Love him or hate him, UK boxing promoter Eddie Hearn has undeniably helped British boxing progress in recent years since his company Matchroom Sport’s return to boxing.
As many fight fans will have seen during the week, there was some rather entertaining clips doing the rounds of Shannon Briggs online with his initial visit to the UK caught on camera this week, where he now intends to campaign at as a professional fighter for the foreseeable future.
In a very interesting clip as captured by Kugan Cassius of IFL TV, Briggs’ crew had an extended meeting with Eddie Hearn at the Matchroom offices, where Hearn can be heard joking at the beginning:
“I came from a very underprivileged background, this was my house. Every fighter that comes in I tell them, you know, I’m from the streets too, you know what I mean (laughs). My dad was from East London and we moved here, this was like his first house that he bought when he done very well for himself. We turned it into offices about seven or eight years ago.”
Having met Hearn a couple of times myself, it backs up the notion of my first impressions of what I thought of him, which was he came across as a decent bloke, who loves (and knows) his boxing, and seemed to have a good sense of humour about him (he got the better of me anyway in our banter exchange).
In many ways, the above clip is salesmanship 101, introducing an idea to someone (in this case Briggs fighting in Scotland) and then before you know it, solely focusing on that idea. As unlikable as he might be to some, he’s just doing his job as a boxing promoter which at the end of the day, is a salesman job – in essence.
Having said the above, there’s also no doubting that there has been the odd pay per view disaster Hearn has put on during his tenure in boxing over the last four or five years (Haye vs Harrison and Bellew vs Cleverly II come to mind) but overall, when you really analyse the level of fights that were taking place before he came into the sport, the standard has gone up across the board.
The UK is probably now one of boxing’s main global markets over the last few years and you’d be a fool to think that big events like Froch vs Groves II that packed out 80,000 in Wembley put on by Hearn, didn’t contribute to this growing trend somewhat.
He has his detractors probably due to his over enthusiastic confidence that he portrays regularly along with mentioning of money perhaps a little more than some would like, along with in general, human beings liking to shoot down anyone who is on top in their given craft, but make no mistake, Eddie Hearn has been very good for boxing since his incorporation into the promotional side of the sweet science.
But he has high standards to keep because of this, and fans will be eager to see another big stadium fight this summer in the UK.
(Image source and credit: Sky Sports Twitter)
