Eddie Hearn: ‘Ask someone to name three people in boxing, they’ll say: Tyson Fury, Anthony Joshua, me’
If you asked someone on the street to name three people in UK boxing, they’d probably go: ‘Tyson Fury, Anthony Joshua, Eddie Hearn.’ Or something like that – top five maybe. That’s important.”
Some may be irked by Hearn’s claim, but they’d struggle to argue against it. The promoter’s rise in boxing has been symbiotic with Joshua’s, but certainly not wholly reliant on it. Hearn himself has become a heavyweight, in a sense, and while his father – legendary promoter Barry Hearn – and “AJ” have contributed to that profile, so has the 44-year-old’s own approach to business.
“I think it’s my engine. Being a promoter is being a showman, a salesman, and no one sells like me – no one,” Hearn tells . He’s sat in breezy, linen clothing on the sizeable lawn of Matchroom HQ – a quasi-mansion on the outskirts of Brentwood in Essex, and a building that was his childhood home. On the odd occasion. That is the purest skill of promotion: presenting your show.” That is, among other things, what Hearn does so well, and that is why his evaluation of his place in British boxing is so high.
