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 – it’s 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.
King ADZ is the author of eight books, published by Thames & Hudson and HarperCollins. All his books to date have been concerned with youth-culture, sub-culture and street art. He has been creative consultant for numerous global brands including Adidas, Vice, Levis, Diesel, Smirnoff and Guinness. His latest feature documentary, The Iconoclast, profiling the notorious international art smuggler, Michel Van Rijn, has secured cinema distribution in the UK and US.
For Beardie, who will always be my champion.
It’s been almost two weeks of solid darts and drinking and dabbing and more darts and then a party or two where most people are talking about the darts and right here right now I am high as a kite stood slap bang in the middle of the arena in Alexandra Palace surrounded by a few thousand people – most of whom are dressed in some very professional, mind-bending costumes but all of whom are about to lose their shit. The Simpsons are in the row to my left but for some reason Bart has outgrown Homer and it’s Lisa who – a little out of character – has just steamed back in after smoking back-to-back Mayfairs, ensuring she doesn’t get caught short when the action begins for real. Marge has pulled off her mask as she’s feeling a little the worse for wear but after she takes a couple of deep breaths her nausea seems to pass. Woody from Toy Story makes a dash for the toilets, almost wiping out a platoon of Stormtroopers who are speed-marching back to their seats in tight formation after completing a heroic mission to the bar for an imperial amount of lager and sufficient depth charges to take out the Death Star. The music is slowly and subtly getting louder, faster, stronger. The classic pop-house banger of The Chemical Brothers’ ‘Galvanize’ increases the pace before seamlessly blending into an almost inevitable house remix of Gala’s ‘Free from Desire’, which gees-up the gang of Little Alexes from Clockwork Orange – each one complete with cod piece, bowler hat, singular eyelashes and nobbling stick (how did they get them through security?).
Back to the music building and building and building and just after it cuts back to a snatch of the housey-chanty chorus of ‘da da da da da da’ I take a quick sip of my shandy and wipe my brow. By now I’m sweating like the proverbial pig under my heavy costume. The atmosphere is what you’d call electric, with a buzz of anticipation zapping around the place, generated, no doubt, by all the static bright plastic being worn, not to mention the music, the lager, the tension. And just after the anthemic sing-a-long lines of ‘Chase the Sun’ by Planet Funk drops once more, the lights go out …
… the hall the size of an aircraft hangar goes pitch black …
… and just for a moment …
… all is quiet …
‘You can take the darts out of the pub, but you can never take the pub out of the darts.’
Martin Adams, Bobby George, Dr Patrick Chapin, et al.
‘Darts is something that they can never tame,’ I tell some actor in a pub just off Tottenham Court Road after he asks what I’m up to and I mention this book. ‘It’s the only sport they can never really clean up and remove the smell of the pub.’ By the time I’ve finished spouting this line he might just be changing his mind about darts, and makes a face like De Niro, as if to say, Blimey – perhaps there is something interesting in there after all.
One night, hundreds of years ago, in an inn or tavern that wouldn’t look out of place in the ’hood of Robin, a soldier who’d supped one too many meads (or whatever the tipple of choice was back then) snapped a few arrows he’d nicked from his mate’s quiver and lobbed them towards the bottom of an empty barrel that someone had kicked on its side. One of the darts went reasonably near the centre ‘eye’ but the others fell on the floor. His mate clocked this attempt through the fog of alcohol and tobacco smoke and immediately spotted a challenge (because that’s what soldiers do). ‘I can do better than that.’ And after reclaiming the broken arrows, he threw them – one by one – at the target, almost hitting the ‘eye’ twice. That night something took hold of those weary drunken warriors as they played their newly discovered game over and over, until the landlord lost his patience and turfed them out into the cold English night, broken arrows and all.
By contrast, the modern world of darts is a £50-million industry – the majority of this revenue coming from sponsorship, live events and television rights. It also generates tens of millions of pounds as an export, as the sport is rapidly gaining popularity across the world in countries as far-reaching as Thailand, China, India, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Even the USA can’t ignore the potential revenue up for grabs if darts can somehow tip into the mainstream across the pond. The fortunes of darts – as we know it today – have been anything but steady, yet since the early twentieth century, when breweries began organising darts leagues, one relationship has remained: as mentioned above, darts and boozers go hand in hand.
It wasn’t always like this. After our year-dot moment in that crusty old ale house, this exotic new pastime took several centuries to ripple out across the land, but by the 1800s a primitive game of ‘darts’ was being played across England and France (both countries were ruled by much the same dynasty back then) under a number of different permutations. At this stage, there was no uniformity to the rules except that the board was round and you threw some kind of stubby arrow at it. At some point towards the beginning of the nineteenth century, travelling French fairgrounds adopted it as a game of skill – you had to score under 21 points to win a prize. Being a carny game, this was naturally much harder than it looked, especially since missing the relatively small scoring part of the board resulted in an extra 18 points being added to your tally. The arrangement of the numbers on the board, on first glance, appeared random, but it was actually designed to penalise the player for their inaccuracy. The darts were called ‘flechettes’, which means small arrow, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the game had crossed the channel and become an integral part of the typical British fairground. The French began to manufacture darts in around 1860 and as the game rose in popularity, they began to export them from Northern France to Britain, where more and more people were beginning to play. You’d be right to speculate that they were perhaps practising at home so they could win at the fair …
There are two theories about what happened next. The first theory is that in 1896 a carpenter from Bury called Brian Gamlin (now there’s a darts name if ever there was one) designed a numbered board that is still in use today. It was created following the basic premise that the high numbers were placed next to the low ones so the player paid the price for inaccuracy. The top score was the bullseye. In essence, Gamlin took the original French board, added a bullseye and called it his own.
Theory Two is that in 1913, Thomas William Buckle (again a fine name that lends itself to our beloved sport. Today he’d be called ‘The Buckle’, renowned for putting a tight squeeze on his opponents), a domino maker from Yorkshire, created what is now called the ‘Yorkshire board’. This was identical to today’s board but without the doubles and trebles. So again, remarkably similar to Gamlin’s, which as we’ve already established was based on the original French design. To quote the Beastie Boys – ‘what comes around goes around’.
The next stage in the evolution of darts followed swiftly in 1898 when Nathan P. McKenney, of Dixon, in the County of Lee, Illinois, USA, created a paper-folded dart flight.
‘My invention relates to toys and games, and particularly to a game apparatus of the “dart and target” type, and has for its object to provide a dart, adapted to be projected manually, whereof the feather is of four-wing construction and is formed from a foldable blank of paper or other flexible material to adapt it to be replaced with facility,’ McKenney wrote on his patent application form. This was quickly followed by a patented metal dart barrel in the UK. From that point on, there was no looking back. The board we know and love today is there for all to admire, and the dart flies through the air towards it with a lot more accuracy, even if there is some haziness about the true origins. It’s probably French, let’s leave it at that.
You’ll be pleased to know this is where the ancient history lesson ends.
To the uninitiated, the actual physical activity of darts, its metronomic repetitiveness, could frankly make spectating the game somewhat dull. Pull away from the board a bit and the view doesn’t get much better: two people throwing some rolled brass, steel or tungsten at a cork circle stuck to the wall at a certain height from a very specific distance. Swing the camera 180 degrees and you will see a somewhat younger crowd drinking, shouting, tooting, singing – some dressed as popular cartoon or promotional characters, some just giving it large in their finest designer clothes. It’s 100 per cent working class and 100 per cent popular culture – a bona fide cultural movement to be recognised and documented as any other. The crowd is 90 per cent white and 70 per cent male. Why is it so white? And why, when the actual sport is so repetitive, is it so popular?
One thing is undisputed: the popularity of darts is yet again on the rise, as the sport seems to keep dipping in and out of the mainstream – the last peak was in the late seventies/early eighties. What’s more, there’s no doubt that it’s coming back in a bigger and louder and way more raucous manner. A question that keeps nagging me – and nagging those who participate at both the professional and the amateur level – is whether darts is destined to remain forever on the fringes of contemporary sport. Will it ever really be accepted as a ‘proper’ sport?
The game is unquestionably wrapped around the extraordinary personas that the players adopt – what they represent, how they behave when they win or lose and, probably most importantly, how they react under pressure – even though we all know that these outlandish characters are as manufactured as the oversized and lairy shirts they play in.
There is no denying that the heritage of darts is rooted in the (now declining) pub culture of Britain. When you look at the names, the characters, the epic battles, the feuds, the classic rags-to-riches storylines where working-class men can actually ‘make something’ of themselves, a slightly more complex, more intriguing narrative comes into view. The five-time World Champion Eric Bristow taking an unemployed Phil Taylor under his wing and mentoring him to become the greatest ever champion mirrors the story of a prodigal son. Alan Evans emerging from the Rhondda Valley and rising to become the first superstar of darts undoubtedly has echoes of David and Goliath.
In this world, the venues – the landscapes for these epic battles – are rarely exotic, but they are real, they are industrial and they are predominantly northern; well grody, in other words. In its way, though, to the insider, this is a grand landscape. The landmark clubs etched deep into the desk of darts history speak for themselves:
Heart of the Midlands, Nottingham – now the legendary Rock City
Jollees Cabaret Club, Stoke-on-Trent – a Wilkinson’s department store today
Blackpool Winter Gardens – the stag-and-hen-do Vegas of the north
The Circus Tavern – once the jewel in the Essex crown, now a lap-dancing club
Lakeside Country Club – controversially known as ‘Lakeshite’ by some
Alexandra Palace – uncontroversially claimed as the pinnacle of darts by others
Three in the north, three down south. All places I will visit, revisit and get to know a lot better by the time I’m done.
Darts in Britain was always at home in the pub, and at the start of the twentieth century the pub was the centre of the community. You could always find a variety of games to play in the boozer; it was what you did. You drank and you played. No television. Cinema was still a twinkle in the eyes of the Lumière Brothers, the variety halls offered live entertainment – singing and dancing, magic and acrobats – but the heart of the conversation was found down your local. Naturally, as darts became more and more popular it found a home in every pub.
In 1924 the National Darts Association was formed in London. It standardised the sport, laid out the rules and regulations, and helped many pubs form their own teams. For all the purists out there, the first organised and regulated competitive darts tournament was played in England when the ‘Darts Challenge Cup’, sponsored by News of the World and CN Kidd & Sons brewery, was held in London, and won by William Jewiss who hailed from Dagenham.
By 1938 the event attracted over 280,000 entrants, with over 14,500 spectators cramming into the Royal Agricultural Hall in Islington to watch, but then the Second World War put a temporary halt to all competition. When it re-started in 1947 as the News of the World Individual Darts Championship – the championship every darts player wanted to win – it was held at Alexandra Palace. The winner that year was a Harry Leadbetter of St Helens, who no doubt pocketed about three quid and spent it before he’d got to the bottom of the hill on which Ally Pally is built.
By the mid 1950s there were well over 600,000 applicants each year, which throws up the question: how did they deal with those logistics without the use of computers? The answer to this is that the News of the World employed a team of women to keep the applicants in some kind of order, to run the mailing list, and to keep the players in the loop via the postal system.
Popular tastes were changing, and this is something that plays a big part in the story of darts. The fact that a tabloid was its first-ever sponsor positions the game firmly in the mainstream, and even though there is some archive film of the Queen Mother throwing a few arrows to show she was at one with her people, before the 1970s, darts was rarely embraced outside of its natural home – a working-class pub – no matter how popular it got.
In April 1972, Alexandra Palace was the venue for darts’ first appearance on national TV – London Weekend Television’s World of Sport – and this momentous event propelled the sport into another dimension. Behold 12,000 fans in the building (most of whom looked like the Bay City Rollers, with their vibrantly patterned shirts dangling open, huge flares, and some very scary stack heels, all supping those minuscule cans of Ind Coope Double Diamond pale ale) and a record-breaking seven million watching on the box at home. It was after this historic televised moment that the whole concept of big-money sponsorship of the sport began to take shape in the mind of brand managers. The word was spreading and the first darts superstars were created.
‘Twelve thousand darts fans turn up at the Ally Pally as drunk as skunks. They cheer on their heroes just like a football crowd. They have banners, gonks, rattles, the lot. It will be great telly.’ That’s how legendary television producer Donald Baverstock sold it.
It was around this time (1973) that the British Darts Organisation (BDO) was formed by Olly Croft. As he put it: ‘Everybody wanted to play darts. It was very addictive and if you get involved you become very passionate. We tried to encourage women and kids to come and everything. We made it a big family thing, and that was the start of what we call the BDO family.’
‘Olly Croft shook my hand and smiled,’ Sid Waddell, one of the most iconic commentators, recalled in his autobiography, Bellies and Bullseyes. ‘I was not sure what to make of him. He spoke with a rough cockney twang and was reckoned to be the owner of a profitable tile company. He told anybody who would listen that he wanted to be the “Alf Ramsey of Darts”. His dictatorial attitude to the players when he did become darts supremo was to be at the heart of the dispute that ripped darts apart twenty years later.’
The role of the BDO was to gather together sixty-nine different regional/county darts organisations in order to make sure they all behaved in a unified manner, adhering to strict rules and following a rigid code of conduct, which was vital for the sport to grow and, more importantly, move swiftly and seamlessly from the fringes and into the commercial mainstream. No rogues, no spivs, no wild cards, and definitely no unregulated gambling. Croft wanted it all in-house and tightly controlled. He had spotted a gap in the market into which darts would fit nicely and he wanted to own it lock, stock and rolled brass-barrel.
‘My introduction to the BDO was playing Leighton Rees at Mardy Workmen’s Hall for as much as four thousand pounds. Not our money. The punters’ money. They would make two queues and put money on who they thought would win. That’s how it all started,’ John ‘Old Stoneface’ Lowe, ten times World Champion, recalls.
The above quote may make it sound like some dodgy back-room deal run by illegal bookies, but it was actually a BDO-sanctioned event, and took place during the most rigorously controlled period of darts.
‘Without Olly Croft, darts would not be where it is today,’ Dr Patrick Chaplin, darts historian, said in the film Blood on the Carpet. ‘The sponsors just queued up. The people couldn’t get enough of darts, the sponsors couldn’t get enough of darts, TV companies couldn’t get enough of darts.’ Which shows how, in a very short space of time, darts had become big business and was ready to be exploited.
Television played a major role in the commercialisation of the game, and one of the main factors behind this was that tournaments were cheap to produce. Matches were broadcast as a split screen with one camera on the player and another on the board, and even when a third camera was added to focus on the crowd, the production costs were never going to break the bank. Croft also realised that the audience and scope of darts could be enlarged by millions by simply televising the big events, and when this began to happen, he hoped that the BDO would become a household name, along with the top players.
Olly Croft was the mutton-chopped captain of the good ship darts and ruled it for twenty years with a rod of iron, and although most credit him with taking darts into the national arena, some say that he was only doing this for his own gain and – as we shall see – he became so besotted by his role that when he eventually and inevitably lost touch, he refused to relinquish power and go quietly.
Barry Hearn tells it like it is: ‘We call them the blazers. They are in love with their sport, without a doubt, but they have no commercial expertise whatsoever, and they will never listen to anyone who has because it detracts from their own importance. Olly Croft ran the BDO as his own fiefdom. They’ve all got this snob value and it comes from him. When I took over the PDC (Professional Darts Corporation) in 2003 the first thing I did was send an email to Olly saying, “I appreciate there has been a lot of bad feeling on both sides, which I was never part of. Can I suggest we sit down, have a cup of tea and have a chat about darts?” He wrote back saying, “I see no point in the meeting.” I wrote back saying, “I will now fuck you …”’
From the end of the 1970s to the middle of the ’80s the darts juggernaut just kept on trucking and became a multi-million-pound industry, attracting millions of television viewers and tens of thousands of spectators at the events, all supported by a highly profitable industry of darting merchandise that enabled the consumer to play along at home. Right at the top of this pyramid stood a whole raft of brands wanting to shill their assorted wares (tobacco, DIY, cars, holiday camps, breweries) off the back of the popular sport of darts. What had started as a pub pastime was now a mainstream sport where local heroes could quickly become national superstars, but what was unique was that these men were totally different from anyone who had come before. They had all stepped out of the pub and into the spotlight. They were regular blokes who just so happened to be world-class darts players.
One such bloke was the late, great David ‘Alan’ Evans aka The Rhondda Legend aka Evans the Arrow from the Rhondda Valley aka Rhondda Fats, who was one of the first superstars of darts. He of the ‘Alan Evans Shot’: finishing on a triple bullseye to check out on 150. He who started out as a darting prodigy at his local, then played and slayed throughout the Rhondda Valley (as his nicknames suggests), quickly becoming a household name as his fame spread across Wales, where they love nothing more than a home-grown legend.
‘He would say what he was going to do – and then he would do it.’ John Lowe weighs in with a testimony. ‘I saw him play an exhibition and he said he was going to hit twelve 180s that night. And he hit twelve 180s before the last leg!’
Alan shot to UK-wide fame after he appeared in the first televised final of the 1972 News of the World Championship (at Alexandra Palace) flying the flag for Wales and dressed in a red and white tam-o’-shanter, a 1970s red footy shirt and a pair of voluminous flares topped off with some very clunky Cuban heels. When he won the 1975 Winmau World Masters, which also happened to be the first televised darting event on the BBC, he jumped around the stage with joy, waving a massive leek, which probably annoyed the crusty old men who ran the corporation. You can hear them grumbling, ‘What the Dickens is that Welshman playing at?’ as they sat in their club peering at the spectacle on a tiny TV screen. Alan went on in the same year to clean up and take home the World Masters title.
‘Evans’s delicate style, poised like Eros, was in marked contrast to his chunky appearance,’ Sid Waddell recalled in Bellies and Bullseyes, of Alan’s distinctive playing style. ‘There was a balletic quality to his throwing action and he held his arrows like a surgeon about to slice – ever so delicately. His dark Celtic features snarled at a miss, soon to be followed by a war whoop that Cochise would have been proud of when he shot well. He leapt in the air giving Denis Law-style salutes to his fans [who] mobbed him off the oche.’
After winning the double, Alan went professional. At the time, he recalled how he’d been on the dole for long periods, but when he could he worked as a brewery drayman. ‘After we’d put the barrels in the cellar, they couldn’t get me off the dartboard!’ he explained. ‘I wanted to be a footballer and had trials with Cardiff City, but rheumatic fever put paid to that dream when I was sixteen. But I am now at the start of a new dream.’ This showed his followers that darts wasn’t just something you did in the pub, it was something that you could earn a decent living from. Alan was the player who turned darts into something aspirational; a pursuit that could actually better your life.
‘I get well paid for my exhibitions so I can afford to pay a driver every week. I like a few pints and sometimes I have more than a few, and then you’ve got the breathalyser coming into it so, some people might think it’s for show – but it’s not really,’ Evans went on the record back in the day, sat in the back of his mauve Daimler Sovereign whilst being driven by his chauffeur. On his way, no doubt, to play a match over a few pints. There is some great footage of the little fellow walking up onto the stage of a working men’s club in the valley, sucking down a pint in a couple of steps, which is what they used to call ‘warming up’.
Without his darts in his hand, he was an unlikely heart-throb: rather greasy hair, a pimply complexion and the most off-white teeth you’ll ever see on a world champion. But the thing about darts heroes is that they often look like the people who they play for, the people who worship them, and it was these people who paid 50p a pop to watch Alan play in cinemas, bingo halls and working men’s clubs around the country. He did a five-month tour of Butlin’s holiday camps, and averaged eight 180s a week.
When you number-crunch his statistics, it becomes apparent that Alan never really won as many title matches as he should have for someone of his skill level, but he did get to lose a charity match to Muhammad Ali. Okay, so the odds were stacked against Alan as he was only allowed to hit trebles, with Ali finishing on a bullseye, but he still stood shoulder to shoulder on the oche with the world’s greatest.
But then, at the height of his success, it all went a bit wrong for Alan. During an international match, whilst playing for his beloved Wales, he apparently called an English match official a ‘smarmy cunt’ – for which he received a twelve-month suspension from playing. This must have had a major effect on his career, and even though Alan made a valiant comeback after the ban, reaching the semi-finals of the World Championship a couple of times, he never won another major championship. He does, however, hold the record for the highest-ever score on the charity round of the cult TV show Bullseye – 401 (which they kindly doubled up to £802). Once on a tour of Scotland he finished with three bullseyes eight times in one match. Who says he died without reaching his potential?
‘From when I first met him at Tonypandy Working Men’s Club in 1970, I knew he was special. His darts were awe-inspiring. He made people aware of the game and he loved to be in front of the crowd – especially if they were Welsh,’ remembers Leighton Rees, 1978 World Champion, and fellow teammate on the notorious Wales international darts team.
As I was roaming around a BDO event at Lakeside (venue for the BDO World Championship) one weekday afternoon, I got chatting to an elderly official with some amazing lamb-chop sideburns, who was in charge of the door to the players’ bar. I quizzed him about who he thought were the legends of the game. Those who needed to be name-checked.
He told me, ‘Leighton Rees was the first superstar of darts. He was the first winner of the Embassy. But if you want to go further back to the first superstar, Tommy Barrett – a Londoner – twice won the News of the World before the BDO was born. Tommy Gibbons – a Yorkshireman – Bill Duddy, a local from here won the News of the World. They were the superstars and they were the originals.’
One of the greatest rivalries in darting history was between Eric Bristow and Jocky Wilson, and a glorious confrontation between the two has gone down in darts folklore. The camera sets the scene: the audience was smoking, drinking, coughing, shouting out into the thick hazy air, their eyes smarting but locked on the tiny dartboard at the back of the minuscule stage, waiting for their gods to reveal their super powers and unleash some arrows.
After slugging it out for a couple of hours, the two players were neck and neck on the scoreboard. The tension could not get any tighter, the arrows any sweatier. Eric stepped up to the oche, scanning the audience with a slight sneer on his face. He checked the board, and threw a dart straight into the bullseye. He repeated this. And again. It seemed as though the darts couldn’t all fit into the tiny metal circle slap bang in the middle of the board, but they did, and just for a moment, one looked like it was going to fall out, but it didn’t. The crowd barely registered this rather amazing feat. They were totally ignoring his skills, as he was English.
Eric stared out into the haze, made a face, shrugged as if to say ‘don’t give a toss’ and walked over to remove his darts. Then Jocky – as wide as he is tall – lumbered up and took aim without a second thought. His first dart flew straight into the bullseye: bang. Bang. Bang. Three bullseyes in a row, like Bob Marley shooting the sheriff.
There was a moment of calm. A blip on the radar of noise, and then the place went absolutely ballistic. The bomb dropped and devastation ensued. This was an old-school darts tournament in the heart of Scotland, after all; this was back in the day when it was a proper working-class sport for that very reason; this was the real deal, the genesis of what today’s game is now. A right rowdy night out that you may never recover from. This was what darts was all about. Heavy, heavy legends playing around the country to crowds who expected to be able to consume as much as those under the spotlight, slugging it out on the oche. Jocky stood there, drinking a pint in celebration and waiting for the place to calm down somewhat.
Eric moved back in position, threw three darts and ruthlessly ended the game on a double ten, and then looked around to give Jocky the biggest smirk you will ever see on live TV. The moment hung for a second but Jocky had no other choice but to smile and stick his hand out, muttering something. If you watch the footage carefully, you can see Eric pause, wondering if he should demean himself and shake the proffered hand – because what no one knew was that moments before the players had been introduced to the roaring crowd, Jocky Wilson had tried to nobble Eric Bristow.
‘Just as I was about to bounce on stage, Jockey took a run at me and kicked me as hard as he fucking could in the shin. He took about two inches of skin off my shin. Christ it hurt, so I grabbed him by the throat and I was going to fucking kill him, but five officials managed to prise me off, and shoved me onstage into the bedlam of lights, television cameras and baying crowd – they were Scots, what do you expect?’ Eric recalled in his autobiography The Crafty Cockney.
‘What did you do?’ I blurted, totally caught up in his book, which I was reading as part of my research, and before, I may add, that Eric had totally disgraced himself.
‘Well, after that I had to thrash the fucker, and when it was all over and Jocky came over and shook my hand, he told me, “I’ve got to try to beat you somehow …” And after that I had to laugh.’
The next thing they knew, Eric and Jocky were propping up the bar together, the kick already forgotten. No major beef. No long, drawn-out feud that would interfere with their playing or their ‘career’ trajectory. This is a valuable insight into what makes darts so special. A spot of casual violence resolved by a brutal thrashing on live TV and then the equilibrium restored with a pint or ten. In this day and age, with doping and cheating and scheming in the ‘proper’ and ‘respectable’ sports, I have to salute this honesty, as warped as it may seem.
That clash of the gods took place in the golden era of darts when millions regularly sat down and watched on television and the supporting industry couldn’t churn out the assorted merchandise (darts, boards, hats, mugs, cigarette cards, shirts, books, magazines) quickly enough. It was a time when the BDO tightly regulated and ran the industry and decided what happened and what didn’t – and this arrow-filled Nirvana seemed like it would last forever.
Darts had travelled far from the first televised matches in the early seventies, but just over a decade later, unforeseen and pretty much unchecked by the BDO, the tide was about to turn. In 1983 the public watched a lot of darts – it was broadcast on both the BBC and ITV – but the knives were being sharpened. The tabloid press began to focus on the huge beer bellies and the hacking coughs that were a result of the drinking and smoking the players liked to do not only whilst playing on live national television (which seems rather unbelievable today), but also after they’d won a tournament – which was much more of the same but on a bigger scale. It wasn’t a healthy lifestyle and these men were definitely not the sort of role models that appealed to many sponsors outside the beer and tobacco industries. It certainly wasn’t in keeping with the clean happy-family image that the BDO liked to project at every given opportunity. One of Olly Croft’s Achilles heels was that he didn’t have a clue how imperative the art of public relations and image-control was to a sport under attack in the press.
The relentless bashing in the red tops couldn’t have helped, but then a sketch was broadcast as part of the comedy show Not the Nine O’Clock News that probably did the most damage to the image and perception of the darts brand. This was the first nail in the coffin. It was of two men in fat suits (Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones) dressed in loud shirts who you presumed were going to throw some darts but in fact were drinking pints and shots in order to see who could hold their drink. The winner was whoever stayed on his feet for the longest, not who threw the best arrows. The extreme negative influence of the sketch showed how quickly and easily the chattering classes could be turned against something that they had probably never really understood nor had any real cultural connection to in the first place. The diehard darts fans were upset by the portrayal of their heroes but it was never going to dampen their support; they were used to being ridiculed in the media. But the people in charge of the media chequebooks, and their associated brands, began to see darts in a very different light.
‘It goes back to the Not the Nine O’Clock News sketch. That hurt darts big time cos it made people think that it was all about being a piss-head,’ Russ ‘The Voice’ Bray told me backstage at the World’s.
The second nail in the commercial coffin came on 28 September 1985 when London Weekend Television decided to stop broadcasting World of Sport, which carried darts as part of its format, following a dwindling of viewing figures. The third was in 1988 when the BBC cut its weekly darts coverage to just one tournament a year – the Embassy World Championship. A few months later, ITV announced that they would be stopping all darts reportage by the end of the year, and by 1989 there was only one remaining televised darts event on national television. This drastically reduced airtime meant that fewer brands were willing to be part of the sponsorship package, as their total reach had been chopped from tens of millions of TV viewers to the tens of thousands of people who still attended the regular events. The wheels had begun to fall off.
But Croft and the BDO didn’t seem overly concerned. They simply re-booted and re-focused on the amateur game, which kept them busy; they were running 800 grass-roots tournaments a year, the majority of them at holiday camps such as Haven, Pontins and Butlin’s, for their 30,000 members. Croft still drove round in his Rolls-Royce surveying his empire, but to everyone else it was definitely not perceived as the lucrative and glamorous business it had been just a few years before. The image had crashed almost overnight.
‘We were still very busy promoting darts in a big way,’ Croft remembers. ‘Darts is full of so many nice people. They are really appreciative. It’s surprising when you’re running a tournament when someone loses in the first round but they still have a lovely time.’ It’s a point of view that may be heart-warming, but it held little value for the fickle bottom-line obsessed commercial investors, who up until that point had spent a lot of money promoting darts through various brand partnerships. Olly’s words were also totally irrelevant to the hard-working professionals of the game who relied on prize money as their main source of income – the majority of which came from sponsors and TV revenue, a purse that was now shrinking rapidly.
The top players had no option but to spend the next few years in the wilderness, travelling around country pubs and clubs playing exhibitions and other low-level tournaments, trying to keep themselves in the public eye, probably playing a lot of dodgy games for very high stakes for the more ‘professional’ gamblers out there, all without any help whatsoever from the BDO.
‘We don’t actually employ dart players and we don’t owe them a living,’ Olly commented at the time in the film Blood on the Carpet.
Yet even though the BDO did not ‘employ’ the players, they did insist that the professionals were not allowed to wear any personal sponsorship logos on their shirts when playing in competitions – televised or not. They could only endorse the sponsors of the BDO. The players were also unhappy with the way they lost their fees to the BDO when playing international matches for the English team. Many meetings were set up where the players aired their grievances with the BDO but nothing seemed to change. The top players must have felt like they were banging their heads against a wall.
Another insulting experience for the professional players was a VHS released by the BDO of the highlights of the 1983, 1985 and 1987 Embassy World Championships. The tape featured Eric Bristow, John Lowe and Keith ‘The Feller’ Deller, as well as a legendary nine-dart finish from Paul Lim in the 1990 final. The rights of this VHS were always under suspicion, since none of the featured talent was ever offered any kind of remuneration, nor had they signed releases for the use of their images. The fact that the BDO rushed it out, sensing that they were losing their star talents and milking them till the end, says a lot about how they viewed their professional players. It also shows how unregulated and insignificant the rights of the individual players were in the eyes of the BDO.
Player resentment came to a head in 1992 when the world top sixteen, along with their managers, formed a pressure group called the Darts Council, and approached Olly Croft to ask if he could guarantee more than one TV appearance a year: he couldn’t. In response to this they asked if they could stage their own tournaments for TV: he said they couldn’t. He didn’t even attempt to appease them, which left the players no other option but to set up their own separate organisation – the World Darts Council (WDC).
The last tournament that all the players participated in was the 1993 Embassy World Championship. The newly formed WDC players attempted to walk onto the stage wearing WDC-branded shirts but were stopped by BDO officials and ordered to remove the offending logos before they were allowed to play. This was the last straw for the WDC players, who felt they had no choice but to walk out of the tournament in protest at the appalling way they were being treated.
‘Olly’s ability, thinking and everything else with the game had become stale,’ said Tommy Cox, the founding chairman of the WDC. ‘He wouldn’t bring in any marketing people, any specialised TV people. He thought that PR was a total waste of money. He didn’t try to do anything, nor did he think that he had to justify himself in any shape or form.’
The BDO responded to the boycott by banning every WDC player (which included every champion from 1972 to 1992) from all UK darts tournaments. This was Olly’s attempt to break up the WDC and force its members back into the BDO. They also issued a motion forbidding any BDO players entering any tournament that included any of the WDC players, and hastily pushed through a worldwide ban on any WDC players playing abroad at the World Darts Federation conference in Las Vegas. Brutal.
The original rebels’ hall of fame: