Who Dares Wins by Dominic Sandbrook

Author:Dominic Sandbrook [Sandbrook, Dominic]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141975276
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-10-02T16:00:00+00:00

He was talking about snooker, but he might easily have been talking about so much more.

Even men who had more obviously gained from the snooker boom shared some of Reardon’s fears. For his fellow Welshman Terry Griffiths, snooker had brought almost unimaginable riches. Born in Llanelli, Griffiths had been a miner, postman, bus conductor and insurance salesman before turning professional in 1978. The following year he won the world championship, and for the next decade he remained one of snooker’s most popular personalities. Yet when Burn interviewed him during a tour of the Far East, Griffiths confided that money and fame had changed him. He used to be more open, he admitted, ‘more of a giver … I don’t really like the person I’ve changed into.’ Partly this was because he was homesick. But the commentator Ted Lowe, one of the fathers of the snooker boom, diagnosed a deeper problem. The players might be ‘richer than ever’, he wrote in the Daily Express, but they were ‘not as relaxed or happy as the old players who struggled to pay the rent’. Snooker was ruled by ‘sheer greed’, and even Lowe wondered if it had been worth it. ‘The fun has gone out of the games’, he thought, ‘since it was taken over by big business.’21

Barry Hearn, however, made no apology for his pursuit of success. ‘There’s so many opportunities,’ he told Gordon Burn, ‘an’ if you can take ’em, why not take ’em? ’Cause some other bugger’s gonna do it.’ In this, as in his designer watch and alligator shoes, he seemed the personification of Thatcherite materialism, the embodiment of entrepreneurial values, the ultimate Essex Man. Where, after all, had Hearn bought his first snooker hall? In Romford, where east London meets Essex, classic upwardly mobile working-class territory, home to thousands of ‘East Enders who made good and moved out’, as a contemporary profile put it. Here was snooker’s heartland, a world of small businessmen and self-improvers, leather jackets and lock-up garages, working-class patriots and first-generation owner-occupiers.

This was Mrs Thatcher’s heartland, too. In the 1960s it had been Harold Wilson country, but like neighbouring seats such as Norman Tebbit’s Chingford, it was turning increasingly true-blue. From Hearn’s club in Arcade Place it was just three miles to the huge post-war Harold Hill estate, where in August 1980 Mrs Thatcher handed over the keys to 39 Amersham Road. Those three miles were lined with suburban houses whose owners saw in her, and in Hearn, champions of hard work and self-improvement. And although Hearn sold his first club in 1989, the new owner was a man after his own heart: a self-made entrepreneur called Richard Willis, who later became vice chairman of the Romford Conservative Association. No wonder, then, that some people thought snooker had become a thoroughly Thatcherite game.22

In this context, not even the most accomplished casting agency could have found a more richly symbolic protagonist than Hearn’s most famous client. As the son of a south London bus-depot worker, Steve

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