A insightful look into the thinking and achievements of Barry Hearn, owner / founder of Matchroom Sports from the Observer.
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Play Your Cards Right
Poker, pool, darts, snooker, boxing, football, fishing ... all in a day's work for Barry Hearn, as he tells Will Buckley
Sunday January 1, 2006
The Observer
In the early stages of his book, From Winchester to This, Willie Donaldson attempts to give some advice to the new man on his team scouting for locations for a television series. He settles on the following: "To succeed in life you must delay for as long as possible the moment when you suddenly say, 'Never mind, it's all bollocks anyway' - not least if you're the man in charge. Others on the enterprise lose heart if the man in charge suddenly sees the joke."
It is a thin line but Barry Hearn has avoided crossing it even when pitching programmes as esoteric as six hours of live fishing from Doncaster, the curiously watchable Fish'O'Mania, now in its twelfth year. It is an ability that over the past two decades has helped him to build his company, Matchroom, into the Tesco of sports broadcasting, knocking out perhaps as many as one in every eight hours of sports programming broadcast in Britain. Hearn claims to be responsible for 40,000 hours of product, which equates to 1,666 days of solid, no-sleep viewing. And should you manage that, Hearn would only have produced a shed-load more while you were doing it.
Full Story Here: http://sport.guardian.co.uk/columnists/story/0,10260,1676016,00.html
--------------
Play Your Cards Right
Poker, pool, darts, snooker, boxing, football, fishing ... all in a day's work for Barry Hearn, as he tells Will Buckley
Sunday January 1, 2006
The Observer
In the early stages of his book, From Winchester to This, Willie Donaldson attempts to give some advice to the new man on his team scouting for locations for a television series. He settles on the following: "To succeed in life you must delay for as long as possible the moment when you suddenly say, 'Never mind, it's all bollocks anyway' - not least if you're the man in charge. Others on the enterprise lose heart if the man in charge suddenly sees the joke."
It is a thin line but Barry Hearn has avoided crossing it even when pitching programmes as esoteric as six hours of live fishing from Doncaster, the curiously watchable Fish'O'Mania, now in its twelfth year. It is an ability that over the past two decades has helped him to build his company, Matchroom, into the Tesco of sports broadcasting, knocking out perhaps as many as one in every eight hours of sports programming broadcast in Britain. Hearn claims to be responsible for 40,000 hours of product, which equates to 1,666 days of solid, no-sleep viewing. And should you manage that, Hearn would only have produced a shed-load more while you were doing it.
Full Story Here: http://sport.guardian.co.uk/columnists/story/0,10260,1676016,00.html
Maybe he'll come back as a heavyweight