Eric Bristow (19 page)

Everybody was licking their lips and saying, ‘Mmm, you’re right, Keith, that was really lovely.’

He flipped, he totally snapped and screamed, ‘That was
not
fucking funny lads! You should never,
never
fuck about with someone’s food.’

He wouldn’t shut up about it. ‘I don’t need this shit,’ he kept saying, until I said, ‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ got up and bought him two of these giant kebabs.

But Keith had spat his dummy out, and he threw these kebabs at a wall and we watched as they slowly slid down. ‘I don’t want them now,’ he said, and stormed off.

He makes us laugh, though, and that is why every darts player loves him, and if he gets the hump it makes it even funnier. The poor lad is doomed in that respect.

When he gets the hump he gets it big time. I’ve been on the
QE2
with him twice. On the first occasion we stopped off in Bermuda for an exhibition where we played four singles matches each. I won my four and I
did
brilliantly; I played some really good darts. He lost three out of four of his games and started sulking.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘It’s the same money whether we win or lose.’ Then we played each other head to head and I absolutely slaughtered him. He got the hump even more then. He refused to speak to me on the way back to the ship.

The second time on the
QE2
was farcical, but it was typical Deller. I was with my wife Jane then and it was August 1997. Jane was in bed and I was in the casino playing blackjack. Suddenly people round me started crying. Then the croupier started crying and said it was the last three hands. It was weird.

I whispered to him, ‘What’s the problem? What’s going on? Why is everybody in tears?’

‘Princess Diana is dead.’

Minutes later the casino closed and that was the end of it for the night. I went back to my cabin and woke up Jane to tell her the news. She cried her eyes out. That was on the way to New York.

On the way back the ship’s captain announced, ‘We are going to slow down for a day or so to keep us in the footprint of the satellite so that we can all watch the funeral of Princess Diana.’

We were due to play darts between one o’clock and two o’clock in the afternoon in a conference room they were now using to show Di’s funeral. They took the dart boards down and erected a giant screen. The place
was
packed. Almost the whole ship was in there watching this historic but sad moment.

Keith came into the hushed room at half past twelve and collared me.

‘They can’t watch this in here,’ he said. ‘We’re due to play darts in here in half an hour. They’ll have to watch it somewhere else.’

I whispered to him because people could hear Keith and said, ‘Keith, you ain’t fucking playing darts today, not on the day of her funeral.’

And the daft sod still kicked up a fuss. ‘But we are booked to play. How are we going to get the games in?’

‘Look, Keith,’ I said, ‘trust me. They won’t want us playing darts today.’

But he had to ask a member of staff and turned to this officer and said, ‘Are we playing darts this afternoon?’

This bloke just looked at him as if he was silly, nodded towards the funeral that was being played on the big screen and mouthed the word ‘No!’

I couldn’t believe him. Not only had he made himself look a prize prat, but he’d made me look a plonker by association – but that’s what he’s like and darts would be a less happy and less funny place without him.

In 1982 and 1983 there were serious manoeuvrings afoot. In 1978 the winner of the inaugural world championship, Leighton Rees, won £3,000, by 1980 the winner got
£4,500
, and in 1982, when darts was really taking off, the champion took home £6,500. Despite the huge sums of money darts was bringing in, the
total
prize money pot for the 1982 world championship was a paltry £28,000, and it didn’t look as if it would go up significantly in the forthcoming years. For other tournaments it was even less, so if you weren’t one of the top players it was difficult to earn a living from darts.

John Lowe was one of the first to spot this, so he started sounding players out on the possibility of starting a Darts Players’ Association. It would basically have taken the form of a union that would look after the players’ wellbeing, because in the eyes of events organisers, and to a greater extent the BDO, darts players were nothing.

I was all for it, I thought it was a great idea, but most of the others were oohing and aahing and were just plain ignorant. When John and I talked to them about it, I began to realise half of them were brain dead. They couldn’t see the future. They couldn’t see that a Darts Players’ Association would give them a voice. We were looking at pensions, insurance for players, retirement incentives, all sorts of things, but they were saying, ‘No, we don’t want to get involved with that,’ and it fizzled out.

Lowey had the intelligence and the foresight to see that something had to be done, but the rest of them were more worried about themselves. They couldn’t see
that
however brilliant the BDO was at bringing players through the amateur ranks via the pyramid structure they had put in place, it wasn’t a professional organisation that looked after the top thirty-two players once they had reached the summit of that pyramid.

Although the money was good at first, it wasn’t really going up at a rate that reflected the level of interest in darts that was being generated by greater television coverage. Lowey felt very strongly that players were being abused. When the TV ratings shot up after the 1980 final between Bobby George and me, so should the prize money have done, but it didn’t. Darts players were seen as working-class filth by the powers that be, to be exploited by the businessmen in suits. It’s the same businessmen that today talk about introducing darts into the Olympic Games, but darts doesn’t need the Olympics; it’s full of druggies. In saying that, at least we’d be guaranteed another gold medal for Great Britain.

In 1982, however, the Darts Players’ Association wasn’t to be. Despite the support of Lowey, Big Cliff and myself, nobody else wanted to be involved. There was no trust among the players. The meetings, when we did get the players together to discuss the proposal, were farcical. We proposed meetings every three months to discuss the state of the game and how we could improve it. Then a player would pipe up, ‘Do we get expenses to travel to these meetings? Because we don’t have the money.’

I’d say to them, ‘But you will
have
the money, because we’ll ensure that more money is in the pot for the players.’

‘But we need the money now in order to travel to these meetings,’ they’d say.

It never really got past that stage. It’d end with me throwing my arms into the air in resignation and telling them, ‘Don’t worry about it, lads, we’re only trying to help you.’

They saw it as a conspiracy among the very top players to line their own pockets, which couldn’t have been further from the truth. We were trying to bring all the players together for
their
benefit, but in some ways it only served to drive us apart.

The BDO were aware of this move; in darts circles you can’t keep anything secret. What they should have done was taken it as a warning that the players wanted to be treated right and be seen as professionals on decent money. Instead they chose to ignore it, and ten years later they were to pay the price.

TEN

Back on Top

THE FOLLOWING YEAR
, 1983, proved to be traumatic in more ways than one. I lost the World Championship final to Keith Deller, and shortly after that Dad keeled over in the kitchen at home. He had burst an ulcer and there was blood everywhere. He was rushed into hospital, put on a ward with other people who had burst ulcers, and in the days he was in there at least three of them died. Dad survived, but he knew it had been a close call, and it frightened him.

He left hospital a changed man. He had a totally different outlook on life and was basically someone my mum no longer recognised, so they split. That was horrible for me, but at least I was twenty-six. At least I was a grown man. It’s different if you’re a teenager.

When the marriage broke apart I helped to pick up the pieces. They sold the house in Stoke Newington and divided the money: eleven thousand pounds each. I told Mum I’d buy her a flat to help her out. We found
one
for £22,000 and Mum said to me, ‘I’ll put my eleven thousand in and you make up the rest.’

I said, ‘And what are you going to fill the house up with, Mum? You’ll have no money left. Or are you just going to sit on a box?’

So I gave her £15,000, which meant there was enough cash left over for her to have a telly, three piece suite, nice furnishings and that sort of thing.

My dad went to live on the Kent coast, at Sheerness, where he has lived ever since. He goes down to this bingo hall now where there are all these old dears whose husbands have died and he pulls them. He’s still a good-looking bloke and a few years ago he had four going at once. He was seventy-one. It amazed me where he got his stamina from. He’s had to slow down a bit now, though, and just has the one girlfriend who he won’t let me see. Maybe he thinks I’ll disapprove, but I couldn’t care less. As long as she makes him happy, that’s all that matters to me.

He moved down there because my nan was there and he went to look after her. Dad lived with her for years until she became ill and had to go in a home. He went down to that home every morning and pushed her along the sea front in her wheelchair.

After the split Mum and Dad both found happiness of sorts, but I always dreamed that they would get back together. Years after the split, my wife Jane and I would go off to America on darts tournaments and they would
move
in to look after our children while we were away. I’d come back hoping they’d greet me holding hands, but it wasn’t to be. They were beyond that point, but it was always my little dream, my one wish.

My big dream going into 1984 was to get my World Championship title back. It hadn’t been a bad twelve months for me because I knew Deller hadn’t fluked it in 1983 – he deserved to beat me fair and square. However, I knew I had to put him to bed in ’84 because he had been nagging, nagging, nagging at me, in fact at all of us, saying how he was the best in the world and all that rubbish.

Twelve months later he didn’t last long. He was beaten in the first round by Virachkul, and the good thing about Keith is that once he loses he is gone. There was no bragging after that. He went off to lick his wounds. I said to Nicky afterwards, ‘Cheers for that. Now we don’t have to suffer that twat for another year. We can get on with the tournament now.’

I was lethal in the run-up to the final. I beat Finn Jensen, Rick Ney, Peter Locke and John Lowe without dropping a set, to play the new number three seed Dave Whitcombe in the final. He’d had a monumental battle with Jocky in the semis, scraping home by six sets to five.

I had no doubts going into that match that I’d win because I was playing the best darts of my life. I’d hit top form. Whitcombe on the other hand breezed
through
darts as though it was a meaningless sideshow. Sometimes he’d practise; a lot of the time he couldn’t be bothered. Before our match he had a great interview for the BBC in which the interviewer asked him if he did any exercises and what his keep fit regime was. Quick as a flash Dave said, ‘I play chess with the window open.’ It was a brilliant response and left me in stitches.

On the day of the final I was downstairs on the practice board and he was up in his hotel room with two or three videos, watching them on telly. Just as he couldn’t be bothered practising, he couldn’t be bothered socialising. He was never a great talker, Dave. He still isn’t now. I’ll go, ‘How are you, Dave?’ and he’ll reply, ‘All right,’ and that’ll be the end of that.

I bumped into him recently and said, ‘Hi Dave, have you been practising?’

‘No, not really.’

He owns a pub now so I then asked him if he did any practice there.

‘No, not really,’ he said. ‘Not any more than usual.’

I tried to have a bit of a laugh with him. ‘I’ve heard you’ve been playing for four or five hours a day.’

And with a deadpan face he looked at me and said, ‘No.’

That was it after that. I just gave up. It was like the interview I did with that tosser on the
Cockney Classic
.

Dave never came out and had a drink with us or anything like that. He just wasn’t a party boy. I don’t hold
that
against him – you need variety in darts. You need the lunatics like me, Jocky and Cliff, but then you need the counterbalance of players like Whitcombe and Lowey.

Anyway, on the day of the final I’d been practising and with an hour to go Dave came into the room, sat down and just chatted. With half an hour to go he still hadn’t thrown a dart – and usually every player likes to get in at least an hour of practice before a match to get their aim sorted and get a feel for the darts. It began to play on my mind. I began to think he was up to something and I couldn’t understand it.

My dad was there and I said to him, ‘This bloke isn’t throwing.’

Dad said, ‘I know, I’ve been watching him.’

He was freaking me out. I’ve never been out-psyched by anyone before a game, but Whitcombe, by not practising, was inadvertently doing it to me. I used to practise longer than half an hour for exhibition games, and this was a world final! Then, with twenty minutes to go, he got up out of his chair and had a couple of throws. It was spooky.

Once we got on stage all that was forgotten, and to be honest, it wouldn’t have mattered if he had practised all day because he would never have beaten me. I was on fire and won easily by seven sets to one. My ambition had been to get a hat trick of titles and now I had achieved it. I’d done it. But then I got greedy.

*

It was a case of wondering how long I could keep winning this thing, because with every new victory I was setting a new record. I set myself a target: to see how long I could retain my title. I’d retained it once, now I wanted to retain it twice. Also, I always had the memory of the 1983 defeat in my mind. I had had a year of hell off Deller, telling me he was better than me and constantly being introduced as the World Champion. It did my head in a bit. After 1984, however, it was me not Deller who was everybody’s worst nightmare. I was winning everything, I was back doing exhibitions as the current World Champion, and I was back in everybody’s front room.