WHEN Eddie Hearn speaks you tend to listen. It’s not as if the boxing promoter is intimidating in that way you imagine someone who promotes fights for a living might be. Good-looking, permatanned Hearn is the quintessential Essex boy with the easy charm of a door-to-door salesman.

Last year, I and a few other journalists from the Scottish boxing scene stood in conference as Hearn held court prior to a Ricky Burns world title fight. His material – and that of his boxers – provided three days’ worth of stories in the way that big-bout pressers tend to do. Eddie’s blue eyes started spinning like kaleidoscopes, the dimples appeared and I was smitten – drinking in his words like a Jim Jones devotee: Willie Limond would quit if he lost his fight that weekend against Tyrone Nurse. One fight and a defeat later and Limond was climbing into the ring to face Michal Vosyka that December.

Then it was Hearn’s turn, telling us that should Burns beat Michele Di Rocco to win a third world title he would join the ranks of the all-time greats. By the time it got around to talking about Glasgow 2014 hero, Charlie Flynn, he had metamorphosed from promising lightweight to “a little superstar”.

On reflection, most of what Hearn and his entourage said was balderdash.

But behind the hype lies an uneasy truth: for all boxing’s razzmatazz and pantomime-villain appeal the viewing figures rarely match the perceived interest from the wider public. At 27.3 million viewers, Muhammad Ali against Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden in 1971 remains the high-water mark for a live fight broadcast on UK television.

The 1990s, the era dominated by middleweights Chris Eubank, Nigel Benn and Steve Collins, boasts six of the top-10 audiences for domestic fights broadcast in the subsequent years after that Ali-Frazier blockbuster. Between 1992 and 1994, figures ranged from 10m for Eubank v Lindell Holmes in 1993 to 16m for Eubank against Benn in the same year. Eubank was a natural showman, he was an artist inside the ring and had the perfect persona for winding up opponents – and, crucially, audiences.

By comparison, the Tony Bellew/David Haye fight at the O2 Arena in March attracted 600,000 pay-per-view customers. The low point of Haye v Bellew came in the days leading up to the bout during which the former waged an unseemly verbal war which culminated in him warning the latter that he might kill him.

“He’s risking his life,” said Haye of Hearn’s man. “This isn’t about his career, his life is on the line.” The British Boxing Board of Control subsequently fined Haye £25,000 for his comments. The ill-feeling generated between two complete strangers was as unpalatable as it was predictable. It was not the first time Haye had provoked controversy following his claim that his fight against Audley Harrison in 2010 would “be as one-sided as a gang rape”.

The trash talk in the run-up to fights promoted by Hearn is a familiar theme. Hence, the grudge between George Groves and Carl Froch and then the feud between Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua – a fight which has been set for some unspecified time in the future but might have happened sooner but for the suspension of Fury’s boxing licence for substance abuse.

Next weekend, another of Hearn’s fighters Ohara Davies will fight Scotland’s Josh Taylor. The night’s proceedings can be viewed free-to-air on Channel 5 under the banner “Bad Blood” since the two of have embarked on a series of exchanges on social media which have, conveniently, stoked the fires of resentment between the two men.

The flip side to all this jousting, though, is the argument that when Joshua resisted Wladimir Klitschko’s attempts to embroil him in a verbal sparring match prior to April’s world heavyweight unification bout it helped to produce one of the best fights of the last decade, one watched by more than 1.5 million viewers, the record for a UK pay-per-view audience.

Contrived scenarios involving threats of prolonged pain are for the most part risible but they run the risk of becoming tedious. Yet the sport seems powerless to act over the apathy that is enveloping it. Rather than world boxing seeking to establish new ways to breathe life into it such as reducing the number of belts on offer or organising proper unification bouts that people will pay to see, it has sought to import gimmicks from other more successful enterprises. Instead, the smack talk of WWE wrestling has become the norm, going so far as Fury dressing up in Batman’s jump suit prior to his win over Klitschko in late 2015.

The sport’s integrity will be wounded when Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather pull on their dollar-stuffed gloves for a bout that matches up the biggest name in UFC against that in boxing. The received wisdom is that Mayweather will win with ease. But, with a $100 million purse on the table, McGregor cares little for the perception that he is merely a walking punchbag.

Boxing’s public image took a further battering last week when Collins and Benn, whose respective ages total 105, announced plans to fight for a third time in October or November, 21 years after their last encounter.

Eddie Hearn will be kicking himself that he didn’t think of it first.