LONG BEFORE THESE amateur sesh-heads used the spare time of the Covid bother to build bars in their garden sheds, my father actually planned for a room to be used exclusively as a bar when he built a new family home.
Look, it’s not perfect. Bikes, golf equipment, musical instruments, books, sheafs of newspapers and the occasional child’s toy crowds the room. Some of it enhances, some of it detracts.
But there is a counter, some high stools, optics and a mirror behind the bar that has ‘Sean’s Bar’ sandblasted on. So it’s a bar.
And this Christmas, his grandson Ross had to twist his arm for all of 0.125 seconds to convince him a keg stand would have been a fitting addition for the Yuletide period.
Ergo, we spent a bit of time in there over the last few weeks. And a good bit of it was spent throwing darts. Not in an organised, competitive sense, but just something to do while you stood there catching up.
Even with that little exposure to throwing darts, you are soon reminded of the exquisite mixture of difficulty and frustration that makes darts and golf such popular pastimes.
I’ve sat in Brendan Dolan’s living room as he stood at a timber lath screwed into the carpet as he flung darts at a board for two hours solid, occasionally clicking a programme on his laptop that commanded various targets to hit on the board.
Later on, once I had finished up with him, he would get his dinner and then head on into Blacklion village for the evening, to throw darts for at least two more hours.
Then you think of Mickey Mansell, working as a joiner on building sites in Belfast and driving a van home. Getting washed up, something to eat, and leaving his phone in the kitchen as he makes his way to his practice room to throw for two and a half hours.
Every evening.
Dolan is at number 30 in the PDC Order of Merit, with annual earnings of £271,500 in 2024. Mansell was placed at 42, with £143,250 by close of the year.
Take out flights and accommodation from that budget and it’s clear that this is still a fairly lucrative pursuit for these men who found they were very good – amazing in fact – at an activity that might feel faintly ridiculous.
But it’s not ridiculous, because the packaging and presentation of darts by Barry Hearn, President of Matchroom, is fantastic. Throughout the year it bumbles along with everybody vaguely aware of the background noise but come Christmas, it explodes upon us like a blunderbuss spreading confetti.
Darts. The Alexandra Palace. Walk on music. Barry Hearn. Christmas. It’s the most perfect blend of activity, personality and timeslot in the year.
The Ally Pally itself even has a personality. To be frank, as much as it’s enjoyable to watch on television, I’d say the sheer Paddy-Power-Try-Hard-Bantz element might be a bit hard to swallow in the flesh. Poverty chants and the likes, the whole Oi Oi Saveloy stuff. Nah. Nah. Get in the sea.
Much like Glastonbury, the best place to witness it is always the sofa. I’ll revisit that one though with the Neil Young about-turn.
I’ve been to the darts once. The PDC tour came to Belfast in early 2009, which happened to be in the early stages of courtship with my now wife. Arrangements were made to meet afterwards.
It was, she occasionally reminds me, the drunkest condition she has ever seen me in. Darts will do that to even the best of us Pintmen. Here, I know you weren’t expecting to get through a column about darts without drink being mentioned, but just indulge us all the same.
As I recall, the Odyssey was packed that midweek night.
Fifteen years on, darts is enormous now. The Luke Littler Effect, as Barry Hearn calls it, has morphed this sport, game, whatever you want to call it, to a level nobody could have dreamed of. And there’s never a man-child that arrived into darts quite like it, after his performance on Friday night. He simply bludgeoned Michael van Gerwen.
Or maybe we are looking at this all wrong. The Bobby George-Jocky Wilson generation made darts appointment viewing long before the phrase was coined. The charming Jim Bowen guiding a succession of honest to goodness northern folk through episodes of Bullseye. The television audiences reached as far as 17 million. It ran for 15 years and has been revived a few times.
Last year’s PDC final between Littler and Luke Humphries attracted an audience of 3.7 million on Sky. Heaven knows how many more were watching on illegal streams.
There’s more money to be made. Netflix and Amazon are sniffing around the rights.
The three weeks of action at the Ally Pally can hold up to 90,000. The capacity of the current hall is 3,500. Needless to say, more would attend. Other venues might include Wembley Arena with 12,500 capacity or even the O2, with 20,000.
Hearn is an East End boy from Dagenham. He’d be well aware of West Ham’s soul being left at the Boleyn Ground when the team left for London Stadium.
All of it will, with depressing inevitability, happen. The sport will swallow itself. People will turn off. The lure of it all now is that, as big as it is, it still feels a little boutique, quirky and playing by its own rules.
As much as you’d like, you can’t make it a listed building. All you can do is cherish it as it is now.
Enjoyed that Declan thanks.
Excellent piece, as a big snooker fan, and a recent middle aged first time visitor to The Crucible. The same inevitabilities exist…
@Adrian: Indeed. I’ve been to both. Very different!