Eddie Hearn interview - ‘Do I want to be the most powerful man in boxing? 100%’

In a sport where promoters play the Devil and command Gods, Eddie Hearn walks with the cocky, unstopping aura of a man at the face of an empire. At 6’6”, he is as tall as his own Hercules in Anthony Joshua, smiles with a cheeky glint through designer suits and, most noticeably of all, never stops talking; always whirring on a relentlessly slick, salesman-like autocue.

His aim, he says with conviction that could sell you a used dishcloth “is to dominate – not just in America – globally.” And as you cut through the spin and bottomless bravado, you begin to understand Hearn’s ambition is one of the few qualities not amplified by brash persona. He is infatuated with success, speaks about it like a drug and describes his desire for it as an addiction. “I have to win,” he says with a blunt assertiveness. “People are desperate for me to fail, and that’s the worst thing they could do because it motivates me even more. If I enjoy what I’m doing, I can’t be beaten. I won’t be number two.”

If Hearn had the time between flights from Glasgow, London, Boston and New York – and that’s just this week – he would be celebrating. This year marks his tenth as a boxing promoter. In that time, he has revolutionised the sport in Britain and taken a stranglehold on the UK market, won an unprecedented $1b broadcast deal in America and runs eight shows a year in Germany, Italy and Spain. In Joshua, he wields one of the most marketable heavyweights since Mike Tyson.

“Do I want to be the most powerful person in boxing?” He asks himself unwaveringly. “One-hundred per cent.” Perhaps, at just 39 years old, he already is, or rather he’s so good at selling it to you that you’re lost for argument. He’s an ingenious pantomime villain, cocksure in the spotlight, weaponises the camera, and is unusually generous in his time with the media. Visibility is power. As we begin our hour’s interview, his first words are: “ask me absolutely anything”.

But beneath the pride, there is still a lingering sense of something unfulfilled that spurs him. Even when he walks into Madison Square Garden and sees the ring ablaze by a looming screen bearing Joshua’s portrait, Hearn struts with “a massive chip” on his shoulder. His relationship with his father has coloured his entire character. A complex, competitive nature that determines success not only by leaving a legacy greater than a gravestone but by outsizing the other’s; the need to be known as something more than “Barry Hearn’s son”.

---

It’s 1995 and Eddie Hearn is standing in the ring at Billericay Boxing Gym, a picture of terror and relish. His father has promised to give him “a pasting to teach him life’s lessons”, to remind his cocky, Jack the Lad 16-year-old son that he is the one who placed the “silver-spoon” in his mouth. They are both wearing six-ounce gloves, so thin you can feel the knuckles through them, and Eddie tucks them to each cheek, glimpsing at his father through the cracks as the bell rings. Instantly, his dad flies towards him, teeth gritted and bared, lips curled into a guttural snarl, unleashing a melee of full-blooded punches. “He was really letting leather fly,” Hearn laughs as though it were a case in textbook childcare.

“He was really trying to do some damage. I rode the storm and bashed him up to the body, I dropped him, he got up, I hit him with two more and he stayed down. He still tells that story almost every day it makes him so proud.”

The son of a bus driver, Barry Hearn was raised on a council estate in Dagenham, Essex. He was a born hustler and started small businesses washing cars and picking fruit and vegetables while still a teenager. In the early ‘70s, he bought a run-down snooker hall in Romford, just as the BBC prepped to show the sport in colour for the first time, took young amateur players under his wing, and rode with them to the heights of the sport. He’d later branch out into darts, table tennis, gymnastics, fishing, poker, football and, of course, boxing.

From salt, the Matchroom empire was born and stands as perhaps the most successful sports promotional company in the world. “He’s still going, he’s still hustling, he won’t stop,” Eddie says with admiration. Seventeen years after suffering a heart attack, Hearn Sr, who turned 70 last year, is still on a fitness regime consisting of 700 sit-ups a day.

open image in gallery

Barry Hearn was petrified that his son wouldn’t share his working class mentality. He sent Eddie to Brentwood, a public school in Essex, where he admits he “was a bit of a brat”. After school, he’d take the bus to Romford and rush to the boxing gym because it was the only way he could hang around with his dad. He’d follow around Britain’s best boxers – Frank Bruno, Chris Eubank, Herbie Hide, Naseem Hamed and Lennox Lewis – totally undaunted by their celebrity. “I’d watch them spar and train, then go and get dinner with them,” he says. ”Francis Ampofo [a British flyweight] took me to Spurs games on a Saturday night. I’d just tag along. The fight environment is so exciting environment.”

Hearn flopped his GCSEs and was kicked out at 16; his promising county cricket career not enough to save his place. He was sent to Havering College, a state sixth-form, and burst into tears when his mum dropped him off for his first day, but it was the point at which his real education began. He started working night shifts at a telesales company, selling double-glazing, earning £3-per-shift and training himself in the art of salesmanship. Barry made him sell programmes at the fights, wash his cars and clean his shoes, “drumming the mentality into me”. And, despite his privileged upbringing, Eddie did in many respects became a carbon-copy of his father.

“I always had a chip on my shoulder because everybody thought I was Barry Hearn’s son,” he says. “Whether I was in the cricket team or when I got my first job, people said ‘he’s only got that because he’s Hearn’s son’. I’d go for interviews with sports management companies and they would say ‘are you related to Barry Hearn?’ And I would say yeah I am, I’m his son and they’d say ‘well, what are you doing here?’

open image in gallery

“The only way my success can be measured is by where I take the business and I have to take it to such huge heights to not be Barry Hearn’s son. I have to outperform him to well beyond his levels to be a success because if I just run the business then I’ll always be that. It’s very hard for sons to go and run a business that their father has built because you’re always compared to them. He comes from a different background to me, so what he’s achieved will always be more remarkable. One of my biggest regrets is not having the chance to start from nothing.”

---

Eddie Hearn was sitting at a casino table in Las Vegas when he met Sydney Olympic heavyweight gold medalist Audley Harrison. After stints as a golf agent and various roles in sports management and marketing, he had returned to his father’s wing and taken over Matchroom’s lucrative poker business. Harrison’s professional career had become a figure of ridicule after losing four fights at domestic level but he remained a recognisable name and, despite having no experience, Hearn concocted a plan to steer Harrison to a world title fight. When he phoned his father to proudly tell him his plan, Barry said: “You’re mad. I’m not getting involved.”

Within five fights, Harrison was scheduled to fight David Haye for the heavyweight title. The fight was broadcast on box office, the build-up was bombastic, the numbers were huge, but Harrison barely threw a punch before getting knocked out in the third round.

“I remember leaving there and this guy leaned over and shouted ‘Hearn, you are a shit promoter’,” he says, mimicking the man’s voice. “It was really embarrassing. I remember walking into the cafe later that week and people were walking up to me being like ‘prat’. I just thought to myself, I’m done in boxing.”

open image in gallery

Days later, Hearn’s phone rang; Darren Barker’s manager was asking if he’d consider promoting his fighter. In the same week, Carl Froch called, then Kell Brook. “I was like ‘Jesus’, this is getting a bit serious,” Hearn laughs. “I need to think if I actually want to do this. I didn’t really know what I was doing, I didn’t have the structure at the time but I had a big mouth.” Within five years, he’d guide them all to world titles.

---

Loyalty is like a diamond in boxing; precious and exceptionally hard to find. When Hearn becomes friends rather than simply business partners with one of his boxers, he almost lives vicariously through them. His impassioned shouts from ringside are an audible giveaway, his exuberant celebrations upon the final bell are overt but unexaggerated. As a child, Barry told him if he could feel one per cent of a fighter’s adrenaline, he would be happy. And Eddie? “I honestly think I feel 50.”

He reels off the nights where every sound still lives with him – Froch dethroning Lucien Bute, Tony Bellew winning a world title at Goodison Park, Barker rising from the canvas in Atlantic City, Brook outgunning Shawn Porter in Los Angeles. The journeys from the very beginning to the pinnacle, the memories which, despite common perception, outweigh any monetary lust. “You really live the highs and lows,” he says. ”Touch wood, I’ve never had a fighter be really badly injured by a fight but it can happen and it frightens me. You don’t know if you’ll ever be the same afterwards.”

Even now, Hearn still carries the scars of seeing Jim McDonnell, another of the boxers he’d tail at the gym during his teenage years, being knocked out at the Royal Albert Hall when he was 11 years old, and the tears that he cried for weeks afterwards. Whether in or out the ring, he’s nagged by a haunting “feeling that something is always about to go wrong”.

open image in gallery

“Boxing’s one of those sports where you always have to sleep with one eye open,” he says. “You never really get a chance to look back and reminisce about the great nights until it’s all said and done. It’s a bit sad really. One day, I’ll be sitting in a chair, looking at all these pictures and videotapes of all these great nights and be like ‘where did it all go?’

He reflects on the toll boxing’s taken on himself. The consequence of the stress and sleepless nights, the pace and the politics. He perseveres but can’t help but dwell on his own mortality. He doesn’t see his wife and children as much as he’d like to, is nervous of becoming a distant father and “not being able to spend time with the kids in the right way”. Yet, for the time being, his obsession will not allow him to switch off.

“When I put the phone down and try to relax, all I can think about is work; four round fights, box office fights, new signings and pay-per-view buys”. Recently he was asked what he liked to do on a day-off. He says it doesn’t exist. “But don’t feel sorry for me,” he interjects. “I do it because I love it. Because I’m addicted to it.”

“But I don’t want to become that grumpy, bitter guy that boxing makes you,” he continues, perhaps in a thinly veiled reference to his domestic promotional rival Frank Warren. “My tolerance levels have dropped on all kind of things and that’s something that concerns me as a father. I’ve put on a little bit of weight and lost a little bit of hair. There’s definitely some grey on the sides.

“I look at the older promoters still going and I just think what are you doing, you’re so miserable, everything’s so negative. Get out of boxing, go and sit on a beach, go and spend time with your family. But you never want to let people win. If I left the sport there would be celebrations within the promotional industry. I’d hate to give people that edge.”

---

Eddie Hearn often gets booed. Whether he’s speaking in front of 90,000 at Wembley or 1,200 at York Hall, the crowd unfailingly jeer in a belch of beer haze. But it’s not genuine hate, just another act of theatre in the pantomime he has created. The result of being a stagemaster at the centre of his own circus. “It’s a bit of a love-hate thing [with the public],” he says. ”I get them to pay their money so I’ll never be their favourite guy. I’ve grown up watching my dad get booed on stage. He told me ‘son, if you’re worrying about getting booed, you’re really wasting your time’.

open image in gallery

“When I first started the support I got was incredible, this young guy trying to smash up the world of boxing, he’s a breath of fresh air, go on and turn over the industry. When you get to the top, you’re Dr Evil. You run boxing, booo.”

But what’s the secret to his success? Without any vanity, he says it’s about being “sexy”. His success is derived from changing the way sports are consumed. It started eight years ago in Vegas. He walked into the arena and saw a male-dominated audience drinking four-litre Diet Cokes, snacking on buckets of popcorn and thought “am I in a cinema?”

The following night, he went to a mixed martial arts bout. People were drinking champagne and vodka red bulls, women wore sequinned mini-dresses, the crowd stood, danced and roared into the early hours. Not all that glitters is gold but in boxing, the facade is personality as well as beauty. Hearn understood that, and he sold it. “Once a sport’s fashionable, there’s no turning back,” he says. “All you’ve got to do is open doors to people, let them touch it, let them feel it and they’ll be in it forever.”

It helps, of course, that Hearn now wields the sexiest commodity in boxing in Joshua. The 2012 Olympic gold medalist has transcended the sport commercially and Hearn is under no illusion over the unified heavyweight champion’s influence in propelling Matchroom’s growth over the past five years. Joshua has already headlined four stadium fights and eight pay-per-view shows in the UK in just a 22-fight career.

In the last financial year alone, Matchroom’s turnover increased by almost 25 per cent to £132.8m and reaped £17.9m in pre-tax profit. But Hearn insists financial success is not his motivation. “I never get home and think how much money did we make tonight,” he rebuts. “I’m not motivated by money. I’m motivated by numbers. People criticise us and say ‘they’re just accountants’ but it’s not about the money. It doesn’t matter if it’s one million or 20, it’s about outperforming targets.”

open image in gallery

Hearn is in New York this week where Joshua will become the first British heavyweight to headline at the iconic Madison Square Garden since Lennox Lewis in 2000 – a feat Hearn admits he never dreamed possible in his promotional career. He expects Joshua to collect a highlight-reel knockout against late replacement Andy Ruiz Jr – filling in after Jarrell Miller failed three drugs tests. The Mexican comes from an Olympic schooling but is out of shape, has slow footwork and will masquerade as a live piñata come the early hours of Sunday morning.

“The American people will fall in love with him,” Hearn coos, knowing the importance of building Joshua’s brand in the States. “I knew Anthony could become a superstar. He’s the perfect athlete and his smile lights up a room. His work ethic is incredible, I’ve never seen anyone like it – well, except me and my dad.”

The real chalice, the legacy fight, is a Vegas super bout between Joshua and American heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder. Negotiations have been torturous and protracted but with tens of millions at stake, their eventual meeting is inevitable. “That’s the biggest fight in boxing,” Hearn says untiringly. “It’s one of the biggest heavyweight fights of all time. Forget about the money, talk about legacy, they are the fights I want to promote and I’ve got to push for it.

“We’re taking boxing well beyond anywhere [my dad] ever took it. Now I’ve got to keep going and take it to a level where people will remember what I’ve done when I’m gone – that’s what my dad is synonymous with. I want to be remembered as someone who actually changed the sport of boxing. That’s my real motivation.”

Yes, it is about money, power and ousting the competition, but the crux of Hearn’s self-ascribed “addiction” is rooted in his longstanding desire to outperform his father. A fire that’s been stoked in his shadow ever since he was a teenager. “I don’t know how long I’ll want to do this,” he says nonchalantly, because once he feels he’s achieved that – if his mind will ever allow him to recognise it – there’ll be little reason to go on.

Eddie Hearn presents No Passion, No Point for BBC Radio 5 Live, available now on BBC Sounds.