Snooker may not be the force it once was, yet under the stewardship of Barry Hearn and the rest of the chaps at Matchroom Sport, the sport is starting to tap back into the consciousness of the UK public.
It was the late 60’s that snooker initially started to hit the mainstream. The sport had a torrid time of it in the few years previous, so much so that between 1958 – 1963 there wasn’t even a tournament held due to such a decline in popularity, however in 1969, thanks to the introduction of the colour television, the BBC commissioned the TV programme Pot Black to showcase their sparkling new technology to a sporting audience. And the show would go on to haul snooker back from the brink.
In fact, it did more than that, and though not everyone had colour TV’s and there were still blips like when ‘Whispering’ Ted Lowe uttered the infamous line, “Griffiths is snookered on the brown, which, for those of you watching in black and white, is the ball directly behind the pink”, snooker soon became the sport for the British armchair sports fan. The later emergence of Alex Higgins in the 70’s and Steve Davis (with the help of the aforementioned Barry Hearn) in the 80’s would only go on to fortify its place in British culture.
But by the early 90’s, snooker was struggling again. Following the readmittance of English football club’s into Europe in 1990, England’s success at Italia ’90, the consequent launch of the Premier League in 1992, together with a nationwide economic recession, snooker’s tournament prize money began to wane and the later ban on tobacco advertising only damaged the sport even further.
Thankfully though, snooker had a man in shining armour waiting in the shadows who went by the name of Barry Hearn. Almost everything Hearn has touched throughout his career has turned to gold, so his appointment as chairman of the World Professional Snooker Association in July 2010 was met with widespread adulation, and though he hasn’t quite taken snooker back to its glory days yet, snooker is undoubtedly back on the up, not just in the UK, but around the world too.
Barry Hearn, eh. What a man.
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