During his 19 years owning beloved Leyton Orient, Barry Hearn experienced highs, lows, characters and his fair share of general chaos that comes when you try to run a football club.
But for Hearn, few characters were as memorable as John Sitton.
When Hearn bought the O’s in 1995 for a nominal fee, he was taking a club drowning in debt at the bottom of the third tier, with Channel 4’s cameras documenting the period in their ‘Club For A Fiver documentary.
Hearn on working with Sitton
At the heart of his documentary was Sitton, whose combustible personality produced one of the most infamous dressing-room rants ever caught on camera. It’s a moment that Hearn still laughs about today, even if Sitton’s methods ultimately proved to be too much for him.
“I actually got it even cheaper than that,” Hearn tells FourFourTwo, when asked about the documentary, which was named after the price he had reportedly paid to former chairman Tony Wood, who had seen his coffee business decimated after the Rwandan Civil War.
“I only paid £2.43. But of course, there was £2m worth of debt which I had to take on as well. People said I was mad, but I used to go there when I was a kid. You cherish these things.”
Hearn had already amassed a fortune from snooker and immediately set about trying to transform a side floundering near the bottom of the third tier. “I went in and said ‘Right, a million pounds a year, that’s your losses, I’ll cover that million’,” he recalls. “I told the press I wanted Premier League football within five years. I knew absolutely nothing about the game, but I’m a promoter. I needed headlines. I needed people to be talking about us.”
They soon would be, mainly thanks to the antics of the club’s gaffer John Sitton. The Londoner’s passionate language and full-on management style would make for engaging viewing when Club For A Fiver was later released.
Shortly before Hearn’s arrival at the relegation battlers, an increasingly beleaguered Sitton delivered a half-time speech that would go down in football folklore. With his side 1-0 down at half-time against Blackpool, Sitton sacked defender Terry Howard on camera in the dressing room, before offering to fight two other players.
“You, you little c**t, when I tell you to do something, and you, you f**king big c**t, when I tell you to do something, do it,” he snarled. “And if you come back at me, we’ll have a f**king right sort-out in here. All right? And you can pair up if you like, and you can f**king pick someone else to help you, and you can bring your f**king dinner. ’Cos by the time I’ve finished with you, you’ll f**king need it.”
Even in the blood and guts days of the 1990s, viewers were shocked at the tirade. Hearn saw the funny side. “I loved that rant,” he says. “I quote it all the time – ‘And bring your f**king dinner’. Just fantastic. In all honesty, I think Sitton allowed the cameras into an area he shouldn’t have. They should never have been in the dressing room on a matchday.”
Hearn was aware of the infamous rant when he set up office, but decided to judge Sitton and his staff on their own merits. “I actually loved him and his assistant Chris Turner – good men, and John was very eloquent,” says Hearn. “He spoke a good game and I thought he was on to something.”
Yet there were further signs of Sitton’s ferocity that didn’t sit well with Hearn. “I watched him in training one day – he cleaned out a 16-year-old and I thought ‘Nah, that’s not my sort of man’,” he says. “Not a man with integrity.”
Sitton would eventually be let go, with his depiction in the documentary meaning other clubs were reluctant to take him on, meaning he would leave the game to become a black cab driver. “He failed in the end and I had to ask him to leave,” recalls Hearn. “You have to make tough decisions in sport.”
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