With his kaleidoscope of costumes, and his peacock airs, Peter “Snakebite” Wright is the Elton John of darts. On Thursday night the defending world champion came dressed as The Grinch, his signature snakes stencilled on to the shaved flanks of his head, a peninsula of spiked green hair perched on his crown.
He pranced across the stage at the Alexandra Palace in his usual prematch dance, executing moves that might have been parlayed from a Jane Fonda fitness video, stoking a late-evening crowd already giddy from gargle.
A few feet away Mickey Mansell, “The Clonoe Cylone” from Tyrone, tried not to look, refusing to submit to the Snakebite’s spell. In a sartorial stand-off, The Cyclone was dressed as if he had slipped down the local for a quick midweek pint, his bald pate sporting nothing but a shine. Darts is a broad church now. Who says what’s normal?
Mansell is 49, a late bloomer at the world championships. Wright didn’t win his first world title until he was 50, both of them in the late prime of their tungsten lives. In darts, the greatest threat to longevity is losing your nerve. It happens in the end. Every sports person knows that fear.
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The difference in darts, though, is that the players’ nerves are under a constant onslaught, not just from the endless requirement to land a short, pointy stick on a sixpence, but from the hot breath of the arena, lapping in waves against the back of their necks.
For the world championships, the Ally Pally looks like a world of make believe, a place of uninhibited escapism and drinking and chanting and tomfoolery. Punters come in fancy dress, anything from traffic cones to SpongeBob SquarePants, to a variety of animals and vegetables. Markers and A3 sized blank cards are scattered on the tables so that the punters can write a little message that might be picked up by the TV cameras, something whimsical, or something foolish, or something naughty.
“Leo Varadkar is a terrible kisser,” flashed up on a card on Saturday night. Luckily, on his first day back in the hot seat, the Taoiseach will have been braced for unsolicited feedback.
But once the matches begin, and the beer starts to flow, the crowd turns into a mob: often irreverent, but sometimes downright mean too. Unlike other solitary sports, like golf or snooker, where every good shot is applauded, there is always one player on stage who knows that he’s not the crowd favourite; when his game goes haywire he expects that his suffering will be compounded by loud, unfiltered taunting, and that his good stuff will be met with a damning murmur.
The players do their best to deflect it. On stage, they greet the crowd with waves and blown kisses and overhead claps, and in post-match interviews they shower the mob with bouquets, but this courtship is futile. The crowd will pursue whatever cruelty it finds amusing.
On Saturday, Simon “The Wizard” Whitlock and Christian Perez were treading quicksand during a hapless leg of darts, late in their nail-biting match. Both of them had nine attempts at a double before Whitlock ended their misery. By then he was hunting a double one, the most ignominious double on the board. Each miss was greeted with derisory roars from the crowd. On stage, the players must have been squirming inside, but there was no escape and no mercy.
In the wide world of sport, it is a unique dynamic: the Ally Pally is the octagon of professional darts where all the bleeding is internal. The Irish player, Brendan Dolan, still speaks about his debut at the tournament, 13 years ago. Back then he was a part-time dart player making a living as a painter and decorator.
He had whacked a seeded player in the first round and his next opponent was Raymond Van Barneveld, a former world champion and one of the game’s biggest stars. In every other sport, the underdog is showered with love. At the darts, the mob divides its affection on a case-by-case basis.
“I couldn’t believe how vigorous the crowd were in their chanting for him,” Dolan said years later. “It was crazy. I thought I could handle it, but I don’t believe I did. I don’t believe I handled it at all. I let them get inside my head. There has been a few occasions when that stage has been a lonely place. You kind of bury yourself in those situations. You kind of make your own hole.”
The world championship, and the grand prix events during the year, are made-for-TV confections now, designed to be bright and raucous and overblown. In the first golden age of darts, 30 or 40 years ago, all of the players were required to wear black trousers. Nicknames were optional. There was no music. Crowds of men sat at beer-filled tables, and clapped. There was scarcely a woman in sight. Maybe none. Cigarette smoke filled the venue in a Dickensian fog.
But it was absolutely compelling too because it was the same essential conflict between dialled-in precision and haranguing tension. A UK television audience of eight million watched Eric Bristow win his first world title in 1980; 10 million watched when he lost the final to the unheralded qualifier Keith Deller three years later, in one of darts’ great fairy tales.
“It was a magnificent subculture,” said the late Sid Waddell, the poet laureate of darts commentary. “Keith Deller’s mum used to fry chips with one hand and throw darts with the other. Jocky Wilson would bring his own optic to tournaments and a bottle of vodka with his name on it. He’d win darts matches when he should have been in intensive care.”
Barry Hearn, one of sport’s most prolific hawkers, invented the spectacle we see now. Terrestrial TV had sidelined darts when Hearn took over the Professional Darts Corporation in 2001 and turned it into a travelling circus. Depending on your tastes and your habits, the Christmas season has many starting points, most of them pagan in character: the opening night of The Darts at the Ally Pally fits that bill.
But don’t be fooled by the high jinks and the good cheer: at the oche, every night, someone dies a thousand deaths.
