My youngest, who lives near Alexandra Palace, has been watching the walking pints of lager pass by his place for some days now, heading in the same direction as the human traffic cones, men dressed as bananas, condiments and Flintstones.
It’s obviously the Professional Darts Corporation’s World Championship, transforming the Ally Pally into a place where Oompa Loompas, nuns and bottles of tomato ketchup sing ‘Stand up if you love the darts.’ A place, as The Economist recently put it, ‘where it is always 11.30pm on a Friday night’.
The purists will probably frown at the industrial levels of ale and the merely gradual adjustment to changing social mores. (Though there was an acceptance, six years ago, that the event’s so-called ‘walk-on girls’ were not ‘compatible with family viewing’, the cheerleaders remain.)
But these few weeks are something really quite beautiful, attended by those who know how to enjoy themselves, and how to laugh at themselves, in a place where inclusion simply happens.
The operators of this year’s ‘kiss-cam’, who started out zooming in on a few women in the crowd, captured two men in sombreros in a passionate embrace. The roars of approval almost took the roof off the place.
The Ally Pally has become synonym with a carnival atmosphere over the years
Fans dressed as nuns are a common sight at the Ally Pally during the PDC World Champs
Fancy dress are the norm at the north London venue during the PDC World Championship
Many have scoffed at this sport down the years. There was the infamous Not the Nine O’Clock News sketch, two months after Eric Bristow won his first world title in 1980, featuring Dai ‘Fatbelly Gutbucket’, played by Mel Smith, versus Tommy ‘Evenfatterbelly’ Belcher, played by Griff Rhys Jones. Commentary, in the manner of Sid Waddell, was provided by Rowan Atkinson.
Rather than hitting singles, doubles and trebles on the dartboard, they stepped up to the oche and sank single pints double and triple vodkas.
The sketch certainly damaged darts’ sporting pretensions and the BBC and ITV both lost interest in televising it, though Barry Hearn – a genius, no less, who has driven the sport into the mainstream since first witnessing the raucous madness of an event at a PDC venue off the M25, around that time – had a very different kind of vision.
Darts, Hearn felt, was a sport offering a level playing field, independent of sex, colour, religion or class.
‘All you needed was a set of darts and a nearby pub. Or you could hang a board in your bedroom, as Eric Bristow did,’ he reflected, long before the wider world knew of Luke ‘the Nuke’ Littler, a kebab-loving 16-year-old who has taken the Ally Pally by storm these past few weeks.
The darts can often be dismissed as a pub sport because of its unique atmosphere
But despite the raucous atmosphere, the darts crowd are a knowledgeable bunch
Inventing personas, wrestling-style, became part of darts. Peter ‘Snakebite’ Wright was an average player with little or no personality who rebuilt his persona with outrageous hairstyles and a walk-on defying imagination before becoming world champion.
But make no mistake about this phenomenon. Technical excellence is the reason why darts built a huge TV audience.
It’s why Sky Sports, who pay £10million a year to televise the sport, compared with £10,000 in 1998, secured a 1.4million audience on Monday – a figure with which only Premier League football compares on their output.
It’s why my editors at Mail Sport digital have recorded double the views for our reports of the competition, compared with last year.
Those who imagine their favoured sports to have a far loftier place in the hierarchy may wish to consider Hearn’s reflections on their own. Golf, he says, ‘gets really terrible viewing numbers.’ And he would be right.
The late Eric Bristow won five BDO world titles and was a superstar in the 1980s
Phil Taylor was crucial in turning darts into a TV phenomenon in the 1990s and 2000s
The Power won a record 14 world titles across the BDO and the PDC
A huge debt is owed to Bristow and to Phil ‘the Power’ Taylor, who put in the hard yards to bring unquestioned excellence and sporting credibility to this realm. Hearn always wondered how Taylor, 14-times world champion, managed to keep driving himself forward when he was slaughtering people week-in, week-out and hitting three-dart averages that no-one had seen before.
Taylor simply treated darts as a day of work – clocking in at nine, playing four hours of darts, breaking for lunch between one and two, clocking back in again and playing darts for another four hours. ‘If you do that every day, you will definitely get better.’
Taylor raised the bar and in these past weeks Littler, another game-changer, has done the same. We see in him the same persona shifts which have become an intrinsic part of the sport.
One minute he is on the stage, using a phone thrown from the crowd to take a selfie of them with him, asking them whether he should try to close out with a bullseye. The next, he has reverted back to the diffident, bemused teenager.
But it is the prosaic and ordinary in Littler which really makes your heart soar.
In the puffed-up, pretentious world of elite sport, where the obsession with image drains away so much magic, what an absolute joy it has been to see a competitor who is not lean, manicured and PR-trained to the point of tedium – delivering with a clear mind and the absolute fearlessness of youth.
Luke Littler has taken the Alexandra Palace by storm at the PDC World Championships
The 16-year-old is one win away from winning the tournament after beating Rob Cross
Littler has become a cult hero among fans at Alexandra Palace over the past two weeks
His maximums have, coincidentally, helped raise more than £750,000 for the Prostate Cancer charity, with Paddy Power’s donation of £1,000 for each 180 recorded a shrewd piece of marketing.
The sight, these past weeks, of players urging 50-something men to go for a test – ‘And here’s another checkout that all of us men should do’ – is, needless to say, another sign of the evolution of an event once known as The Embassy, after its cigarette sponsor.
The irony of yesterday’s latest eye-catching scenes on Alexandra Palace Way was that those processing along it were destined for a far inferior view to the millions tuning in.
That’s the problem with watching a board 45.1cm in diameter from the back of a hall, even when there are big screens in place. The human cones didn’t care. They were more concerned about getting the beers in.
Writing was on the wall for Wayne Rooney at Birmingham
It was hard to be hugely optimistic when writing a piece on Wayne Rooney’s appointment as Birmingham City manager, with colleagues Simon Jones and Tom Collomosse. Our understanding was that Rooney was more of ‘a players’ coach than a tactical one’.
The disastrous ensuing 82 days have demonstrated that motivational skills alone don’t cut it. Rooney’s sacking coincides with an unforgiving time for Steven Gerrard – two months without a win in Saudi Arabia, calling for more of the riches already bestowed on him by the gulf state’s sovereign wealth fund and watching Unai Emery bring excellence to Aston Villa.
Frank Lampard can tell either of them that it’s a long way back from here. Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports that David and Victoria Beckham more than doubled their revenue from their business empire to £72.6million last year, thanks to the former player’s Netflix and Amazon deals and tie-ups with other brands. Beckham can reflect he did extremely well to stay out of management
Wayne Rooney was sacked by Birmingham on Tuesday after just 82 days in charge
Rooney won only two of 15 games since replacing John Eustace at St. Andrew’s
New Year’s Honours list brings back memories of Ian Wooldridge
Colleague Jeff Powell’s inclusion in the New Year’s Honours list led me back to the story of the Daily Mail’s late, great Ian Wooldridge, a man of immense warmth. When Ian was awarded the OBE in 1991, he asked both his wife and his former wife to be with him at the investiture at Buckingham Palace, acknowledging the selflessness each had played in him furthering his career.
And that led me, for the umpteenth time, to ‘Searching for Heroes’, Hodder and Stoughton’s selection of Ian’s writing. Journalism and writing to take your breath away.
How do you pronounce ‘Ian Botham’?
Our years-old ‘Articulate’ game has had a good airing this Christmas, with the sportspeople listed in the ‘Person’ category posing the usual challenge when the kids are asked to describe them in a way which enables a teammate to guess the name.
Getting a teenager to identify ‘Hana Mandlikova’ has never been easy, but one of our contingent was unsure how to pronounce ‘Ian Botham’ this year. Class might be permanent, but it’s no protection against the ravages of time
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