When Eddie Hearn was a kid he waited patiently for his father Barry to return from work. In the fading daylight on the grounds of his family’s home in Essex, Barry put down his briefcase, loosened his tie and spun a cricket ball as fast as he could towards his ten-year-old son.
“I knew I couldn’t afford to let my focus falter,” Hearn writes in Relentless: 12 Rounds to Success, his 2020 biography. “All I ever wanted was to make him proud and hear the words, ‘Great shot!’ Thirty years later, nothing has changed.
Barry Hearn came from nowhere and founded the family business, Matchroom Sports, in a pool hall in East London. In the 1980s and 1990s he transformed the image of sports like darts and pool, amassing his own fortune in the process.
“He’s always had a chip on his shoulder because he’s a working-class kid from Essex, who was seen as a second-hand car salesman or a bit of a git flash. And, in fact, he is a smart, very smart businessman,” says Don McRae, the UK’s foremost boxing writer and author, of Hearn’s father. “And I think he was afraid that Eddie, who he sent to public school, was going to be a fancy kid who just hung on his coattails.”
To counter this, Hearn Sr. gave his son a nickname, ‘Silver Spoon’, and tried to instill in him the principles of hard work and discipline that boxing embodies. This created the strange dichotomy that defined Eddie’s early life: attending a sweltering private school during the week, fully engaged in the sawdust-and-spittle world of professional boxing on the weekends.
“We had money,” says Hearn. “We weren’t super rich. We didn’t have 100 in-house employees and gold cutlery. But my dad was from a council state and he made money, new money. And my lifestyle was getting picked up from school in the limo, right, which was so scary looking back, then going to the gym, to see [Frank] Bruno or Nas [Hameed] either [Chris] Eubank”.
Being “a horrible jerk” in high school eventually led to Hearn being told he couldn’t go back to sixth grade, despite his father’s checkbook. “My dad used to sponsor prizes to keep them sweet, because of my behavior. So he would be at the assembly and it would be like: ‘and now the Sports High Achiever Awards, sponsored by Matchroom Sport.’ And I thought: ‘What?’ And he was like, ‘Because you’re always in trouble, I thought I’d sponsor the award.’ And then when I got lost [on sixth form] by a GCSE, which normally [the school] would let go, went downstairs to try and convince them to stay and they said ‘No. I’m sorry, you have to go.’”
Another part of the family lore is how Barry, concerned that his son was becoming an obnoxious rich kid, challenged Eddie to a boxing match when he was still just 16 years old. Eddie, who is 6-foot-4 and thought of himself as a boxer at the time, refused to back down and won the fight: “Barry physically hurt Eddie. And then he loved the fact that Eddie knocked him down,” says McRae.
Source: www.gq-magazine.co.uk