Barry Hearn, the working-class lad who wants to breathe life back into snooker

By Jim White Published: 8:00AM GMT twenty-three February 2010

Up for a challenge: Barry Hearn, the authority of the WPBSA, believes he can move the great times behind to snooker if the competition is dauntless sufficient to examination Photo: GETTY IMAGES

"Darts is working-class golf" is one of his. And "at my age I don"t mount for office, I get invited". And, may be majority pertinently since his benefaction preoccupation, "I don"t have people fighting opposite me, I find they give up really easily."

At 62, Hearn is at the tip of his game. Though as it happens, but peers as a sporting upholder opposite 10 sports, he is probably the usually one in his game. Sitting at his billiard-table sized list in the Essex domicile of his Matchroom organisation, the accounts of multiform dozen events available his scrutiny, with a fast of supercars purring on the expostulate outside, he is the design of success. The sequence sporting entrepreneur, authority of Leyton Orient, authority of the Professional Darts Corporation, he has some-more chairs on his CV than the normal dining table. And he has usually combined another.

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In Dec 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 onslaught drew a radio assembly of eighteen million, he rode the call of success, but regularly as an outsider, a thorn in the side of the determining body. Now, as the competition struggles to find sponsors and radio audiences, he has taken charge. Which is a bit similar to Russell Brand apropos director-general of the BBC.

"Yeah, right afar I am the establishment," he says. "Nice isn"t it?" Nice, maybe. But rather unexpected. Seemingly, after a 30-year love event with the game, at the spin of the century, similar to most of the earlier followers, his aspiration appeared to have cooled. For the last decade, whilst still handling the likes of Ronnie O"Sullivan, he stopped compelling the events he used to, instead concentrating his energies on alternative interests. So because the shift of heart?

"It brings to mind a poetic story about [the fighting promoter] Bob Arum," he says. "He was concerned in a justice box and altered his justification utterly overnight. The decider said: "That"s not what you pronounced yesterday". It was the same with me, a couple of months ago when the issue of me apropos authority was initial lifted I was saying: "Snooker, nah not for me, been there, finished that, didn"t usually buy the T-shirt, I printed it".

"Then unexpected I find myself rolling my sleeves up and removing down to classification the diversion out. Well, Bob Arum"s answer to the decider was "Yesterday I was lying, currently I"m revelation the truth"."

As regularly with Hearn, it is a pointy line. But does it not facade a behind step? After all, he finished his name and the happening that keeps those motors on the expostulate building new sporting markets. Poker, that did not exist as a radio practice 10 years ago, right afar earns him a fortune. He has grown the new Prizefighter array in boxing, that is branch a large profit. And darts has grown exponentially underneath his stewardship. Indeed, he says darts right afar binds the place in his attentions snooker once did.

"Listen I"ve finished a couple of quid, but I"m a operative category kid at heart," he says. "For me, there is no improved night out than carrying a couple of lagers at the darts, afterwards a curry on the approach home. I"m a man of elementary tastes."

So because then, is he working similar to a prime man seeking up his initial partner on Friends Reunited and returning to the baize? Especially as so most observers hold snooker is a competition that has had the time.

"I don"t think snooker"s dead. I described it the alternative day as a bit similar to Sleeping Beauty and I"m keeping my fingers crossed that I"m the large prince. But, it"s in my genes. I recollect the fun we had with it. I see behind and we were shouting all the time. It was the great times. And I can"t see because they can"t come back."

Except that, where once he presided over a fast of domicile names, these days over O"Sullivan and Jimmy White, you"d be propitious to find any one concerned in the diversion being recognized in their internal Tesco.

"People contend there are no characters left," he says. "That"s not true, they"re there, but we don"t know sufficient about them. Mind, I confess I"m a bit out of the double back myself. I went in to the players" room at a competition not long ago and I says to initial chairman I meet: "Who"s son are you then?" And it usually turns out he"s series eleven in the world."

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

"No denying that. First day on this I worked from 5.30am to 9.30pm and I took five paracetamol to stop the suffering in my head," he says. "The feeling between the players was that something indispensable to be done.

"They had taken a see at what we did for darts. We took it from a competition that had �500,000 esteem income in a deteriorate to �5 million. There"s smiles on players" faces. Crowds are big. It"s been a outrageous success story, utterly suggestive of snooker in the Eighties. The beliefs of graduation are the same: give worth for income and have the commercial operation leave with smiles on their faces. It"s about becoming different the momentum. It"s not space station science."

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

"Listen, I know we got a small critique for that," he says. "But when Mark King dances a small hop to his walk-on song and says that was fun, that"s what you wish to hear. The most appropriate e.g. here is Twenty20 cricket. The purists were so wrong about that, it"s been a large success.

"The difficulty with snooker is that all tournaments see the same, there"s no variation. You"ve got to be dauntless sufficient to experiment. Maybe I"m not dauntless sufficient to shift the World Championship, I"ll leave that well alone. But serve down the pecking order, may be we"ll have a one-frame fire out, in out, bish whack bosh. Maybe it will capture a new market. Maybe it will be a disaster. I have had copiousness of disasters in my time. The tip of my success is keeping still about them. The point is, what I"m earnest is we"ll have a go."

Though that "we" has something of a stately shade to it. Hearn is not someone who feels gentle in the normal structures of British sporting organisations.

"We don"t live in the universe of cabinet at Matchroom," he says. "The players longed for me to mount for choosing opposite Rodney Walker [for the WPBSA chairmanship]. I pronounced I don"t stand. My name"s not David Cameron. Democracy is all really well, but I"m not in the democracy business. I schooled the biggest commercial operation order of all from snooker. I walked afar from it meditative I can"t be worried with all the in-fighting. From that impulse on, I schooled if I do anything, I carry out it. It"s sum carry out or nothing.

"I know there is no one else in the universe can do what I can do. That sounds terribly big-headed. But this is my strength. And prior to you contend it, I don"t similar to the tenure dictator. I cite the tenure good despot."

To underline his integrity to do things his way, Hearn has since the players who have up the membership of the WPBSA an ultimatum.

"March 31 is my personal deadline," he says. "By afterwards I won"t have all the answers, but I"ll have a diversion plan to benefaction to the players. New ideas, new tournaments, a delay of my control. They have to have preference on that. If they contend yes I will deliver. If they contend no, I"m exiting theatre left and wishing them God speed.

"I"m not in this for a recognition contest. I have alternative things to do. But this is the challenge: on February eleven we had 10,000 at the O₂ to watch the most appropriate eight darts players in the universe have a fire out. Can snooker get 10,000 to the O₂? That"s the question."

Well can it?

"I indicate you watch this space."