matchroom organisation, the accounts of several dozen events awaiting his scrutiny, with a stable of supercars purring on the drive outside, he is the picture of success. The serial sporting entrepreneur, chairman of Leyton Orient, chairman of the Professional Darts Corporation, he has more chairs on his CV than the average dining table. And he has just added another.

In December he took up the chairmanship of the dangerously close-to-moribund World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association. During the game’s heyday, when Steve Davis and Dennis Taylor’s epic struggle drew a television audience of 18 million, he rode the wave of success, but always as an outsider, a thorn in the side of the controlling body. Now, as the sport struggles to find sponsors and television audiences, he has taken charge. Which is a bit like Russell Brand becoming director-general of the BBC.

“Yeah, now I am the establishment,” he says. “Nice isn’t it?” Nice, maybe. But somewhat unexpected. Seemingly, after a 30-year love affair with the game, at the turn of the century, like many of its erstwhile followers, his ardour appeared to have cooled. For the last decade, while still managing the likes of Ronnie O’Sullivan, he stopped promoting the events he used to, instead concentrating his energies on other interests. So why the change of heart?

“It brings to mind a lovely story about [the boxing promoter] Bob Arum,” he says. “He was involved in a court case and changed his evidence completely overnight. The judge said: ‘That’s not what you said yesterday’. It was the same with me, a few months ago when the issue of me becoming chairman was first raised I was saying: ‘Snooker, nah not for me, been there, done that, didn’t just buy the T-shirt, I printed it’.

“Then suddenly I find myself rolling my sleeves up and getting down to sorting the game out. Well, Bob Arum’s answer to the judge was ‘Yesterday I was lying, today I’m telling the truth’.”

As always with Hearn, it is a sharp line. But does it not mask a backward step? After all, he made his name – and the fortune that keeps those motors on the drive – developing new sporting markets. Poker, which did not exist as a television exercise 10 years ago, now earns him a fortune. He has developed the new Prizefighter series in boxing, which is turning a handsome profit. And darts has grown exponentially under his stewardship. Indeed, he says darts now holds the place in his attentions snooker once did.

“Listen I’ve made a few quid, but I’m a working class lad at heart,” he says. “For me, there is no better night out than having a few lagers at the darts, then a curry on the way home. I’m a man of simple tastes.”

So why then, is he behaving like a middle-aged man looking up his first girlfriend on Friends Reunited and returning to the baize? Especially as so many observers believe snooker is a sport which has had its time.

“I don’t think snooker’s dead. I described it the other day as a bit like Sleeping Beauty and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I’m the handsome prince. But, it’s in my genes. I remember the fun we had with it. I look back and we were laughing all the time. It was the good times. And I can’t see why they can’t come back.”

Except that, where once he presided over a stable of household names, these days beyond O’Sullivan and Jimmy White, you’d be lucky to find anyone involved in the game being recognised in their local Tesco.

“People say there are no characters left,” he says. “That’s not true, they’re there, but we don’t know enough about them. Mind, I admit I’m a bit out of the loop myself. I went into the players’ room at a tournament recently and I says to first person I meet: ‘Who’s son are you then?’ And it only turns out he’s number 11 in the world.”

Hearn admits, snoozing or not, snooker has its problems.

“No denying that. First day on this I worked from 5.30am to 9.30pm and I took five paracetamol to stop the pain in my head,” he says. “The feeling among the players was that something needed to be done.

“They had taken a look at what we did for darts. We took it from a sport that had £500,000 prize money in a season to £5 million. There’s smiles on players’ faces. Crowds are big. It’s been a huge success story, quite reminiscent of snooker in the Eighties. The principles of promotion are the same: give value for money and make the customers leave with smiles on their faces. It’s about changing the momentum. It’s not rocket science.”

So what does he intend to do with the game? Beyond that is, giving the players at the recent UK Masters walk-on music, a move that had many an observer shaking their heads in bemusement.

“Listen, I know we got some criticism for that,” he says. “But when Mark King dances a little jig to his walk-on music and says that was fun, that’s what you want to hear. The best example here is Twenty20 cricket. The purists were so wrong about that, it’s been a massive success.

“The trouble with snooker is that all tournaments look the same, there’s no variation. You’ve got to be brave enough to experiment. Maybe I’m not brave enough to change the World Championship, I’ll leave that well alone. But further down the pecking order, maybe we’ll have a one-frame shoot out, in out, bish bash bosh. Maybe it will attract a new market. Maybe it will be a disaster. I have had plenty of disasters in my time. The secret of my success is keeping quiet about them. The point is, what I’m promising is we’ll have a go.”

Though that ‘we’ has something of a royal tinge to it. Hearn is not someone who feels comfortable in the traditional structures of British sporting organisations.

“We don’t live in the world of committee at Matchroom,” he says. “The players wanted me to stand for election against Rodney Walker [for the WPBSA chairmanship]. I said I don’t stand. My name’s not David Cameron. Democracy is all very well, but I’m not in the democracy business. I learned the greatest business rule of all from snooker. I walked away from it thinking I can’t be bothered with all the in-fighting. From that moment on, I learned if I do anything, I control it. It’s total control or nothing.

“I know there is no one else in the world can do what I can do. That sounds terribly big-headed. But this is my strength. And before you say it, I don’t like the term dictator. I prefer the term benevolent despot.”

To underline his determination to do things his way, Hearn has given the players who make up the membership of the WPBSA an ultimatum.

“March 31 is my personal deadline,” he says. “By then I won’t have all the answers, but I’ll have a game plan to present to the players. New ideas, new tournaments, a continuation of my control. They have to make decision on that. If they say yes I will deliver. If they say no, I’m exiting stage left and wishing them God speed.

“I’m not in this for a popularity contest. I have other things to do. But this is the challenge: on Feb 11 we had 10,000 at the O₂ to watch the best eight darts players in the world have a shoot out. Can snooker get 10,000 to the O₂? That’s the question.”

Well can it?

“I suggest you watch this space.”

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