Download or read book Barry Hearn My Journey written by Barry Hearn and published by . This book was released on 2022-04-28 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pre-order now: the autobiography of the legendary sports promoter, Barry Hearn. 'I am the largest sports promoter in the world. I promote 11 sports to a global audience of billions of people every day of my life' __________ A larger than life working class hero, Romford born and bred - always ready with the perfect soundbite - Barry Hearn was famously described as 'roguish but never a rogue'. Hearn is credited with turning snooker into one of the biggest sports in Britain. He essentially turned a sport in which competitors wear bowties into a massive, globally televised event. Away from the table, his promotions empire casts its net over a dozen sports - from professional boxing to darts, fishing to ten-pin bowling - and his career spans four decades. He also previously owned Leyton Orient football club. Packed with hilarious anecdotes from the golden age of snooker, and behind-the-scenes insight into boxing negotiations and darts bust-ups, Hearn's book is a joy to read from start to finish.
Download or read book Barry Hearn My Life written by Barry Hearn and published by Hodder & Stoughton. This book was released on 2022-04-28 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Out now: the autobiography of the legendary sports promoter, Barry Hearn. THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'I am the largest sports promoter in the world. I promote 11 sports to a global audience of billions of people every day of my life' __________ A larger than life working class hero, Romford born and bred - always ready with the perfect soundbite - Barry Hearn was famously described as 'roguish but never a rogue'. Hearn is credited with turning snooker into one of the biggest sports in Britain. He essentially turned a sport in which competitors wear bowties into a massive, globally televised event. Away from the table, his promotions empire casts its net over a dozen sports - from professional boxing to darts, fishing to ten-pin bowling - and his career spans four decades. He also previously owned Leyton Orient football club. Packed with hilarious anecdotes from the golden age of snooker, and behind-the-scenes insight into boxing negotiations and darts bust-ups, Hearn's book is a joy to read from start to finish.
Download or read book Fear and Loathing on the Oche written by King ADZ and published by Random House. This book was released on 2017-11-02 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anyone who’s ever seen or attended the PDC World Darts Championships knows that darts is no ordinary sport. Where else would you find world-class superstars, in the midst of a championship match, cultivating tomorrow’s banging hangover? Or two separate organisations, with a bitter historical rivalry, taking potshots at each other in a bid to secure players, fans and an all-important TV broadcast contract? And then there’s the fans... Darts fans are unlike any other fans in world sport. They drink the most, they wear the silliest costumes, they sing the loudest and yet they can arguably see the least live action. They feel an immense pride and ownership for the game – its theirs, and they couldn’t care less about the sneers from the mainstream. Join King ADZ as he dives headfirst into this tempestuous world, meeting former legends, future stars, dominant Internationals, the owners, the referees and of course the fans. Darts may be a simple game to many, but to most it’s absolute mayhem.
Download or read book The Challenge Culture written by Nigel Travis and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The executive chairman and former CEO of Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin Robbins reflects on the unique, results-oriented discipline he's developed over decades of leadership, which provides a blueprint for any organization to achieve prosperity. We live in an era in which successful organizations can fail in a flash. But they can cope with change and thrive by creating a culture that supports positive pushback: questioning everything without disrespecting anyone. Nigel Travis has forty years of experience as a leader in large and successful organizations, as well as those facing existential crisis-such as Blockbuster as it dawdled in the face of the Netflix challenge. In his ten years as CEO and chairman of Dunkin' Brands, Travis fine-tuned his ideas about the challenge culture and perfected the practices required to build it. He argues that the best way for organizations to succeed in today's environment is to embrace challenge and encourage pushback. Everyone-from the new recruit to the senior leader-must be given the freedom to speak up and question the status quo, must learn how to talk in a civil way about difficult issues, and should be encouraged to debate strategies and tactics-although always in the spirit of shared purpose. How else will new ideas emerge? How else can organizations steadily improve? Through colorful storytelling, with many examples from his own career-including his leadership in turning around the fear-ridden culture of the London-based Leyton Orient Football Club, of which he is part owner-Travis shows how to establish a culture that welcomes challenge, achieves exceptional results, and ensures a prosperous future.
Download or read book Deep Pockets written by Brendan Cooper and published by Constable. This book was released on 2023-04-06 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A brilliant book . . . brilliantly written. You really do need to read it' Adrian Chiles 'Mixing the sacred and the profane, high culture and low culture, the sublime and the ridiculous, Deep Pockets is the book this game of unfathomable difficulty and infinite mystery well deserves' Critic The game of snooker has a remarkable history. From humble origins, it blossomed spectacularly in the 1980s into the nation's most popular sport. Top players became celebrities. The papers were stuffed with snooker scandals. It even conquered the pop charts. In the twenty-first century, the game is still big news. Along with millions of British fans, a vast audience continues to grow across every corner of the world, from Europe to the Middle East to China. The global thirst for snooker has never been greater. But - strangely perhaps - snooker's deeper meanings have rarely been explored. It is a game that celebrates subtlety and mystery; a slow undertaking in a fast-paced world. Elegant and profound, snooker invites serious contemplation. Deep Pockets is a study of this uncharted territory - a love letter to snooker, and an impassioned journey into its soul. Because snooker, in fact, is more than a game. It is a belief set; a way of seeing; an entire philosophical system. In chapters that cover everything from time, truth, loss, luck and more, Deep Pockets explores how snooker can help us to trace the meaning of life itself.
Download or read book The Book of Football Quotations written by Phil Shaw and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-04-30 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The greatest football quotations collection ever, now in its ninth edition. This compilation includes quotes from everyone – Shakespeare to Suarez, Camus to Cantona, Busby to Beckham – who has made an apt, pithy or comical comment about football. And not just footballers and managers either – fans, pundits, groundsmen, directors and wives all get to have their say too. Every subject is covered, from tactical debates to changing lifestyles, to produce a sometimes hilarious and always thought-provoking commentary on the game. ‘My players are always the best players in the world, even if they aren’t’ - José Mourinho ‘He was a quiet man, Eric Cantona, but he was a man of few words’ - David Beckham ‘Sometimes when you aim for the stars you hit the moon’ - Ian Holloway
Download or read book Interesting written by Steve Davis and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015-04-09 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Steve Davis was just a rookie from Plumstead, south London, learning how to play from an old book his snooker-obsessed father had given him, when an encounter with Barry Hearn changed his life forever. With his backing, Steve began touring the country in a clapped-out car as an amateur. Challenging established professionals and winning titles, supported by his loyal following the Romford Roar, it wasn’t long before he progressed to the world’s stage. By the eighties, Steve had helped transform a previously shady sport into a national obsession. He and a cast of legends such as Ray Reardon, Dennis Taylor and Alex Higgins, with other young guns like Jimmy White, were doing silent battle in front of huge audiences. Tens of millions of viewers would witness the nail-biting conclusions of his world championship finals; this was snooker’s golden era. The man behind the ‘boring’ tag has always been the sport’s smartest and sharpest man. With his cool, obsessive approach, Steve rewrote the rule book and became untouchably the best player in the world and the best paid sportsman in the country. Interesting lays it all bare: what it was like to win in those pressure-cooker situations; how to cope at the top, when everyone wants you to lose; and how you deal with the moment when a man comes along who is finally better than you. This is a memoir that closely evokes the smoke-filled atmosphere of those arenas, the intrigue behind the scenes and the personal psychology and sacrifice that is required to stay at the top of such an exacting sport.
Download or read book House of Lords Select Committee on the Olympic and Paralympic Legacy Keeping the Flame Alive the Olympic and Paralympic Legacy HL 78 written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Lords: Select Committee on Olympic and Paralympic Legacy and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-11-18 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Games, the same political impetus and agreed deadlines no longer exist and many aspects of legacy are in danger of faltering, whilst some have fallen by the wayside. There is confusion on the timeframes and targets involved in delivery and a lack of clear ownership of legacy as a whole. The committee recommends that a minister be given overall responsibility for the Olympic legacy, enabling greater co-ordination across Whitehall departments. It also believes the Mayor of London should be given control over further development of east London and the Olympic Park in Stratford. There is also a warning over the geographic disparity in the economic benefits stemming from the Games. While London and the south-east of England benefited with nearly 15,000 additional jobs, just seven were created in the North East. London 2012 may have promised to "inspire a generation" but the committee says it found "little evidence [of a] step change" in sports participation levels across the UK. UK Sport, the body that invests approximately £100m in high-performance athletes and teams each year and decides funding levels for Olympic and Paralympic sports, is also criticised. The committee believes not enough is being done by UK Sport to help both team and emerging sports. The 'no compromise' approach of UK Sport has delivered medals for Team GB and has clearly improved top-end importance. This approach, however, has an inherent bias against team sports, and fails to help emerging sports, some of which, such as handball and volleyball, generated real enthusiasm at London 2012.
Download or read book Staying Power written by Phil Taylor and published by Hodder & Stoughton. This book was released on 2014-10-23 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Phil 'The Power' Taylor is the uncontested king of darts, his sixteen world championship titles between 1990 and 2013 far outclassing anything else the game has seen. He started out as a protégé of Eric Bristow, the Crafty Cockney, having wandered into his Burslem pub with a set of darts his wife had given him for his birthday. At that time Taylor was earning £52 a week working in a ceramics factory and hardly played. But jaws dropped and pint mugs tipped over as this newcomer suddenly unleashed a gift for flight that had soon eclipsed even the Crafty Cockney himself, and amassed Phil a haul of over 200 professional tournament victories. Staying Power is a year in the life of a legend, twice nominated for BBC Sports Personality of the Year, a man who made darts look a doddle to British pub-goers everywhere and set his seal on the game as the bloke to beat. A year of triumph and disaster, in which Taylor crashed out of the world championship in the second round to young outsider Michael Smith and fell asleep at home on Christmas day, exhausted from the strain of constant winning. A year when he played arguably the greatest ever game of darts, in the Grand Slam semi-final against recent world champion Adrian Lewis the two slugging it out to the wire. A year in which Taylor rocked Australia, fêted like royalty. A year of spats and hecklers, clashes on stage and off, of head-to-heads with the Dutch superstar Michael van Gerwen. But most of all this is a year in which Phil Taylor, one of sport's greatest champions, has looked hard at his life in his determination to stay in power.
Download or read book The Hate Game written by Ben Dirs and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-10-24 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chris Eubank, with his jodhpurs and gold-topped cane, who lisped in his posh accent about his distaste for the business of 'pugilism', could not have appeared more different from Nigel Benn, 'The Dark Destroyer', the Essex boy who had battled with his demons to reach the top of the boxing world. Their boxing style was just as contrasting, and it was inevitable that they would have to settle their differences in the ring. Their first bout for the WBO world middleweight title, in Birmingham in November 1990, was a brutal affair, widely held to be one of the all-time great contests. Eubank emerged victorious over Benn, the people's champion, and immediately fans called for a rematch. But, for three years, the two men circled each other before coming together again in front of over 40,000 fans at Old Trafford and a global TV audience estimated at 500 million. Author Ben Dirs has interviewed the key protagonists to tell a story that gripped the nation and that still resonates today, 20 years on. It is a tale that reveals the best and the worst of boxing, while rvealing the truth that lay behind the public facade.
Download or read book Running written by Ronnie O'Sullivan and published by Orion. This book was released on 2013-10-10 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World Snooker Champion Ronnie O'Sullivan's frank and honest account of his astonishingly dramatic life. I used to rely on drugs and alcohol to keep me going, but now I've got the healthiest addiction going - running. This book explains how running has helped me to fight my demons - my addictive personality, depression, my dad's murder conviction, the painful break-up with the mother of my children - and allowed me to win five World Snooker Championships. It is also about all of the great things in my life - my kids, snooker, my dad's release from prison, great mates who have helped me, and the psychiatrist Dr Steve Peters, who has taught me how not to run away when things get tough. Finally, it's about what it's like to get the buzz - from running, from snooker, from life. Because when it comes down to it, everyone needs something to drive them on.
Download or read book Newbon Bloody Hell written by Gary Newbon and published by Biteback Publishing. This book was released on 2023-11-16 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past fifty years, Gary Newbon has established himself as an icon of sports broadcasting. He interviewed Sir Alex Ferguson after Manchester United clinched a historic treble in 1999. He was in the ring when Gerald McClellan collapsed after suffering life-changing injuries in his fight with Nigel Benn. Nigel Mansell was his neighbour. This is the tale of a man who has spent his life in close proximity to legends; he interviewed them, befriended them and shared their defining moments until he became part of the DNA of Britain's sporting history. Many of his interviews are still used in TV shows today. In his highly anticipated memoir, Newbon tells all. Encompassing a plethora of anecdotes that reveal the depth and wit of figures such as Brian Clough, Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King and many others, this book considers how these people felt and thought during the pivotal sporting moments of the past half-century. From the Hand of God goal to the Munich massacre, Gary Newbon was there for it all. This, for the first time, is his story.
Download or read book The Ultimate Book of Darts written by Anne Kramer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Share in the euphoria that comes of the “kill shot” by learning the skills and techniques required to play a great game of darts. From the history of the sport to choosing the right type of equipment, The Ultimate Book of Darts is written in an accessible style that is perfect for both novices and seasoned professionals. Dart throwing is now a global phenomenon with new players emerging every day. This amazing sport demands remarkable precision and an agile mind from its competitors. Learn the rules for playing team games and tips for improving your score and ability for more advanced competitions. Author Anne Kramer focuses on the mechanics of dart throwing by discussing the pros and cons of various stances, such as toes square to the line versus one foot behind the other. This guide emphasizes good form over accuracy. If you develop good form, the accuracy will follow. Aside from mechanics this book also discusses the necessary equipment from types of darts to board materials, dimensions, and mounting. Whether you’re an expert marksman who competes in a pub league or a guy who just enjoys throwing sharp objects, this is the go-to guide to a longstanding and fun tradition.
Download or read book Hard Road to Glory How I Became Champion of the World written by Johnny Nelson and published by Kings Road Publishing. This book was released on 2011-04-04 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A self-confessed coward, Johnny Nelson hoped his opponents wouldn't turn up. He twice froze when given the chance to take the world title. Glenn McCrory declared: 'He's scared. I don't think he'll ever do it now' and even Johnny's mother mocked him. But by the time of his recent retirement, Johnny Nelson had been undefeated world cruiserweight champion for seven years. Now Johnny relates his moving, funny, frank and inspirational story: an amazing odyssey from chump to champ. Legendary trainer Brendan Ingle, who produced a string of champions including Naseem Hamed, described Nelson as 'the biggest success story from our gym.' He might have added that the skinny kid from the wrong side of Sheffield was also the least likely to succeed. Nelson had a stubborn streak. Determined not to let early failures stop him, he went into exile, taking fights all over the world to learn his craft. Finally, nine years after being booed from the ring, he earned the respect of everyone. Along the way he encountered the dark side of boxing: the drugs, the gangsters and the gamblers who wanted him to fix fights. He fell out with his best mates Herol Graham and Naseem Hamed and for the first time reveals exactly why they no longer talk. He tells the terrifying story of a plot to kidnap him. Johnny Nelson's story will appeal beyond fight fans as a straightforward, honest account of overcoming personal fears and terrible setbacks to become the best in the world.
Download or read book Ronnie written by Ronnie O'Sullivan and published by Seven Dials. This book was released on 2019-11-14 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ronnie is snooker's most written and talked about player, and its greatest showman. His supreme talent and style have made him the People's Champion and, as one commentator put it, 'the question is not how much does Ronnie O'Sullivan need snooker, but how much does snooker need Ronnie O'Sullivan?' A honest and candid account of his extraordinary life, Ronnie tells of the infant who was introduced to legendary snooker clubs at an impossibly early age; of the boy who frightened off the bookies aged just 12; of the teenager whose life was decimated when his father and mentor was sent to prison for life; and of the man dubbed the 'genius' of the modern game who regularly threatened to quit the sport to pursue other interests at the grand old age of 28. 'A fine autobiography ... compelling' - Independent 'O'Sullivan is as frank about his spell in the Priory clinic as he is about his father's murder conviction. His accounts of snooker tournaments and sketches of the sport's personalities will fascinate fans, but even snooker haters will be rooting for Ronnie in the game of life' - OK!
Download or read book John Virgo Say Goodnight JV My Autobiography written by John Virgo and published by Kings Road Publishing. This book was released on 2017-11-02 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Famous for his hilarious impersonations of snooker's biggest stars, JV is a household name thanks to his razor-sharp BBC Snooker commentary and the much-loved quiz show Big Break. A fascinating insight into British sporting life, taking readers from John's childhood in Salford, through smoky snooker dens, to tournaments and championships all over the world, as he relives travelling on Concorde, rubbing shoulders with royalty and much more. Admiringly nicknamed 'Mr Perfection', John tells how he overcame adversity to become UK champion, yet also reveals how gambling wrecked his dreams of becoming World Champion, and almost bankrupted him. An affectionate reminder of a time when Britain - and sport - took themselves a little less seriously.
Download or read book Does Your Rabbi Know You re Here written by Anthony Clavane and published by Quercus. This book was released on 2014-08-19 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since the children of penniless immigrants caught the train from Whitechapel to White Hart Lane--to be greeted with the refrain: 'Does Your Rabbi Know You're Here?'--this forgotten tribe have helped to shape the Beautiful Game. In telling the fascinating lives of these largely unsung trailblazers, Clavane uncovers a hidden history of Jewish involvement in English football. From Louis Bookman, the first Jew to play in England's top division, to the pugnacious winger Mark Lazarus, whose last-gasp goal won the 1967 League Cup for QPR, to shady figures like One-Armed Lou, a ticket tout who never told the story of his missing limb the same way twice, through to the businessmen who helped form the breakaway Premier League, and in the process changed the English game for ever.