As Dimitri Van den Bergh makes his way on stage after a raucous, fist-bumping entrance-walk, he starts to dance.
It is a quick-stepping dance, with shades of jazz, hip-hop and those moves people tend to pull out in viral YouTube videos just before cracking their head on a frozen duck pond.
In front of him the floor of the Alexandra Palace rises to its feet with a bellicose cheer. Van den Bergh is wearing a spangled shirt with the words "The Dream Maker" emblazoned across the back.
The Belgian is 24 years old, well-groomed, slim, the reigning world youth champion, and the kind of player PDC chief executive Matt Porter describes half an hour later as “the new breed”, on whose shoulders the aggressive global expansion of the sport will rest.
Eventually Van den Bergh stops dancing. Moments later he takes the second leg of his round of 32 match with a stunning 147 checkout, picking off the decisive double-18 then ambling up to the board with a showman’s swagger, a man looking darts in the eye and refusing to blink.
We put a map of the world in front of us and we try and colour it in
And yet, just over an hour later Van den Bergh is out, thrashed 4-1 by a roofer from Newbury with a dicky elbow. It is Luke Humphries, the world No 90, who will progress to the next round to face reigning world champion Rob Cross.
The Dream Maker will head home to Antwerp, the latest casualty of a game that remains an entirely unforgiving mistress. But it is a game which, after years of steady progress, is steeling itself for another giant leap forward.
Welcome to the third age of darts: the global supremacy years.
“We put a map of the world in front of us and we try and colour it all in,” Porter said at the start of these championships. This is the dream now, colouring the whole world a shade of darts. As ever, it starts in one place.
The sky is a cold hard blue above the trees of Alexandra Park. Out here the air is clear. The winter sun glints off the domed glass of the People’s Palace, an island of pastoral calm above the city. Inside, things are a little different. Close the doors. Blot out the windows. Rain, wind and fire! The secret, bestial peace!
The main hall, venue for darts’ 19-day world championship, has the air of a vast and humid tropical shed. It is subject to sudden waves of noise and movement, cheers that barrel across the floor then break against the stage at the front with its central darts-altar, its darts lectern, its huge lighted screens.
Happy Dartmus
“Stand up, if you love the darts,” someone starts. Everyone stands up, everyone sings. And, as ever, all human life is here from storm troopers, to cowboys, elves, Supermen and hairy-legged Wonder Women.
This is a nuanced world, too. Evelyn Waugh suggested prison was the last bastion of the English class system, but there is a strictly regimented sense of hierarchy at the darts too.
“Boring, boring tables,” the people in the seats sing through the afternoon session, mocking the moneyed rigidity of the table-dwelling bourgeoisie.
“We pay your benefits,” the tables will sing back later. At the far end the VIP section sits through all this in mannered silence, safe behind its branded awnings.
Meanwhile, down in the fan park, they are selling bar tokens and bets, Happy Dartsmus shirts and silky-blue Gary Anderson replica tops (RRP £60). A very drunk German man in a Grinch costume is caught by his friends as he falls over trying to jump the queue for the pie stall.
This is all essential to the show. Alexandra Palace is the Wimbledon of PDC darts, the burping, beer-chugging cash cow that funds the rest of the tour, its development ambitions and junior tournaments.
A third of people here are darts tourists, Germans and Belgians who commute on low-cost flights as though this is just a long-range extension of the local glühwein and bockwurst markets.
Watching this you can feel the full force of darts' ascent over the past decade, the way the game has been woven into the Christmas sporting-televisual rituals. Last year the final drew 1.4 million people on Sky Sports (and 2.7 million more in Germany), a combined European audience only slightly lower than the Christmas Day edition of Coronation Street.
“People associate darts with Christmas,” Porter says.
“Nobody wants to sit there and have the same conversations with their family for 12 days running. Nobody wants to watch the rubbish they put out on the TV channels over Christmas. They just want to watch the darts.”
Porter is an agreeably boyish, clean-cut figure, a popular figurehead through the golden years, during which Barry Hearn and his associates have successfully repositioned an outsider sport as glossily-staged family hedonism.
Four continents
This year is another jumping-off point. Tournaments have been staged on four continents. The field at Ally Pally has risen to 96, with 24 new places for qualifiers from the development territories, and two guaranteed spots for female players.
The overall prize purse is £2.5 million. It is an unprecedented investment in growth. Like stout Cartes on his peak in Darren, darts stands on a precipice, contemplating the perils and the profits of its own new world.
“The big key for us was to make darts a global sport,” Porter says. “We staged tournaments where we thought there was a sporting fit and a cultural fit. We’re starting with a blank sheet of paper, which can be an advantage because you’re starting without preconceptions.”
Australia, New Zealand, Germany and Scandinavia remain the heartlands. India, China and parts of Africa are the expansionist dream, albeit a dream that remains some way off.
Devon Peterson is another surprise winner in Thursday’s morning session. Peterson is from Cape Town. He has the words “African Warrior” on the back of his shirt.
As Peterson nails the final double he is off dancing and pointing at the crowd, leaping down to pose for the cameras and cuddle a baby who turns out to be Devon Junior. He passes close to the edge of the stage waving to people in the LIP seats, and you can feel his star gleam, his cold, clear darts power.
Does darts lack that one real cover star now? Does Porter secretly fear his sport is missing an A-list figurehead at exactly the wrong moment in its modern history, with the retirement last year of the titan, Phil “The Power” Taylor?
“No. I wouldn’t say that at all,” Porter says. “Phil was one of the best known sportsmen in the country because of what he achieved over 20 years. The fact is the standard is much broader now.
For years we heard darts players were changing, that they were no longer paunchy barflies with ashtray eyes
“You look at the players today, you’ve got Timider, Devon, young players who look great, who dance on stage. The crowds love it. The modern-day darts player isn’t what the darts player of 30 years ago was. We’ve worked hard with the players and the brand to reposition it.”
This is a story as old as darts itself. For years we heard darts players were changing, that they were no longer paunchy barflies with ashtray eyes, that they were athletes now. And every year the darts players would turn up looking like darts players.
No gender divide
There is still room for the likes of John Henderson, the nicest man in darts, who walks out to Status Quo, and who has a head like a butcher’s block and arms like large cured gammons. His opponent, Michael Smith, is younger, hipper and thinner, complete with sculpted beard and tattoo sleeves. Darts is moving on. But where to?
Porter talks of PC dart academies “springing up around the world”, of darts affiliations at academic institutions across the country, where young players can keep up their studies while honing their arrow-skills. An oche in every school playground, a generation of kids who dream of becoming just like the darts players on their screen. Is this for real? Is it even a good idea?
Darts occupies an uneasy position on this front. It is, though, a progressive game in many ways, with no gender divide, a place where men and women compete on the same tour, and with an ever-growing female flambeaus.
This year Porter even decided to get rid of the walk-on girls, to follow more closely “the direction of travel of women’s sport”, although there are still skimpily-dressed cheerleaders, who leap up and jiggle their pom-poms as the players enter and depart.
All sports dream of expansion, growth, world domination. Darts has set its sights on that horizon, ready to spread its message across the six continents.
Still, it is hard to avoid the feeling that its real seat of power will always be here, crouched around that winter hearth on a hill in north London, a place to shut the curtains, source another six-pint flagon from the bar and lose yourself in a very British kind of escapism.
– Guardian
