Eric Bristow (12 page)

I got to a path and started walking along it when, from about fifty yards away, a big black lad started walking towards me. Where he came from I will never know, but he was huge, and he was walking with his mate who was also six foot eight. As we got to about ten yards from each other I said, ‘All right, lads?’

One of them looked at me and sneered, ‘What’s the matter, man, dead boy frighten you?’

This was one of those life and death, think on your feet moments when what I said would determine whether I would see the sunset that night while sinking a cold beer or end up floating in the sea.

I looked him straight in the eye and snapped back, ‘Nothing frightens me, pal,’ and I walked straight through them.

I’m certain that if I’d shown any sort of timidity they would’ve had me, but I wouldn’t have gone down without one hell of a fight. Those moments are when
you
know your heart is working properly. We were told the medics arrived soon after, put a tag on the dead lad, bundled him inside a large black bin-bag and threw him on the back of a lorry. Life isn’t worth jack shit over there.

The whole tour seemed to lurch from one disappointment to another. I wanted to go and see Bob Marley’s grave because I’m a big fan, but the tour organisers said we couldn’t go because it was watched over morning, noon and night by his followers who didn’t want the white man there. That riled me no end.

Part of the tour was in Montego Bay. I’d heard all the songs about it and thought this was going to be a lovely place. But it wasn’t, it was just as rough as Kingston. There were all these lovely resort hotels there, but what they didn’t show you in the brochures was the forty-foot-high barbed wire fence surrounding them to keep all the loonies out. It was madness.

From Montego Bay we went to play an exhibition which was held in a huge shack in the middle of a field at a sugar plantation. Inside the shack they’d put up row upon row of dart boards, but jumping between the boards were all these lizards, and the air was thick with moths. When I threw my darts I was amazed I didn’t spear one mid-flight. Maureen didn’t like it; it affected her game because she was beaten by this woman who was nowhere near as good as her.

We had been booked for an hour to play for the
workers
during their lunch break, and at half past twelve this hooter went off and my party and I went outside the shack to see all these black workers come running over the hill towards us. There were about a hundred and fifty of them, all sprinting. I turned towards Dick and Maureen and shouted, ‘In positions, men, the Zulus are coming!’

I felt like Michael Caine in
Zulu
and started shouting, ‘Zulus! Zulus!’ until Maureen, her face red with anger and embarrassment, said, ‘Eric, shut up! Just behave yourself!’

They were packed in the shack like sardines, got their lunch and we played for them. It was good fun, and some of them were good players. Then we went back to the hotel where we had to endure constant power cuts.

The number of times during that tour that I had to have cold showers or baths, and then cut myself to ribbons shaving in cold water I wouldn’t like to count, and the service at the hotels was laid back to say the least. First you got your coffee, half an hour later you got your bacon; half an hour after that you got your egg. We even took a flight on a small plane that was laid back to the point of terrifying, especially when the pilot shot the plane down the runway at eighty miles an hour for take-off and the doors either side of him were still open.

I turned to Maureen and said, ‘For Christ’s sake, is someone going to shut those bloody doors?’

Then, just as he was about to pull up to take off, he leant one way and closed the door, then leant the other way and closed the other door, Jesus Christ!

On the way back to England I realised how lucky I was to actually still be alive. The incident on the beach was a close call. I could’ve been another body in a binbag, tagged and thrown on the back of a lorry. I always seem to have a problem with beaches. I played a tournament in Torremolinos and took Maureen, her three children and her mum and dad. On my day off I joined them at the beach. I’d only been there a few minutes when this kid, who was swimming in the sea, stood up in the water and screamed. When I looked towards him it was as though he had a plastic head, but then I realised a giant jellyfish had wrapped itself around it and across his face. Without thinking I raced into the water, pulled him out, and with two other blokes managed to rip this thing off him. He was taken to hospital in shock. If he’d been in deep water he would’ve been dead; he would’ve panicked and most likely drowned. He was a very lucky boy. That was me finished with the sea after seeing that. I didn’t go in the water again and never have done since. I stick to the pool. Why go in the sea when you don’t have a clue what’s in it?

One thing I couldn’t avoid was planes. I survived Jamaica but I nearly didn’t survive a flight on a big BA10 from Auckland in New Zealand on my way home from a
tournament
over there. In those days you could smoke on planes. After take-off you waited for the ding sound and the no-smoking light to go off, and then you’d spark up. We went up and were climbing no problem when suddenly there was this big boom and the whole plane shuddered. Then it levelled off, but it still carried on shuddering. Maureen was the first to panic. She said to me, ‘We’re flying too low; we are way too low to level off. We’re going to hit something if we don’t climb.’ The fear in her face said it all.

Suddenly all the alarms started going off and the pilot announced, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, would you please remain in your seats. We have a bit of a problem here.’

The shuddering plane started circling Auckland harbour, which is shark infested, and that’s when we noticed one of the engines was on fire. Suddenly Tony Brown shouted out above the noise of the screaming passengers, ‘Don’t worry, we can limp home.’ Then the fuel was dumped to prepare for an emergency landing.

I was desperately trying to calm my beating heart and shouted to Big Cliff, ‘If we go in the water I’m throwing you out first. All those sharks will be full up after eating you.’

It was a bizarre situation. All the non-dart-playing passengers were crying and wailing and all the darts players were shouting at each other and joking as a way of trying to stay calm. I was even toying with the idea
of
getting my bottle of spirits out from the overhead locker and downing it in one.

Then we made it safely to the runway and ran a gauntlet of fire engines. When the plane came to a standstill they foamed the blown engine and I stood up and said, ‘Right, I’m off.’

‘No, no, no, we can’t let you off this plane just yet,’ a stewardess said.

Two hours later we were still sitting on the plane and they started serving the in-flight meal. Well, this annoyed me no end.

‘I don’t want a fucking meal,’ I said to the stewardess. ‘I just want to get off this plane.’ And I added for good measure, ‘You can stick your meal up your arse.’ I was fuming after everything we had been through.

But they didn’t let us off the plane until we had all received the in-flight meal: that way they avoided giving us a voucher for the delay, and all the pre-packed meals didn’t go to waste. Basically they were money-grabbing tight-arsed sods. All I wanted was to be off that death plane.

After the meal we were all let off: the Danish dart players, the Swedish and Dutch, the English, Scottish and Welsh – if that plane had gone down it would’ve wiped out European darts.

Then we were supposed to wait in the airport lounge while they fixed it! I told an airport official, ‘I’m not getting back on that thing. I saw what happened to the
Manchester
United football team in Munich. You can stick your ticket up your arse. I’ll pay for my own fare home.’

So Maureen and I booked our own flights back to Britain, arriving at Heathrow some twenty hours later absolutely knackered. The BA10 whose engine had blown arrived back safely with the rest of the players on it shortly afterwards. I had been certain that that plane was never going to get back to England and there was no way I was ever going to get on it.

The flight out to New Zealand had been equally farcical because the BDO, to save money, flew us the wrong way round the world. We went from Heathrow and stopped off at LA, where there was an eight-hour delay, then onwards to Auckland. Once there, we had another long wait for the plane to take us to Nelson, but as we were getting on they discovered the plane was overbooked by two seats. I said, ‘Don’t worry, me and Maureen will find our own way there.’ We were the youngest so it only seemed fair.

We had to fly to Christchurch and from there get a flight to Nelson. By the time we finally arrived we had been travelling for forty-six hours. We were absolutely knackered when we got in the hotel room, so we had a shower, and then Maureen discovered there was no hair dryer and she’d forgotten hers.

It was starting to get dark now and we’d lost days, but I had to go out and buy this bloody hair dryer for
Maureen
. On the way back I treated myself to a visit to the pub for a few drinks to cheer me up and bring me round a bit, I was dead beat.

We had a presentation dinner that night where all the Maoris danced in front of us, and on the following day, the Saturday, we played the World Cup where, to cap off a miserable time, I got beaten by a rat-catcher who wasn’t even a full-time darts player. It still ranks to this day as my most humiliating defeat, but mentally I was shot after the exhausting flight getting there so maybe I had an excuse. Nine times out of ten I would’ve beaten him playing with just one dart.

The tournament was all finished on the Sunday afternoon, and we got the rest of the time to ourselves before flying back home on the Monday. We’d been doing nothing but travelling and playing darts, so when we went into town that afternoon we were looking forward to a break and the chance to let our hair down a little. Imagine how pissed off we were to find the whole place was shut. I couldn’t believe it. It was a nightmare. Then we had to fly back on that dodgy plane.

I don’t like flying. The only reason I fly is because I have to. I had another dodgy flight with Dennis Priestley. We were coming back from Australia and almost as soon as the plane lifted off we hit massive turbulence. Everything was banging around and flying about and all the women were screaming. Even one of the stewardesses was crying, it was that bad. I could have got up
and
filled her in though. This was all I needed: these stewardesses are supposed to be professionals, they’re supposed to be used to this sort of thing. It was like a roller-coaster ride all the way and Dennis and I played crib to get us through it and take our minds off it. We played three games and to this day we have no idea who won because we didn’t mark them down – we were just going through the motions, trying to escape the mental torture of the flight from hell.

Although I’m not keen on flying, I’ve helped others conquer their fears. Mark Dudbridge of Harrows, the darts manufacturers, went with me on a tour of Hong Kong and Japan. He had great trouble sleeping on planes, so I said to him, ‘I’ll cure you of this problem. On the way home I promise you, you’ll be snoring like a baby.’

On our last night in Hong Kong the darts finished at five in the afternoon and we went out for a meal at seven. We finished it two hours later and I said to him, ‘Come on, let’s go out. It’s our last night, let’s enjoy ourselves.’

I got him back to the hotel at quarter past six the next morning and we had to leave forty-five minutes later to go to the airport. We looked like pond life, we were absolute wrecks. I told him, ‘Go upstairs and have a quick shower, but
don’t
sit on the bed. If you sit on the bed you won’t get up.’

We got the cab to the airport, checked in and went
to
the bar area where the barmaid asked me if I wanted a beer.

‘Yes, I’ll have a beer,’ I said.

‘Small or large?’ she replied.

Mark looked at me in disbelief and said, ‘Fucking hell!’

‘Large,’ I said – and she came over with a two-pint pitcher of beer, and one for Mark as well.

He said, ‘I only came in here for something to do.’

We downed the pitchers of beer, got on the plane and he was away with the fairies as soon as his head touched the back of the seat. I woke him up when we got home and said, ‘See, you can sleep on planes after all.’

The Far East was expensive, bloody expensive. Dick Allix organised a trip with Maureen and me to Japan and when we arrived he told us we’d have to wait three hours for the coach to come and pick us up to take us to our hotel eight miles away. I said bugger that and told him we’d get a taxi. So Maureen and I set off in a cab – and it cost us £62 to go those eight miles. Then, when we got to the hotel, we found they were charging £6 for a Coke, and this was in the late seventies! Our hotel room cost us £110 each, and to go swimming in the hotel pool cost another £10 for a special band you had to wear.

One girl called Sharon had come over from playing
in
a Canadian tournament where she had been knocked out first round so didn’t win any prize money. Within a couple of days all her dosh had run out, so she couldn’t afford to eat, and she resorted to nicking bread rolls at breakfast to last her all day.

Despite being expensive, the food was great; it was a real eye-opener. I had everything. I ate the sushi, drank the sake, everything they served up went straight into my mouth. It could have been cat, dog, whatever. If it was on a plate in front of me I tried it. One dish they gave us was a whole duck which was presented to the table cooked and then the skin was carefully removed to form pancakes which you filled with different ingredients and ate. We had a couple of these duck skins and then they came to take the duck away.

‘What’s the matter with it?’ I asked.

‘Oh, you don’t eat that,’ the Japanese waiter told me. ‘That gets thrown in the bin.’

‘You’ve got to be having a laugh,’ I said. ‘Send it up to my room. I’ll eat it later.’