In Eddie Hearn’s huge Essex office, a huge photograph of Muhammad Ali knocking out Sonny Liston hangs above his desk. Towards the door is a huge bottle of Courvoisier given to him by somebody he can’t remember. The office overlooks a huge garden with its helipad and attached forest. Hearn doesn’t understand the concept of small. He is a giant of a man, mega-successful, motor-mouthed, stonkingly wealthy, with a desire to best the opposition that verges on the pathological.
Take the relatively understated scoreboard on his cabinet, pitting him against his father, Barry – the founder of their Matchroom Sport empire and a rival for the title of Britain’s leading sport promoter, though he is now officially retired. “Boxing skills, 1-0 to Eddie. Snooker skills, 1-0 to Barry. Instagram followers, 62 to Barry, 1.2 million to Eddie.” And on it goes. “Amazon book reviews, 33 to Barry; 1,370 for Eddie. Height: Barry 6ft 2in, Eddie 6ft 5in. Golf handicap: Barry 19, Eddie 15.” The final score gives Eddie a 5-4 victory. To say that father and son are competitive is like saying Imelda Marcos had a fondness for footwear.
Eddie Hearn’s fighters, who include the two-time former world heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua and the current world lightweight champion Katie Taylor, are rarely out of the news. Remarkably, though, Hearn seems to make more headlines than they do. He is the author of an award-winning memoir (aptly called Relentless), writes columns for Men’s Health, has a BBC podcast series in which he interviews sporting greats, is involved in drug-testing controversies and hosts press conferences with the brio of a latter-day Don King, regularly photobombing pictures of his boxers. His father was no slouch on the self-promotion front (appearing on Top of the Pops in the video for Chas and Dave’s 1986 hit single Snooker Loopy), but Eddie is in a different league.
Barry Hearn wanted to give his two children the best education money could buy, so he sent them to exclusive private schools. His daughter, Katie, excelled academically and fenced for England. The trouble with Eddie was that he hated Brentwood School, thought it was soft and privileged, and dossed. The trouble with Barry is that even though he’d sent Eddie there, he was petrified it would make him soft and he already knew his son was privileged. So he toughened him up in the most extraordinary way.
Eddie, now 44, points through a huge office window to the 20 acres in front of us. His father was a decent fast bowler. There’s nothing Hearn Sr loved more than getting the gardener to mow a cricket strip on the back lawn, then hurling the cricket ball as fast as he could at his 12-year-old son. “He’d come in, full run, and I’d get one in the guts.” Were you scared, I ask him. “No, I grew to love it because I wanted to make him proud.”
Barry’s bowling brutality paid off. Eddie batted for Essex from under-11s to under-17s. Were you good enough to go professional? “I was never good enough to be a superstar, but I could have played county cricket.” And that wouldn’t have been good enough? “No.” You’d have considered yourself a failure? “Yes, if I’m being serious.” If you’d not come from such a cushty background, and gone on to play for Essex, would you have thought it success? “Yeah, probably. I’m a little bit envious of the normal life. It’s difficult to say because people think, ‘Oh, shut up!’”
Barry made his money transforming snooker and darts into national TV sports. But when Eddie was eight, his father started promoting boxers. Hearn Jr adored the world of boxing. Every day he went to the gym, to hang out with the fighters. As a schoolboy, he became friends with the likes of Frank Bruno, Naseem Hamed, Chris Eubank and Nigel Benn.
At 12, he started to box, showed talent, and his father made a solemn oath. “He always said to me, ‘When you’re 18 I’m going to take you to the gym and we’re going to have a fight, and I’m going to show you the difference between me and you.’” Was that a threat or a promise? “I was excited. I couldn’t wait to be 18. But when I got to 16, I was 6ft 1in, already boxing at Billericay Boxing Club, and he said, ‘I think we should call it forward.’”
It’s interesting how often he calls Barry him, as if he’s not quite sure how to refer to his own father. “So we went to Romford, where his gym was, put our gloves on, and we did three two-minute rounds, and the bell went and he came out and we had a real war. He hurt me a couple of times, but I got through the first round and ended up stopping him in the second round with body shots.”
He says Barry was so proud of him. “The next day he was at a press conference, talking about snooker or something, and he was like, ‘I had the best day yesterday! I took my son down the gym, thought I was going to flatten him and hit him on the chin hard as I could …’” Would he have knocked you out? “He tried.” But you floored him in the end? “Twice. If it was me I’d keep it quiet,” he says with gravelly voiced braggadocio.
“My dad was definitely an unorthodox father.”
What did your mum think? “She was furious when she found out.” With your dad? “Yeah, a 48-year-old man. She was like, ‘What are you playing at?’ He said, ‘I needed to find out.’” Hearn proved he was tough enough to win his father’s approval.
As far as his school was concerned, Hearn was too tough. “I was an arsehole. Brash. Threw my weight around.” I read that he bullied Jodie Marsh at school. Is that true? “Nah. Nah, but I was boisterous. I was one of the lads, I was definitely flash.”
What advice would you give your younger self? “Have more respect for your elders.” The thing is, he says, he could be hanging out with his dad and a top boxer in Vegas over the weekend and be back in school on the Monday. He considered his teachers to be failures with nothing useful to impart. “I’m looking at the teachers thinking, ‘Who are you telling me? Dad’s Barry Hearn. What are you, a teacher?’ I hate myself for that.” Were you nasty? “No, never nasty. Just Jack the lad. I’ve always had a good heart but I had a chip on my shoulder.”
I don’t get it, I say. If you had a problem with discipline, surely you’d have a problem with your dad constantly telling you what to do? “No, because …” The words don’t come, but I think the answer is simply that he idolised Barry, and was happy to let his father mould him. “He always says, ‘You were my project.’ I’m like, ‘Thanks, Dad!’ He says he was building me to take over: ‘And I wanted to mould you into that individual.’” It sounds like an Essex version of Succession.
He fell one grade short of qualifying to stay on for the school’s sixth form. If he’d been liked, he would have easily got in, he says, but they turfed him out, and he went to the ropey local sixth-form college. It was a turning point: the boy who had been so lazy and dismissive at school was appalled when he came across fellow pupils who just wanted to doss and smoke weed. Again, he had a problem with discipline – this time, the lack of it. But he studied hard, did well in his A-levels, went to university and worked for a sports management company before joining the family business. His ambition was simple: to outdo his father.
But there was a problem. How could he measure success when Barry had come from nothing and already built up the business? It really has tortured him, and continues to do so today. “The hardest thing for a person growing up with a successful father, particularly, is to become a success in your own right. I would love to have had a chance to make it from nothing because that is the greatest achievement.”
He set himself a goal: Matchroom would dominate the world of boxing. “When I came into boxing, in the UK there were four promoters on Sky, including Matchroom. I went to Sky and said, ‘You’ve got to give me all the dates exclusive,’ and they said, ‘We don’t do that.’” Were you playing the nasty bastard? “No, I thought, ‘I need to get rid of these people to dominate boxing, and they’re not good enough anyway.’ I said to Sky, ‘OK, watch me go, and when the contracts are up in six months let me know.’” Sure enough, Sky got rid of his rivals.
How important was it to be more successful than Barry? “It was the only thing I could win.” He smiles. “This feels like a counselling session. If everything is about winning and beating the opposition, and that’s what he’s about, the only way I can win is to be bigger than him, to do more than him, to outperform him because what else will I be compared to? I’ll always be Barry Hearn’s son.”
Do you think you’ve finally outdone the old man? “No UK boxing promoter had ever done a major network TV deal in America. So I looked at what he did in the UK and said I needed to be the biggest in the world: we need to go to America and get that TV deal. I needed to do shows worldwide, cos he never done that. So I went and did that. So I know now if you say to anyone who knows boxing, ‘Who achieved more in boxing, who is the bigger promoter?’ everyone says, ‘Eddie Hearn.’” Does that satisfy you? “It’s satisfied me to know I have made a name in my own right as a promoter. The way I’m respected. Hated but respected – that’s enough for me.”
He claims to have taken Matchroom to a level his father could never have dreamed of. How much are you worth? “No idea!” he says coyly, though a source close to him tells me the business is worth between £800m and £1bn.
Hearn says a measure of his success is that many people in the boxing world want to destroy him, just as he did others in the early days. He has been widely criticised for supporting the boxer Conor Benn, despite him failing two drug tests. After the British Boxing Board of Control declared last year that the fight between Benn and Chris Eubank Jr was “prohibited” in the wake of Benn testing positive for clomifene, Matchroom said it was considering a legal challenge.
Today, Hearn admits he made mistakes. “I was fired up. I should have just said, ‘The board have made their decision, they’re not sanctioning the fight, and the fight’s off.’” Hearn has been accused of hypocrisy – having zero tolerance for other boxers who fail drug tests, but supporting Benn. “The problem is when you have personal relationships with a fighter,” he says. “Take Conor Benn. I’ve known the young man for six years. I don’t deny he produced positive tests, but I believe he never took any supplements on the banned list, and never intentionally would cheat in a training camp and a fight.”
Weren’t you unwilling to stop the fight because it would have robbed you of a big pay day? He laughs at the idea. “The money from that fight makes no difference to me or the business really in terms of the hassle. The profit from a fight like that would be a million quid. The aggravation I’ve had over eight months, no thanks. But I believe Conor. And I know when he gets cleared I’ll be the one he remembers because I stood by him, and that’s what you do when you believe in somebody. I have taken so much stick on Conor Benn.” Has it been worth it? “Only in my heart. I’ve been true to myself on it.” Has it damaged your reputation? “Probably, but it hasn’t damaged our business.”
Hearn spends much of his life in a plane, hot-winging it from country to county to promote his fights. He has just returned from the US, and is now preparing for Anthony Joshua’s next bout in August. He and his wife Chloe have two daughters, aged 10 and 13: he admits he struggles to see the girls as much as he should do, but tells me they understand in the way he understood why his father was away working so often.
For all the Bentleys and Rollers, the TV deals and Instagram followers, there’s something rather sad about the Eddie Hearn story. Despite the success, he admits nothing now satisfies him. He just goes looking for the next bigger hit. “If you’re that driven it’s never-ending… I want more countries, I want global domination. I did Joshua v Klitschko at Wembley, the biggest fight of all time. Straight after that fight, the next day I’m working on the next one. I should have gone out, had a few drinks, and gone, ‘Look at what we’ve just done!’ But that is the problem with the mindset I was built into.” Ambition is an addiction? “Yeah, and it’s impossible to sustain without imploding. Unless you find a different way of thinking.”
Hearn tells me he has found that different way of thinking. He realises now that there is more to life than winning, and is an advocate for promoting participation in sport. One of his daughters is a talented footballer, and he could never understand why the coach would say the best players had to be substituted to ensure everybody gets a game. Now he does, he says. But even as he’s saying it, he doesn’t sound convinced. “It’s all about everyone getting a game, and I’m like, ‘You don’t take your best players off,’ and they’re like, ‘No, we do because we need to make sure everyone gets a game,’ and I’m like, ‘No, we’re going to lose.’ And they’re like, ‘It’s OK if we lose,’ and I’m like, ‘Nahnahnahnah.’ But it’s all about participation and getting kids active in sport. So my true mentality is not one I preach because I don’t think it’s necessarily helpful for people.”
What is that true mentality? “Winning – by any means necessary. That’s how I’ve been taught.”
His father was in his 50s when he had the first of his two heart attacks. Eddie Hearn recently lost two stone because he realised the lifestyle, the constant travelling and unhealthy eating, was taking its toll. He insists he’s seen the light, but I’m not so sure. He might claim to be a workaholic in recovery, but to me he sounds like a man who has yet to book into a rehab centre. “My attitude to life is: if it kills you, it kills you. It’s the same for a fighter. The danger is part and parcel of what you’re trying to achieve.” He pauses, and says he’s not tempting fate, just being a realist. “Of course you don’t want it to kill you, but you also have to acknowledge the risk.”
• This article was amended on 28 June 2023. The offices of Matchroom are in Brentwood, not Chelmsford as an earlier picture caption stated.
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