Eric Bristow (23 page)

But I couldn’t sink it. Two years earlier it would’ve taken me two darts at most. Now I couldn’t do it with eight, and Jocky won the leg. Then, when he was leading two legs to one and needed just one more leg to clinch the title, he wanted 156. He went sixty, sixty, and missed
the
double eighteen for the match. I needed one-thirty and nailed it, going out on the bull.

In the final leg of the set he hung on for dear life and managed to clinch it, and as soon as his dart landed and he knew he’d won he sank to his knees in relief and kissed my hand. He was so pleased it was over he just became overwhelmed by the whole situation. I’m glad he won. He deserved another championship.

Things were changing, though. On telly the beer and fags image of darts was constantly getting slated, mainly through comedy shows taking the piss.
Alas Smith and Jones
had a sketch where Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones were two overweight darts players, only they didn’t play darts but downed alcohol one glass after another as the commentator said things like ‘And he’s gone for the double – double vodka.’

OK it was funny, but it didn’t do the sport any favours, especially with the media luvvies who ruled the BBC and the other channels. They were becoming increasingly disillusioned with what they saw as our boozy working-class image. All we were doing as darts players was going all over the world and having a great life, but we were getting knocked for it. A lot of the other players got upset by all the negative coverage darts got, but I didn’t care. I stuck two fingers up at the knockers and would say to them, ‘See you later, boys, I’m off to Canada for three weeks.’ The people who
knocked
us and ridiculed our sport went on holiday twice a year if they were lucky. Darts players went all over the world a dozen times a year and got paid for it. So who are the idiots here?

It rattled the BDO, however. In the 1989 World Championship they banned alcohol on stage. Only water was allowed. A couple of years later smoking was also banned. They’d fallen into the trap of thinking the game needed to be cleaned up, but it didn’t. The game didn’t need cleaning up at all. There was nothing wrong with it. Darts as a spectator sport is perfect for television. What needed addressing were the BBC cameras and the dickheads behind them. With Sky nowadays, everybody works as a team. If they see somebody downing a full pint in the audience they don’t zoom in on it, or on somebody else fast asleep because they’ve had too many, or on a big mountain of empty pint glasses, but the BBC did. They portrayed the audience as a bunch of idiots and confirmed non-darts fans’ perception of the game as being not a proper sport. Sky on the other hand recognised they were promoting a game that was in their interests to show in the best light possible so as to get the highest viewing figures achievable. They made sure negative images, which can happen in any sport where an audience is involved, didn’t get shown. The BBC didn’t give a toss, and still don’t, because they get all their money from the licence fee and aren’t really accountable.

By the time Sky came on the scene, however, the BDO had already put in place their no booze, no fags on stage rule, and for some players it was a nightmare. Jocky didn’t like it at all. He loved his fags and would chainsmoke his way through a match. When they banned smoking on planes he’d sit through the flight munching on nicotine tablets, and when the cig ban came he munched tablets on stage. It definitely affected his game – he had his mind on cigarettes when his mind should’ve been on darts. My mind never wandered; it was always on the game.

It was only a sign of things to come. The national cigarette ban that was introduced years later in pubs, restaurants and public places is completely out of hand. Why should a politician have the right to tell me I can’t smoke in a pub, especially when the House of Commons was exempt when they first brought the law into effect? It’s a dictatorship and it’s costing the publicans their living. The smoking ban is OK in restaurants and food pubs, but in normal pubs it’s wrong. It is killing the trade and destroying the British way of life. I know it’s a silly, dirty habit and kills people, but I also know it’s better than sticking a needle in your arm.

I blame Roy Castle for the smoking ban. He blamed passive smoking for the cancer that got him, but he wasn’t complaining when he was playing the trumpet in those smoke-filled clubs and taking the money. I did a few charity events in aid of the Roy Castle Foundation
and
the one thing that got me was how all the smokers there were frightened to light up. I just went dink at the first opportunity and puffed away. Then I’d hear the dink, dink, dink of other people’s lighters as they followed suit. What a bunch of idiots. There are far worse things than fags. Junk food is just as big a killer. What about the big fat idiots who live off fast-food takeaways? What is a diet of deep-fried chicken nuggets, burgers and chips doing to their health?

Times were changing. Lowey, Jocky, Big Cliff and myself – the old school – were the wrong side of the mountain. We were seen as antiquated dinosaurs, part of the beer and fags school of darts that had died out. A new breed was emerging, and I had the best player under my wing. His name was Phil Taylor.

TWELVE

The Power

IN 1988 PHIL
Taylor, a local Stoke lad, was playing darts for Staffordshire and occasionally came into the Cockney for a drink. Despite my condition, I’d still practise as I always did, four hours in the morning and four hours at night. In many respects I’d upped my training regime in a bid to rid myself of the dartitis which I was determined to conquer. Players who joined me at the oche would have a throw and then drift away. Hardly anybody had the stamina to play with me for that long, and if they did, they generally had a job to go to and couldn’t put in the commitment. Even my driver Trevor would say to me, ‘I don’t want to play darts for eight hours a day, every day. I want to go and pull birds and have a good time.’ He loved the game, but he loved the life that came with it even more. That’s probably why he never made it as a top darts player.

Phil was different. He came in one morning and we practised for four hours. Then he asked me what time
I
practised in the evening, and I said about seven. So he was back there at night for another four-hour practice session. Then he said, ‘What time tomorrow?’ And so on and so on. The kid was keen and he was like a sponge. He was absorbing everything I was saying, and asking me question after question. I’ve seen thousands of players come and go, but Phil wanted to learn and get out of what he was doing.

He’d come up from the gutter. The house he had grown up in had no proper electricity – his dad tapped it from next door – and the stairs were condemned; they all had to sleep downstairs. He left school with nothing and got a job making toilet handles. He was still making them when we started practising together and was desperate to get out of his dead-end life, as you would expect.

My theory is that if you find someone who is hungry for success but has nothing, then you can train them because they’ll have the commitment; they’ll be that desperate to get out of whatever rut they’re stuck in. This was Phil’s predicament when he first came to me. If he’d had money, or come from a well-to-do family, I wouldn’t have bothered with him. I would’ve been wasting my time. Anyone with money, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, is not going to make it. They’ve never had to scrimp and save and as a result they wouldn’t have had the hunger that Phil had. They just haven’t been brought up in the right way to make them World Champions.

That’s why we struggle to produce a World Champion tennis player because tennis people have money and therefore they don’t have the hunger. If this country wants a World Champion tennis player, set up a tennis school for children who live in Hackney, or Moss Side, or Liverpool and give the kids free equipment. Then you’ll get a World Champion. That’s the trouble with many sports in this country, there’s snobbery involved. If you don’t talk right and your face doesn’t fit, it doesn’t matter how good you are at the sport, you won’t get on.

Phil was a nice family bloke who was a little bit naive. He’d not seen the world and the only holidays he and his family had been on were to holiday camps. A young bloke in a low-paid job and with four kids isn’t going to go to Mauritius, is he? He was skint, totally flat broke. To earn some money he used to come round to my house and do odd jobs for me. When my garage door came off he put it back on. He put it on the wrong way, but he put it back on. Everything he did for me, I had to get somebody else in to put it right. He told me he was a handyman. Is he hell as like. Everything I paid him cash for was a complete balls-up. He got on well with my wife Jane though. They both liked their food. Phil is not a big drinker, it’s food with him.

One morning he called at my house to do a job and Jane answered the door. There was a van parked about a mile down the road selling bacon and egg sandwiches,
and
as soon as she opened the door they were off in her car to this van to fill their bellies with bacon butties. He was supposed to be working for me! It’s a good job his darts wasn’t as bad as his handyman skills or he would never have made it onto a league team, never mind become World Champion.

I put up with his DIY disasters because he was a challenge for me. I was a bit lost at that time. What could I do? Did I sit at home and sulk and feel sorry for myself, get depressed and hit the bottle? No, I wasn’t going to find salvation down that route. I needed a young up and coming player to channel my energy through. I needed a buzz through something else and Phil was the solution.

We’d practise for hours, days, weeks, mainly practising finishing and doing the maths to work out every possible checkout. He had a different way of finishing from me, so he changed to my way because he understood the reason I went double sixteen. He was a double top man before. Now he goes for double sixteen. That way, if you hit sixteen you’ve got double eight, then double four, then double two, then double one, and if you bust after that you’re no good anyway – whereas with double top, if you hit twenty then you have double ten, but if you miss that you have a pressure double: double five. Miss that and you have to waste a dart to get back on a double.

He was good. So I sponsored him and took him and
Trevor
to the mayhem that was the North American Open. I played darts and pulled, Trevor pulled and drank, and Phil was the wide-eyed Bambi, taking it all in.

At first nobody could understand why I spent money on him, especially Trevor, who would say on numerous occasions, ‘Eric, why have you sponsored him? He’s crap.’

In many respects, when I first saw him play he was nothing special, he was just a normal player, but it was simply a case of getting his head right and as the hours of practice went on he got better and better and better, until he was ready to enter tournaments. When I took him to his earliest tournaments there was the added factor of pressure and fear to contend with. One of the first ones he played in was at Vegas and he got beaten in the first round. He came backstage and just sat with his head in his hands, absolutely stunned – but it was good for him; it was all part of the learning process. I put him and Trevor together for the pairs and they made it through to the last eight. They could have made it to the semi-final, but Trevor missed three darts at double top to win. Phil never forgave him for that. He wanted to win so badly, and still does. Every time Phil loses at anything he hurts.

We went over to the Canadian Open next, and he got beaten first round in that, which was another head in hands and tears in his eyes moment. The boys were
really
having a go at me then. Even Lowey said, ‘Why are you sponsoring him? He’s useless. You need to have a rethink and sponsor somebody else.’

‘He’ll be all right in the end,’ I told him. ‘He’ll be OK, trust me.’

If truth be told, I was enjoying the challenge he gave me. My philosophy was that if you’re not doing something well yourself, then you have to put yourself into something else, something to get you up in the morning, something that gives you a reason for living. Phil Taylor gave me that motivation. I was determined to get him into the top thirty-two in the world. If I could do that I had, in my mind, succeeded.

It took about a year to turn him round. I offered him a £9,000 sponsorship on the condition he quit his job and concentrate on the darts, so he took voluntary redundancy and signed on. At first he played in minor tournaments, nothing big. He would set off from home on the morning of the tournament with three pounds in his pocket, a loaf of bread and a slab of boiled ham. If he won any tournament money a large percentage of it went back to me until the sponsorship money was paid off.

His first big win was in the Canadian Open. It was a great feeling for him and for me to know he was going to be a success. That night we celebrated by way of a monumental booze-up and his rise up the world ranking ladder began. By the end of 1989 he’d picked up enough
ranking
points to be invited to play in the 1990 World Championship.

I’d achieved my aim of getting him into the top thirty-two in the world, but, me being me, that wasn’t enough. I then wanted to turn him into a World Champion. Doing so, and excuse my French, turned out to be the biggest fucking nightmare of my life. I was afraid I would draw him in my half, and what would’ve been worse was playing him in the first round. Because it was his debut, I wanted him to get a run at it. I didn’t want to knock him out at the first hurdle.

Fortunately that didn’t happen. My route to the final was fairly straightforward. I beat Leighton Rees, Steve Gittens, Magnus Caris and Mike Gregory. Phil, who was the wild card, was at the opposite end of the draw, so we were never going to meet unless we both got to the final, which was highly unlikely because he was a 25–1 rank outsider who still had a lot to learn.

He eased past Russell Stewart by three sets to one in the first round, and then beat Denis Hickling three–nil in the second, before disposing of Ronnie Sharp four sets to two in the quarter-final. He had total belief in himself throughout that World Championship and that surprised me. I hadn’t realised how quickly he had matured as a player.