Darts king Barry Hearn Turns His Global Sights to Table Tennis

Barry Hearn returns to Alexandra Palace this weekend with his latest sporting spectacle: the World Championship of Ping Pong.

If they think it is all over at the Alexandra Palace now that the PDC World Darts Championship has stepped back from the oche, they had better think again. The staff there may have just de-tacked the carpet, gathered up the Himalayas of empty pint pots and filled the lost-property room with forgotten items of fancy dress (every year several pantomime cow rear ends are left behind in the gents, at least one of which is still occupied). But the king of sporting spectacle will not be abandoning the place anytime soon. Indeed, the man behind the arrows claims things could get messy all over again at Ally Pally.

This weekend Barry Hearn returns to the arena where his tungsten tips have ruled with his latest innovation: the World Championship of Ping Pong. In characteristic style, he insists the event will not be quiet. Via use of laser lighting, a thumping disco beat and – we assume – 8,000 inebriated fans chanting “duh-duh-duh duh duh der-duh-duh-duh” at the end of every rally, he intends to turn the once gentle dining-room pastime of table tennis into an all-action must-watch television event on a par with the arrows.

“It’s rock ’n’ roll,” he claims of his version of the game. “It’s going to be high-fives, knocking balls into the crowd, interaction between the players and the crowd.” In short: whiff whaff meets bish bash bosh.But once the ball is in play, this will not be the game as we most recently saw it at the Olympics. In an intriguing reversion of the norm, the arch sporting moderniser is turning back the clock. Insisting that the deep padded bats flailed by Olympians have ruined the game as a spectacle, making it too quick for the spectator to follow, Hearn will be providing old-school paddles for his players. Even as he sends them into the arena clad in garish kit with ludicrous nicknames embroidered on their shirts, his players will be carrying bats of the kind last seen 30 years ago at the bottom of the kit box at your local youth club.

It will be a bit like turning up at the Open to watch Rory McIlroy address the first tee with a hickory-shafted driver. Or seeing Andy Murray attempt to return Roger Federer’s serve armed with a tiny, emaciated wooden-handled racket. Or sending Mario Balotelli out on to Manchester City’s training ground to argue with the boss wearing ankle-high workman’s boots.

Yet the old-style equipment, Hearn claims, will usher in a new era for Boris Johnson’s favourite pastime.

“I’m going to make them superstars,” he yells of the players. Which sounds like a perfectly timed shot in the arm for a sport which suffered grievously in the latest round of public subsidy. Except the man who broke darts in half by inventing his own tournament is not doing this out of a warm-hearted sense of altruism. Nor is he making a stand against technology out of any romantic insistence on the primacy of skill. He is doing it because he thinks it will look better on the telly. And thus will make him sufficient money to buy out the world’s remaining stock of padded bats and send them to landfill.

In truth, whatever he may say about putting the game back into the public eye, the future wellbeing of table tennis does not concern Barry Hearn. As he has with darts and snooker, his interest in it is restricted to becoming its monopoly provider. If this event works, the English Table Tennis Association will be obliged to absorb the Hearn way, or, like the British Darts Organisation, slowly wither in his shadow.

Hoping the removal of three decades of technical development will somehow make the game more saleable is, however, a big if. And things do not always turn out quite as Hearn predicts. Indeed, if any whiff-whaffer at Ally Pally this weekend believes his involvement in their sport will inevitably result in their elevation in the public consciousness, they should remember these two words: Leyton and Orient.

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