Let’s Play Darts!

As the World Championships opens at the Ally Pally, we take a look at just how darts got to this point.

Let’s Play Darts!

Where would you find some nuns, the Teletubbies, Super Mario, a pack of Crayola crayons and the Avengers all having a great time together? At the Alexandra Palace for the PDC World Darts Championship of course, and the 2025 edition begins today.

Every year thousands of people fill the historic venue for the chance to dress up, drink, be merry and party while supporting their favourites at the ever-popular event. This is on top of the millions who tune in on television, with last year’s audience for the final between ‘Cool Hand’ Luke Humphries and 16 year-old Luke ‘The Nuke’ Littler being a mighty 4.8 million.

The sport, backed by huge coverage on Sky Sports, is massive in the UK and is also hugely popular in many other countries around Europe and the rest of the world, particularly in darts hotbeds such as the Netherlands and Germany. What once was viewed as a pub game for overweight men in smoky rooms that was occasionally televised has now grown into a multi-million pound industry complete with dancing girls and indoor fireworks, and it shows no sign of slowing down.

It is now incredibly hard to even get tickets to go to the World Championships with tickets for this year being sold out before a general sale even took place and a whopping 40,000 tickets being sold within the first half hour and the full allocation of 90,000 being sold within an hour. It is fast becoming one of the UK’s bucket list sporting events.

My first exposure to darts wasn’t watching the masses take in the action at the Ally Pally though but rather was just under 50 miles away at the Lakeside Club in Frimley Green. That was the venue for the BDO World Championship and when I was young, that was the tournament to watch, particularly as coverage was free on the BBC.

Until 1992, the BDO Championship was definitely the most coveted of them all, but the organisation was very much focused on amateur players and those at the top wanted more money for what they did and so broke away to form the PDC and signed a big deal with Sky. This has worked out well over time, as the paragraphs above attest to, but for me growing up, the BDO was still king.

There were still lively crowds, a ton of gold jewellery and cheesy entrance songs, and nicknames galore, but the participants still looked a bit more like your dad and the standard just wasn’t quite as high. There was however something quite endearing about the commentators telling you about the jobs that many of the players still had outside of the game and you respected the time that must be given up to just reach the tournament on top of that. The fact that there were more missed finishes often ramped up the excitement though as you were never totally sure of the whether the finish would come or not.

I have some wonderful memories of tuning in, the first of then being 1995 when the diminutive Welshman Richie Burnett beat a young Raymond van Barneveld in the final. The next year was the turn of ‘The Bronzed Adonis’ Steve Beaton, complete with immaculate mullet, porn star moustache and gold chain, who stopped Burnett going back-to-back in the final. One of the other players that I really remember in my early days was Bobby George, who later became a commentator. Up until that point I had never seen a man west so much jewellery in my life!

Often it was the characters that made darts for me, and in the year 2000, one of the most cartoonish of them all took home the big prize. Ted ‘The Count’ Hankey was famed for his love of vampires and came out to the oche wearing full cape regalia and throwing plastic bats into the crowd. I seem to remember that he used to bring his Mum along with him to the tournament every year too. That year he was just unbeatable and smashed Ronnie Baxter 6-0 in the final, finishing with a high checkout 170. It really was perfection. His character was greatly diminished due to dubious events in his personal life in later years but at that time he was on top of the world.

In 2004 I was at university and staying in student halls in my first year. I had kept an eye on the darts that year without watching religiously but when the final came around a couple of friends and I commandeered the common room TV remote to watch ‘The Viking’ Andy Fordham down Mervyn King while the American students watching with us asked a huge variety of questions about what was going on. Fordham is one of those almost mythical figures in the sport who ran a pub, at one point weighed over 30 stone and regularly used to drink more than 20 bottles of beer before playing. In truth he was probably an advert for the stereotype of all that was wrong with darts at the time but he seemed like a genuinely nice man and I was happy that he won.

2007 was my final year at university, the year I really got into the PDC tournament as well, and also the year that we saw, in my opinion, two of the most interesting, if not the greatest, world championship finals of all time. Firstly in the PDC event, my friends and I sat down in a pub on New Year’s Day to watch PDC mainstay and probably the greatest darts player of all time, Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor defend his title against 4-time BDO champion Raymond van Barneveld. The atmosphere in the pub was great with people shaking off hangovers from Hogmanay celebrations the day previously and all eyes were focused on the action on the multiple screens.

Taylor, sporting an orange shirt in an attempt to play mind games with his Dutch opponent, flew out of the blocks, taking the first three sets in rapid fashion. Barneveld began to find his form however and started to chip away at the lead of Taylor, eventually sneaking in front, 6-5, after the 11th set. Taylor hit back though, taking the match to a decider. The two behemoths could not be separated and the final set reached 5-5, meaning that there was to be a sudden death decider. Everyone in the pub was truly on the edge of their seats. ‘Barney’ finally hit double top to win the match and his only PDC world title. So fuelled by beer and excitement were my friends that they decided the time was right to pop home to get passports, then immediately get a taxi to the airport and board the first available flight in celebration. I declined due to a lack of funds but apparently missed a belting couple of days in Germany!

Just a fortnight later, the BDO final was also very interesting but in a completely different way. ‘Wolfie’ Martin Adams was a BDO stalwart and the captain of the England men’s darts team. Well known for his grizzly beard and entrance backed by Duran Duran’s Hungry Like the Wolf, he had always played well without winning the big one. This looked to be his year though as in the final he was facing the 150-1 outsider Phill Nixon who, at 50, was taking part in his first ever World Championship, let alone final.

This time I eschewed the pub and watched by myself in my flat. Like many watching, I assumed that the match may be over quickly and, initially, it looked like that would be the case as Adams rocketed out to a 6-0 lead in a first to 7 match. The interval came at the right time for Nixon however and he came back out fighting, somehow bringing the score back to six sets apiece, despite Adams having darts for the tournament at different stages. At this point I wished I had gone to join my friends after all.

In the final set, Wolfie recovered and won three legs in a row to finally take his first title. Nixon had made the match memorable though, and the BDO tournament finished on a high that year.

That was also the year that my allegiances really turned. From that point on, my focus was definitely more on the PDC which was becoming bigger and bigger all the time. One step in this was moving the World Championship to the bigger Ally Pally from the Circus Tavern where it had been held previously. Publicity was also boosted by the Premier League of Darts which had started two years previously and encompassed a tour around the country, and eventually further afield, giving local fans a chance to see their heroes in action.

Whilst coming towards the end of university, I actually worked at this event in Glasgow (I was event security at the time) and had the opportunity to meet Phil Taylor who turned out to be a very lovely guy. My support for him stood from that moment forward.

In the subsequent years, coverage and support of the darts has just grown and grown and I have come to know and love many of the personalities of the game including Gary Anderson, Michael van Gerwen, ‘Snakebite’ Peter Wright and ‘Jackpot’ Adrian Lewis, all world champions in their own right. Darts has also become far more professional in terms of both the attitude of the players, and the presentation on television and the wider media. It is now a genuinely respected sport.

There have also been many wonderful moments that have taken place during the finals that will always be remembered from numerous 9 darters, to Phil Taylor’s 16th and final world championship victory in 2013, the rise of the Scots in Anderson and Wright, Fallon Sherrock shocking the men and becoming the first woman ever to win matches at the event, and the underdog performances of players like Rob Cross (champion in 2018) and of course Luke Littler last year.

Littler has been the final shot in the arm that the sport needed in terms of attaining mainstream coverage as the now 17 year-old has been absolutely everywhere in the media this year. His rise from schoolboy to world finalist to Premier League champion has been incredible and he is surely the face of the sport moving into the future.

When the first competitors step up to the oche at the Ally Pally today, the thousands in attendance and millions watching around the world will be on tenterhooks for the brilliant action that is sure to follow. The tournament is now a gem in the British, if not world, sporting calendar and the juggernaut that is the sport just keeps moving forward. Ladies and gentlemen, Let’s Play Darts!