Former boxer Chris Eubank and snooker ace Ronnie O’Sullivan have been dumped in a lake by sports promoter Barry Hearn.
Ronnie’s snooker buddy Jimmy White is in there too – along with a string of other sports stars and some of Barry’s own family.
Sounds fishy? Well, it is.
Angling-mad Barry, 74, has stocked up his private lake and given the creatures names like Fish Eubank, Jimmy Whitebait and Ronnie Roach O’Sullivan.
All the fish have been tagged and recorded and Barry can even monitor their weights – just like he did with his fighters.
Other top stars that he promoted or managed could find themselves on the hook too – like former heavyweight titleholders Frank Bruno and Lennox Lewis, fellow boxer Naseem Hamed and ex-world snooker champions Steve Davis and Dennis Taylor.
Barry lives in Essex and his angling quirks were revealed by his boxing promoter son Eddie, 43.
He said: “My dad’s got a lake at his house and he has built a little chalet and just sits out on his rocking chair for hours and hours looking out at his lake.
“He’s basically gone out and bought a load of fish and put them in a lake but before he’s done that he’s tagged them and he’s given them all names.
“Every one has got a name and it’s names of the family members, friends, people he might have worked with in the past... and then he puts them in.
Then he catches them and when he catches them he scans them and looks at the number and goes ‘Oh look, there’s Dave and Dave’s put on 0.6 of a pound’.
“He’ll phone me up to tell me ‘I’ve caught you today and guess what – you’ve put on a pound’. Unbelievable!”
Speaking on Radio 4’s Saturday Live show, Eddie said his father spends hours trying to catch his favourite fish.
He added: “It’s not like you wonder what’s in there because he has put the fish in there in the first place.
“Sometimes we’ll go down there, we’ll sit for hours and he won’t catch anything.
“And we’ll pack up and he will say ‘That was amazing. How good was that?’
“And I’ll say ‘It was terrible. We sat there for two hours and didn’t get a bite’.”
