Eric Bristow (15 page)

I did lose tournaments, though, going into the 1981 championship. I failed to retain the World Masters, but I won others so I wasn’t rusty. In fact I was looking forward to it. Where other players got nervous the closer
the
big day came, I couldn’t wait to get up there. I was counting down the days until the start.

As I was driven to the venue at Jollees Cabaret Club in Stoke, I listened to ‘Dreadlock Holiday’ by Bob Marley on the tape; I went in the same entrance that I used the year before; and I practised in the same part of the practice room as I had twelve months earlier.

The hardest part for me was the first round because I had been caught out in the past. This was the only time during the whole tournament when I had doubts. All the players knew I was vulnerable in this round and were desperate for me to lose to give them a chance of winning it.

It proved to be wishful thinking on their part. I breezed through the first round, beating Terry O’Dea two sets to nil, before overcoming Dave Whitcombe two–nil, Nicky Virachkul four–nil and Cliff Lazarenko four–one to set up a classic final with number two seed John Lowe.

I was out to get Lowey that year. He’d annoyed me. In the semi-final he’d beaten Tony Brown convincingly by four sets to nil, but towards the end had started playing exhibition darts, by which I mean if he needed seventy-six he would go double thirteen, bull, which is showing total disrespect for your opponent because it’s harder to hit the bull than go for a double checkout. After he won his match I met him in the practice room and said, ‘You won’t be taking the piss out of me
tomorrow
, pal.’ I didn’t like how he played against Tony; it was wrong.

That was the last thing I said to him before meeting him on stage for the final the next day. I knew it was going to be tough, because Lowey has the perfect throw and he is a steady rather than spectacular player, but all I had to do was play my normal game and I’d beat him every time because he can’t go up a gear. He couldn’t raise his game like I could, or Jocky for that matter. However, I also knew that if I was off my game he’d grind me down and win by simply hitting ton, ton, ton, ton and just being consistent with his throwing. This is why I could never believe he became the first player to hit a televised nine-darter. He was never a 180 man, and yet he did it, which was a remarkable feat.

In the final I lost the first two sets without winning a leg and Lowey was as steady and as consistent as ever. However, I managed to pull myself together and edge ahead four sets to three. As in 1980, Lowey then had darts to take the match into a deciding set, but he missed three darts at double ten leaving me to hit double four and take the title for the second year in succession.

I had only one thing on my mind after that, the hat-trick, and I had a good run up to the 1982 Championship.

I’d won the World Masters and practised all over Christmas, including Christmas Day. I never have a day
off
over Christmas. Christmas is for amateur drinkers. They come out of the woodwork, get drunk, fall all over the place and make a right prat of themselves. I can get drunk any time I want, so why would I want to go out and get drunk over Christmas?

‘It’s Christmas, have a drink,’ people tell me.

‘I do it all year round, pal,’ is my stock reply. ‘Christmas is when I have time off from drinking. Christmas Day is my day off.’

On Christmas Day I’d be quite happy to practise for three hours and then get an Indian takeaway before lazing in front of the telly. I don’t like Christmas, never have done. It attracts too much trouble because too many people mix their drinks and don’t know what they’re doing.

In 1982 I also had a lovely draw; Lowey was in the bottom half so I didn’t have to meet him until the final. On paper it looked great, but on paper doesn’t count. I came up against Steve Brennan and I lost.

Steve was a civil engineer from Lewiston who began playing county darts for Suffolk in 1979. He was never good enough to play for England but was eligible to play for Northern Ireland because his dad Pat was born in Derry. This was his World Championship debut. On paper I should have murdered him, but the first round jitters struck yet again and I didn’t play well at all. Even playing below par I should have beaten him, but he managed to raise his game and hardly missed a double
to
take the match two–nil and cause the greatest upset in darting history.

I was annoyed, and what riled me was that these players who cause these sorts of major upsets never go on to win the damn thing. This player wasn’t good enough for England and shouldn’t really have been there. He was picking up ranking points via Ireland, so that upset me a little bit. I was also annoyed with myself. I had prepared properly and everything felt right.

When I lost John Lowe and Jocky were ecstatic. They shook my hand in the practice room and said, ‘Unlucky’, but as they did so they had big beaming smiles on their faces. For twelve months I’d been telling everybody who’d listen I was going to win it three years on the bounce and all of a sudden I was out. I was faced with a long couple of weeks because I always took a week off after the tournament finished. Now I had two weeks without darts, so I settled back and watched it on TV. Brennan played Whitcombe in the next round and beat him two sets to nil before going out four–nil to Swede Stefan Lord. Again this wound me up because I knew I could beat all these players. I’d have beaten Stefan with two darts never mind three. Brennan beat me again four years later in the MFI World Matchplay tournament, prompting me to tell a TV interviewer afterwards, ‘I’m sick of getting beat by wallies.’ Everybody called him Wally after that.

I have no excuses for being beaten by Steve, though.
I
just remember playing and thinking that it didn’t feel right. Everything was going in OK in the practice room, but sometimes you can play lovely in there and just not take it out with you onto the main stage. Other times you can play badly in practice and it suddenly all comes together when it’s game on. I’ve never been able to understand that. That’s why I’ve never worried about what people say in the practice room. I’d have people coming up to me telling me such and such a player who I was due to meet was hitting one-eighty after one-eighty after one-eighty and I’d say to them, ‘I don’t give a shit what he gets in here, it’s what he gets out there that counts.’

Jocky won the 1982 World Championship. He beat Lowey five sets to three in the final. That was his first title, but he had a much easier ride with me not being there. He owes Brennan a drink for that one.

I just threw myself into the next tournament. The great thing about darts is that you haven’t got time to dwell on anything because the next tournament comes round within weeks if not days. I took out my anger on the dart board and looked to 1983. In the meantime I had other commitments in the form of additional TV appearances on game shows and the like. Suddenly darts players were in demand as celebrities and I was right in the thick of it.

EIGHT

You Can’t Beat a Bit of Bully

TV CATAPULTED DARTS
into the mainstream just as I was beginning to make my mark. As I’ve said before, it couldn’t have come at a better time. The inspiration for darts becoming huge on the box, the bridge to success as it were, had to be
Indoor League
, which was first televised in 1972. It was hosted by England cricket legend Fred Trueman who wore a cardigan whilst smoking a pipe during his links! The show featured indoor games such as shove ha’penny, bar billiards, pool, skittles, arm wrestling and darts, and Trueman always ended the show with the phrase ‘Ah’ll see thee.’

The show was the brainchild of Sid Waddell, who’d later go on to become the voice of darts when the World Championship began. Sid, a Geordie and Cambridge graduate, is completely mad and has established himself as darts’ number one commentator when in fact he knows very little about the maths of the sport, which I think is important if you want to be a good commentator. He
couldn’t
tell you how to go out on something like eighty-six or sixty-seven, and I’ve always thought that if it’s your job you should learn how to do it.

He’s enthusiastic, however – a little too much so at some points. At one tournament, when he first started in the 1970s, he became so excited he actually threw up over his microphone. This sums him up really, he loves the game with a passion – but he doesn’t know the checkouts. If truth be told he doesn’t care, because he’ll always have someone with him in the commentary box to whisper in his ear. It’s normally me or Keith Deller now.

He does tend to polarise opinion. People either love or hate him. I know people who have to turn the sound down when he comes on, but he has said some brilliant things, especially about me, from ‘Bristow reasons … Bristow quickens … Aaahhhhh, Bristow’ to ‘When Alexander of Macedonia was thirty-three he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer … Bristow is only twenty-seven.’

Indoor League
, which was filmed in Leeds, was Sid’s baby and it was fun. Within a couple of years of it first being shown viewing figures were going through the roof and it made celebrities out of people like Clive Myers, who was the arm wrestling champion. I remember watching it when I was sixteen and they had these eight professionals playing in the darts part of the programme, two of whom I’d absolutely destroyed in the pub for money, so I was desperate to get on it
because
they were earning upwards of £3,000. However, I had to go through the rigmarole of local league, Super League, county and international darts before I’d even be considered for the
Indoor League
, even though the guys who won it, players like Colin Minton, Tommy O’Regan and Conrad Daniels, I could beat easily.

I made it onto the show when I was eighteen and got knocked out in the semi-final. So much for my frustration at not getting on the show … when I did I couldn’t win it.

Not every aspect of
Indoor League
ran as smoothly as the darts, which proved to be the main draw. One year, only seven professional arm wrestlers turned up, and so the organisers asked if an audience member would like to make up the eighth slot. Whoever volunteered would get £125, a lot of money back then. A big burly bloke volunteered, but snapped his arm during the wrestle. His screams could be heard outside as well as inside the building. Nobody had taught him that when you’re arm wrestling and you’re losing, you are supposed to let your arm go and accept defeat, otherwise your arm breaks like a twig. Nowadays it would never have been allowed to happen, but if it did the victim could have sued the TV company for thousands of pounds. Back then, nobody gave a toss.

I also played on one of the last
Indoor Leagues
in the late 1970s which was a pro/celebrity tournament. I was paired with Nicholas Parsons who
back
then hosted
Sale of the Century
. I was still trying to make a name for myself and just before we were due to go out and play he said to me: ‘How does my hair look?’

‘Forget your hair, you silly sod,’ I said. ‘Just get up there and throw darts.’

He looked at me wide-eyed. ‘What’s going on here then?’ he said, ‘You’re a bit aggressive aren’t you?’

‘Get up there and throw those darts,’ I said, ‘and less of the “how’s my hair”, you fucking plonker.’

It was perhaps a bit over-the-top and maybe I shouldn’t have said it, but that’s TV people for you. They are all so vain. We did win, but he was awful, a really poor player.

There were some decent ones though. Robert Powell liked his darts, and so did Dennis Waterman. They were regular players at charity events and often played with or against me in matches that were just as competitive as a World Championship final. Telly or no telly, I played everything to win, and the celebrities were just as hungry too – well, maybe not Nicholas Parsons – and as soon as they stepped up to the oche these showbiz types became deadly serious. They wanted to get one over on their mates. Charity didn’t come into it.

The biggest showbiz darts nut I ever met was the singer Engelbert Humperdinck who embarrassed the arse off me in Vegas. I was playing at the Tropicana in the nineties when I got a message on my mobile saying it was Engelbert Humperdinck’s son and would I please
call
him. I refused to ring at first because I thought it was a wind-up, but when I did this voice on the other end said, ‘How are you, mate? My dad wants you to come and watch him.’

He was playing at Caesar’s Palace. I still thought it was a wind-up, right until the moment I collected the complimentary tickets and we were put in the front row.

Everybody in the place was allowed to take two drinks into the auditorium, but Engelbert had organised it so I had my own personal waiter and I was ordering White Russian after White Russian after White Russian, oblivious to the fact that the rest of the audience was looking at me in envy. Halfway through the show, which got better the more I drank, Engelbert stopped the music and a hush went about the place. Then he said, ‘I’d like to make a special mention … we have five times World Darts Champion Eric Bristow with us tonight.’

I didn’t need that. Half the audience didn’t have a clue who I was because they didn’t follow darts, but I stood up to the applause, much to my embarrassment, and as I did I turned to my waiter and said, ‘Two more White Russians.’

After the show I was invited backstage where Engelbert had a dart board set up in his dressing room. We had a couple of games and I said to him, ‘Where’s the ashtray then?’

Engelbert said to his son, ‘Get Eric an ashtray.’

So I had a smoke and a drink of his wine, which was top quality claret, and we played a few legs of darts.

Afterwards his son said to me, ‘I don’t believe it. No one is allowed to smoke in his dressing room. We can’t smoke and you’re even drinking his wine. He won’t let us near that either.’

He was a good player. I murdered him but he was good. He could’ve played for a league team easily.

The next day he invited us to have a round of golf with him and we played for five dollars a hole. Engelbert was desperate to win, even though he had enough money to last him two lifetimes, never mind one, but that is how it should be. When he gave us our balls to play with they had EH on them. I was with a friend called Dick who lost his in a pond on the seventeenth. He hitched his trousers up, took his shoes and socks off and waded in looking for it.