LAST UPDATE | 31 Dec 2023
IN HIS EARLY 20’s, Brendan Dolan looked like a darts player before he was a darts player. He sported a furry moustache of the type that would claim the head of a pint for itself during the first slug.
I know this, because Fermanagh is a small world and we played soccer together – briefly – for Lisbellaw United in the lower reaches of Fermanagh and Western reserve leagues.
Later, we linked up again – to the delight of absolutely nobody – when a soccer team was cobbled together out of the barflies that hung around Magee’s Bar in Enniskillen, sometime in the late ‘90s.
Brendan’s position was left-back. Mine was left wing. He didn’t trust the entire concept of offering an overlap. He was rooted in the Gaelic football sensibility from his upbringing in Belcoo O’Rahilly’s that he was more of a corner-back, minding his patch.
During the day he worked in the Elite Electronics factory in Enniskillen. In the evenings he drank and threw arrows in the cross-border Fermanagh and Cavan villages of Belcoo and Blacklion. At weekends he turned out for Belcoo’s second team, the Dolans being strongly committed and recognisable figures around their club.
He was, it bears saying, the most modest chap you could ever encounter. Which is why, at the age of 30 when he started playing proper professional darts tournaments, it came as something of a surprise to a lot of people.
During those long days when the sporting world was locked down with Covid, the Off The Ball folks came up with the spiffing idea of each county in Ireland having a sporting Mount Rushmore; four figures from their county that dwarfed all else.
For our sins, they roped myself and former Fermanagh Herald journalist and county footballer, Colm Bradley in as native judges.
Fermanagh would prove to be one of the quirkier selections. There were World Champions in events such as Bog Snorkelling and running across The Antarctic. There was even an Olympic Champion in Robert Kerr (racing for Canada) who won Gold in the 200 metres in 1908.
Bradley and I kept it more recent, with multiple Olympian Declan Burns, the first Gaelic football All-Star Peter McGinnity, and rally driver Bertie Fisher.
And Dolan.
“I spent one summer travelling with Brendan around Ireland playing in tournaments. I’d be losing in the first round, but he would invariably go on and win them,” recalled Bradley.
“Talking about excellence in your field, he was at one stage the 10th best dart player in the world in 2015. That is a phenomenal level of excellence.”
My own view was strengthened by an afternoon around a decade ago I spent with him out in Belcoo to write a piece.
At the time he wasn’t married and was living with his mother. In his living room he had a timber lath screwed into the floor, the requisite distance back for an Oche. His dartboard was mounted above the sofa pushed tight to the wall.
His laptop had a programme that dictated what target to throw to next on the board. He would approach the lath and run through his methodical style; pull back, a slight twitch of the hand, perpendicular stance, throw.
And he did this hour after hour after hour. When he took a break, it was to book flights and trains to such glamorous venues as Stoke on Trent for the weekend tournaments. The car hire, hotel rooms and flights meant he was barely getting by. But moving to the English midlands wasn’t for him.
Later that day, he would make his way to Eamonn Fitz’s bar in Blacklion to drink a few pints and throw more darts. That was his routine. When we talked about how the sport is presented on Sky, he told me that almost every player would be at least four or five pints deep before they took to the stage, to calm nerves.
I came away from the meeting full of admiration for him, but also feeling that darts was a grinding, brutally boring way of earning your living.
The world of PDC darts is stuffed full of outsized personalities. Men like Peter ‘Snakebite’ Wright who will paint a serpent on his head and fix his hair into a Mohican. Or the Phil Taylors and your Gary Andersons, the Gerwen Prices. Barney and the way he might wring every last bit of goodness out of his walk-on. And so on.
Dolan has slipped in under the radar. He is entirely ego-free. When he nailed his final, winning darts against Gerwen Price and Gary Anderson, there was no fist-pumping or playing to the crowds in his biggest occasions since the nine-dart finish against James Wade in 2011 that earned him his ‘History Maker’ nickname and a mere £5,000.
Instead, there was an instant compassion for the vanquished. He approached both men with a rueful look and appeared to almost apologise for having the nerve to do such a thing.
Afterwards he said to Sky Sports; “It was really tough – I mentally collapsed when I was 2-0 up.
“I went 2-0 up and I was wondering what was wrong with Gary. I fell into the trap that he wasn’t at it and he wasn’t going to be at it, then the next thing he’s starting to kick into gear and come back.”
It’s fair to say the crowd wasn’t for him. They won’t be in the quarter-final tomorrow night against the teenage sensation Luke Littler.
But at 50, he is throwing the best darts of his life. The Fermanagh nation are daring to dream that he can create a Fairytale of the New Year.