Barry Hearn

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Barry Hearn(born 1949, Dagenham, Essex) is an English sports entrepreneur, the founder and chairman of promotions company Matchroom Sport. A qualified accountant who made his first fortune by buying and selling a chain of snooker halls, he began his promotional career in 1974 working with little remembered players Geoff Foulds (Neal's father) and Vic Harris before becoming manager of six times world champion Steve Davis from 1976, and prospered from the snooker boom of the 1980s when he formed Matchroom with players Davis and Tony Meo. Later Matchroom snooker players include Terry Griffiths, Dennis Taylor, Willie Thorne, Neal Foulds, Jimmy White, Cliff Thorburn and Ronnie O'Sullivan. He moved into boxing in 1987, and has promoted leading British and Irish boxers such as Chris Eubank, Nigel Benn, Lennox Lewis, Naseem Hamed, Herbie Hide and Steve Collins. Matchroom is also involved in pool, tenpin bowling, golf (see PGA EuroPro Tour), fishing, darts (as chairman of the Professional Darts Corporation) and poker. It specialises in creating comparatively low-grade events to fill the hours of television sport air-time created by the boom in digital sport channels.

In a separate venture, Hearn has been chairman of the football league club Leyton Orient since 1995. Prior to Hearn's takeover the club was facing a financial disaster due to the collapse of the then chairman Tony Wood's coffee business in Rwanda at the time of the Rwandan Genocide. Hearn's intervention and financial input assured the club's future. Although Hearn has been succesful in stabilising the club financially his tenure has overseen the club's longest run in the bottom division (known through the years as '4th Division', '3rd Division' and 'League 2') of the Football League since its creation (in 1958). However at the culmination of the 2005-06 season Leyton Orient earned promotion to the third tier of English league football (league 1) this being their first automatic promotion since 1969-70.

Perhaps his finest moment came when he appeared in the video for "Snooker Loopy", a hit for rockney megastars Chas & Dave. Despite only appearing for mere seconds, Hearn has stated his desire to have the words "Pot the red then screw back" chiseled into his grave.

Barry Hearn has also moved into the construction industry, selling off large portions of his "assets" and turning them into high rise property.