The Little Book of Darts E-Book

Brian Belton

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 144

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

This book is a fascinating and entertaining mixture of the history and characters of the darts world. It features player profiles, trivia – including players' walk-on music, quickest matches, longest matches, 9-dart finishes, the most loved and hated players and celebrity fans – as well as a treasure trove of statistical information. As such, all the tension, glory, complexity and irony of the 'art of the arras' is portrayed. Funny, interesting and perplexing, the reader will smile, reminisce, laugh and occasionally experience bewilderment as the spirit of the oche is brought to life. The wit and skill of players is mixed with expressions of frustration, pain, confusion and anguish. Fighters, moaners, clowns and philosophers rub shoulders between the pages, creating an atmosphere that anyone who has either watched or played the game will recognise. With this book, Brian Belton hits the bullseye of a simple passion that has enjoyed a massive resurgence of popularity in recent years.

Leseprobe

The Little Book of

Darts

Brian Belton

First published 2011

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Brian Belton, 2011, 2013

The right of Brian Belton to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 5393 1

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

Foreword by Bobby George

Introduction

The Little Book of Darts

FOREWORD

by Bobby George

Darts is an old game; perhaps, in its different incarnations, the oldest. It is so old no one knows when or where it started, let alone why. It’s something people play for enjoyment, social interaction or a challenge, and some even look to achieve fame and fortune in a space of 7ft 9¼in.

There is hardly a place on earth where someone at sometime has not played darts. Cities, mountain peaks, deserts, jungles, and at both poles, people have taken time out to throw darts at a board. 3,000-year-old darts have been found in the Egyptian pyramids. In the First World War the solid wooden dartboards of the day were taken to the trenches, something of home, whether you were a Londoner, a Yorkshireman, Scotsman, Welshman, Australian, Jamaican, Indian or German. If ever you see a photograph or a painting of Second World War Spitfire pilots waiting to face the great dark clouds of the invading Luftwaffe, it is likely that somewhere in the scene will be a Nodor Original Bristle Dartboard. As such, darts is part of us, our society and civilisation; where we have been, so have our darts and our boards. One day there’ll be darts played on the moon and Mars and people will feel much the same about it as they do here and now or a hundred years ago.

This being the case, Brian Belton’s book is a timely addition to the world of darts. It covers every facet of the game, the characters and statistics that are the ticks and tocks of the oche, but there is also history and insight into the razzmatazz of the sport, with all the humour, pathos, amazement, disappointment and glory that comes with it.

Like me, Brian is an East Londoner and from the dockside borough of Newham. He is a life-long fan, follower, supporter and historian of darts, and a fourth-generation player of the game since his boyhood. In this little book he puts the passion and daftness, the pain and the triumph, the commitment and discipline of darts on show, demonstrating how it, maybe more than any other game, reflects what we are as human beings; funny, wonderful, thoughtful, brash, greedy, giving, driven, vulnerable and sometimes a little bit mad. The Little Book of Darts, like the game it is about, will cause you to laugh, wonder, remember and perhaps take a second look. It will add to the enjoyment of the next and every other game of darts you play or watch. This is what makes it a must-read for all of us who have been touched and inspired by the flight, thud and fun of what is the sport most clearly connected to the soul and spirit of the common man.

Bobby George, 2011

INTRODUCTION

What is darts? Darts is thundering music, lights flashing, scantily dressed young women gyrating in front of a great horde of excited and celebratory fans. Darts is dressing up as super heroes, Apache warriors, Buzz Lightyear, convicts, schoolgirls, French maids, cows, rhinos, nurses and nuns. Darts is fantasy in real time; it is a game but it is also a world of its own; a place to be who you are and whoever you want to be or never dreamt you’d be.

The crowd jumps and roars, yells and screams. They are armed with cardboard placards that they raise and wave as one ocean of recognition after three darts ‘tump, tump, tump’ into that tiny letterbox which is the treble 20. Television lights boil the stage in the hottest of hot illumination, denying the winter night that drapes itself outside the doors of this ‘house of fun’. Darts is not just darts but a great night out and the knowledge that you might get to see yourself on telly later makes you part of the entertainment.

The audience leap out of a space of festivity and merry bias, diluted by an apparently bottomless well of beer, consumed by the 4-pint jug, fuelled by an endless supply of chips and burgers. Although you can get 3D darts, this is a 5D experience, you can touch it, you can smell it, you can actually be in it. It is this that has caused the fanbase of darts to grow massively in recent times. This is why a tournament winner can walk away with the best part of a quarter of a million quid. But they will also be lauded like an affable pharaoh, not only by the traditional ‘life-blood’ supporters of the game, from the teeming working-class communities of Britain, but also by the lawyers, showbiz types, professional sports people, bankers and accountants who occupy the £200 corporate hospitality seats. Royalty and celebrities like Stephen Fry, the former England cricketer Andrew Flintoff and retired footballer and radio pundit Robbie Savage, will be proud and excited to call the greatest darters ‘friend’.

Compared even to a few years ago it is noticeable that there are more women in darts crowds now and, overall, people are younger (or look younger to me perhaps). The live game’s supporters seem to be able to enjoy themselves without trouble. Yes people cheer their favourite players, boo who they see as the ‘bad guys’, and there is non-stop banter, but unlike many other sports, darts is not tribal; darts supporters are a single clan.

But while the game is about the communal it is also about the individual. All dart players have their own darts stories, for most of us this is more about the social side of the sport than actually playing. Really that is what makes darts the massive phenomenon it is today; it is very much the ‘people’s game’, it is part of our lives and therefore something that’s literally lived.

My personal story of the game goes back generations. My great grandfather, Jimmy Stone, and his cousin Sammy played together from childhood up to the First World War. For them, from their teenage years onwards, darts was a raw professional sport, laced with wagers and poker-like pots. Somewhere between Plunkett and Macleane and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Jimmy and Sammy fought out their darts encounters in the back rooms of backstreet pubs, in factories after work or in disused warehouses. They once played in the smoke-filled board room of West Ham United, pitted against a group of professional footballers who were members of the West Ham team, watched and wagered on by the directors of the club. Another time the pair played the best of 101 games in a circus tent pitched on open ground on the edge of London’s East End, meeting clowns, the ring master, acrobats and a lion tamer all dressed in their show regalia.

Sammy, a veteran of the Boer War, was around 35 when he said goodbye to his playing partner. Sadly, Jimmy was never to return from the fields of France. However, Sammy, then a slater by trade, continued to play and in 1928, representing the South West Ham Working Men’s Club, he became the first winner of the News of the World Championship – the darts World Cup of its day.

My grandfather met my grandmother at a darts match. He was a mean pub player and guess what – his son, my Dad, met my Mum while in a pub, in Poplar, deep in London’s Docklands, after a game of darts. As a reluctant conscript soldier, Dad had kept himself in cigarettes by way of darts while serving King and Country in some of the furthest-flung military outposts in Britain. However, it wasn’t a bad academy as he went on to distinguish himself as a multi-holiday camp champ right through the 1960s and ’70s (we had a cabinet full of the tackiest trophies you can imagine). It wasn’t unusual for him to defeat me or my grandfather in the final and semi-finals of these surprisingly ferocious competitions, but sometimes we got the better of him. When beaten by my grandfather he would often smile and mutter, ‘Slain by the Maharishi’, a epithet that hardly fitted the hulking, toothless, flannel-shirted, steel toe-cap boot-wearing, city-scarred, barbarian-like, gasworks stoker his father was.

As such, and while I can’t say I’m the player Jimmy and Sammy were, I can say darts is in my blood and it is that which has brought the following pages into the world. So this is not really just another book on darts. I think that in these days, when every fact and figure about most of the top players and tournaments is recorded and repeated over and over again in the great clouds of cyberspace, it is not enough merely to reproduce recent tournament outcomes and the potted life stories of contemporary stars. That said, some of that is unavoidable if one is to provide even a decent snapshot of darts as a sport. But in what follows I hope you will find something of the character and spirit of the game; its presence in the world as a great cavalcade of excitement, competition and fun.

I have not tried to write a darts history; the scholarly work of the peerless Patrick Chaplin on his website (www.patrickchaplin.com) and his book, Darts in England (2009), is the benchmark of such a pursuit, and I, like anyone interested in the chronicles of darts, owe a debt to his endeavour and need to acknowledge his supremacy in this realm; I thank him for his precise and honest efforts to provide the sport with the distinction of rigorous historical research. In this book I’ve made an effort to offer something of a tour round darts, perhaps taking the reader down a few of the less well-travelled byways of the game.

I have played darts in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Uruguay and Argentina. As a nine-year-old, during an afternoon ‘lock-in’, I partnered my father in a doubles game at the Retreat Pub in Essex against Bobby Moore and his fellow England soccer international Johnny ‘Budgie’ Byrne (they had been on the sherbets most of the day as I recall). I have walked towards oches on the Falkland Islands, in Malaysia, Zambia and Slovenia. I’ve played Frenchmen in Germany, Danes in Iceland, Namibians in Cuba, Germans in Holland and Arabs in Spain; in 1972, in Berlin I found myself throwing against an Italian transvestite called ‘Bilbo’ and a drunken Ukrainian who answered to the name of ‘Fido’ (at least that evening). For a while I travelled, as a sort of privateer player, right down the west coast of the USA, throwing for fun, hope and dollars as I buttered my bread via casual work between milking and being milked by the greyhound and trotting racetracks of that part of the world. In the process of all this I’ve picked up thousands of stories about darts and darters. Plenty sounded like illusions, others were incredible, a few were insane, others were mundane, commonly they were inane. I’ve listened to different versions, variations and lots of assimilations of these often anecdotal, frequently narrative, sometimes symbolic stories. I have also, since I was a kid, on dark nights, cold days and sunny beaches, over breakfast and dinner tables, in hop fields and from bedside chairs and hospital beds, been told darting family tales. I have included a few of these myths, legends and apocryphal parables in this little collection of darts life, this journey through the world that by picking up this book I know that we, at least to some extent, share. I hope, as I hope my next dart is a double or a top treble, that you enjoy them and all the facts, figures, memories, nostalgia, inspiring words, the enigma and the bits of fun brought together in this cosy package.

Unlike many other professional, world sports, darts has retained its humanity, its connection with people and it is that ‘realness’ which you will identify with and maybe celebrate in this little book, this big world of darts.

Shall we diddle?

Brian Belton, 2011

FOR THE RECORD

In May 1987, Duncan Swift, of the Felixstowe Dock Sports and Social Club (now the the Trimley Sports & Social Club in Suffolk), scored 493,470 to claim the 24-hour solo darts record. Throwing and retrieving the darts himself, Swift got a total of 123 180s and 643 140s. He slung 18,369 darts, clocking a 26.86-point average per dart.

HERO

Darts has its heroes and its villains; players who fans love to hate and those they take to their hearts. The categorisation will change from person to person, but there are some professionals who seem to inspire these particular feelings more than others.

At the age of 18 Adrian Lewis won the 2003 British Teenage Open. Two years later, in the UK Open, his 11–0 whitewash of Colin Monk, to make the last 16, was one of the few in the tournament’s history. Adrian’s continued success since this time makes it difficult not to admire him and he is sowing the seeds of making himself a legend of the game.

This said, he has looked temperamental at times. During his 2006 debut in the World Championship, Lewis left the stage before the end of his quarter-final clash with Peter Manley, alleging Manley had been attempting to upset him while he was throwing.

In the first round of the 2008 European Darts Championship, Adrian encountered Hannes Schnier. He came on stage with three plasters on his non-throwing hand after trying to catch a falling glass backstage which had shattered in his hand. Despite needing hospital treatment for two deep cuts, Lewis got to the final only to be beaten 11–5 by Phil Taylor.

In the 2009 World Grand Prix, Lewis exchanged words with Gary Anderson as the latter felt Lewis went into the exclusion zone while he was throwing. Lewis appeared to be unfazed as he won the match 3–2.

Adrian’s first televised final on Sky was the 2010 World Grand Prix. He defeated Phil Taylor for the first time on television in the semi-finals but, with Taylor accusing Lewis of playing up to the crowd to put him off, the move into the final was just a little sour. In the final the next day, the tables were turned somewhat with Lewis claiming that James Wade had put him off his throw by allegedly ‘stamping’ on the oche.

In 2011 Lewis met Gary Anderson in the PDC World Championship final. During the first set, Lewis became the first player to throw a nine-dart finish in a World Championship final. He won the match 7–5.

Getting off to a winning start in the 2011 Premier League, Lewis annihilated the 2010 champion Phil Taylor 8–2 – Taylor’s biggest defeat in the history of the tournament. Adrian went on to meet Gary Anderson in Glasgow. Lewis was booed and coins were thrown at him, but he went on to beat the Flying Scotsman 8–3 after being 3–0 down. Lewis made it to the final but lost 10–4 to Anderson.

Lewis has been known to hit ‘blind’ shots during matches, most notably during 180 attempts. Recordings show him hitting a 180 without looking against Peter Manley and repeatedly failing to do so against Raymond van Barneveld.

At the time of writing Lewis has won close to £900,000 during his five-year career.

A TO Z OF PLAYER NICKNAMES

Martin Adams

Wolfie

Steve Alker

The Snake Man

Bob Anderson

The Limestone Cowboy

Gary Anderson

Dreamboy or The Flying Scotsman

Irena Armstrong

Ice Baby

Dave Askew

Diamond Dave

Martin Atkins

The Assassin

SUPER, SMASHING, GREAT

Bullseye was a hugely popular, darts-based television quiz show that was first created for the ITV network by ATV in 1981. It was then made by Central from 1982 until 1995, and hosted by club comedian Jim Bowen. Originally aired on Monday nights, from the second series starting in 1982 up to 1993 it went out on Sunday evenings, pulling in an audience of approximately 17 million. Thereafter it took a Saturday afternoon slot.