The barman sets a pint in front of him, and Hankey, with both hands, moves it a millimeter closer. Bald and badly tattooed, with skin the color of wallpaper paste, Hankey will look tonight, under the unforgiving lights of television, as if he were two decades older than his thirty-two years. Now, though, bent over his beer, he looks beautiful—born to the bar, one hand on his head and one on his Harp, lost in concentration, a Rodin sculpture: The Drinker.
Dublin once had its legendary pintmen, supernatural imbibers who could achieve a state of grace by consuming, in a single sitting, as many as thirty jars of Guinness. "The man behind the bar knows the pintman when he sees one," John Sheridan wrote forty years ago in a trade publication called Irish Licensing World. "It is not a matter of dress, or age, or social status; it is a sort of spiritual look. The pintman takes up the tumbler with ritualistic care. Nothing can touch him then. The clock ticks for you and me, but the pintman is on an island in time."
True, this is not Dublin, it's suburban London. And Hankey's no pintman; he's an arrowman. But the arrowman, or professional darts player, is a descendant of the mystical pintman. And for the moment Hankey is on an island in time.
In thirty minutes Ted (the Count) Hankey must burst through the doors of this backstage bar, stride up to a klieg-lit oche (the line behind which the arrowman must stand), and defend his title in the richest tournament in professional darts: the impossibly pressurized, internationally televised, £189,000 (about $279,000) Embassy World Darts Championship, held every January at the Lakeside supper club in Frimley Green, England. Beyond those doors lies madness. "A lotta blokes throw good darts in the pub," says arrowman Andy Fordham, "but out there under the lights"—he points to the doors and the stage beyond them—"they melt."
Thus the arrowman drinks before (and during and after) his matches. "Loosens the darting arm," Martin Amis noted in London Fields, his epic darts novel. Never ask the arrowman to abstain. That, as the great English dartsman Cliff Lazarenko said in the seventies, would be "like asking Mark Spitz to set world records in two feet of water." It simply isn't done.
Hankey's opponent will be formidable, for he is none other than Fordham, a three-hundred-pound publican from the southeast London borough of Woolwich. Fordham, thirty-nine, the third seed in the tournament, prepared for this semifinal match by rising early, finding a pub ten minutes from the tournament site, and persuading the barman to open up for him. Which is how he came to be drinking pilsner at half past nine in the morning, bottles passing before him as if on a conveyor belt in a bottling plant. He threw, in preparation for the match—the winner of which is guaranteed £23,000 and a place in the £46,000 final—precisely six darts.
Fordham is Popeye-forearmed, with a magnificent mullet that falls, like a brown Niagara, nearly to his waist. When I ask him how often he practices, he says, "I don't." When I ask him how he spends his time, he says, "I drink." When I ask him what that tattoo on his left forearm is, he says, "The Grim Reaper." So it is.
Onstage, master of ceremonies Martin Fitzmaurice is imploring the restless sellout crowd of twelve hundred—seated bingo-parlor-style at a hundred long tables—to behave. "Ladies and gentlemen," says the tuxedoed emcee, "please do not stand on the chairs or the tables. And please do not steal the chairs or the tables. We lost three chairs last night, and we do ask your cooperation."
At one of three bars at the Lakeside, another Martin—Martin the Barman—performs a marvelous inventory of intemperance. "We'll sell four hundred kegs this week," he says. "There are eleven gallons in each keg … that's forty-four hundred gallons, right … there are eight pints in a gallon, so … let's see … right … we'll do thirty-five thousand, two hundred pints this week." He whistles in exhalation and then double-checks the figures with a pencil. "That doesn't include bottles," he mumbles. "We do lots of bottles."
If you figure that one bottle of beer is sold for every two pints of draught, that works out to 52,800 beers consumed during the nine-night tournament—which is to say, five beers a night for every man, woman, and child in attendance at the Embassy. What's more, tournament sponsor Embassy is a brand of fags, or cigarettes, and thus everyone at the Lakeside is encouraged to smoke like an oil fire. Everyone complies, too. So a blue Los Angeles haze hangs over the proceedings. English photographer Julian Herbert, alarmed by my ambition to spend the week in these quarters, coined a vivid anachronism. "You will have a dry-cleaning bill," he said, "of biblical proportions." So I would.
Here's the rub, though. Sometimes the healthiest thing a body can do is get out of the sunshine off the green grass, out of the fresh air, and breathe in the opposite—air that is equal parts smoke, tension, and BO. Only then will you rediscover what first drew you, as a child, to games. "A sense of 'umor is what's missing from sports, don't you think?" says Bobby George, the King of Darts, aspirating his h's in the Cockney accent of London's East End. "The footballers over 'ere 'ave all become prima donnas. Same in America. You don't get the 'umor in sports. Americans 'ave to win everything. Darts aren't about that. Darts are about 'avin' fun. Darts are about the craic [the good time you have] with your mates down at the pub."
So they are. So come with me. It's a beautiful day—much too lovely to spend outdoors.
"You can walk into most any pub, get a free set of darts from behind the bar, and make friends for life," says Irish publican Gabriel (Gabby) Nolan, who left Galway for England when he turned twenty-one, in 1968, to pursue his dream of driving a red London double-decker bus. He did so for four years, and it was a great gas. But then Gabby aspired to manage a pub, and he took classes and wound up pulling pints at the King George in Essex. Which is where he became mates with Bobby George, who sat at the bar for much of the mid-seventies, occasionally answering the telephone just to make it stop ringing.
"King George?" the callers would say.
"Speaking!" George liked to reply.
"And that's how I got my nickname," George says. "The King. King of Darts."
Indeed, George was, for some time, the King of Darts, a two-time winner of the News of the World world championship, a tournament—now defunct—that once drew seventeen thousand spectators to the Agricultural Hall in north London. By the late 1970s the News of the World had moved to a raucous London dance hall, the rough-and-tumble Alexandra Palace. Soon the News was usurped, in prestige and prize money, by the Embassy worlds, where players and spectators alike can (and do) bet at the on-site bookmakers.
"Dennis were an eighty-to-one shot when he won the Embassy in 1991," says Alan Critchlow, manager of the great arrowman Dennis Priestly. "He got twenty-four thousand pounds for winning. And I won twenty-eight thousand pounds betting on him. The next day the bookie sent a big Rolls-Royce 'round, and the driver took us to Ascot. They were trying to get their money back. They took a right canin' on that one."
Every face and every place in darts appears lifted from a Guy Ritchie film. George, fifty-five, never threw a dart until he was twenty-nine. "I dug tunnels and laid granite floors," he says. That explains his square physique, which supports three pounds of gold jewelry, including a ring on each finger of his left (or nondarting) hand. The chain around his neck would be more suitable on the tires of a snowplow. Not surprisingly, George is up for a role on the soap opera EastEnders. "They want him to play a character," says Gabby Nolan, "who is like himself." Which is to say, a working-class hero, for George is universally considered—in the vernacular of the East End—"a good guv'nor."
That's how he fell into darts. "One night a guy in a pub was bein' a bit of a bully," says George. "He was bullyin' people who couldn't play darts, and I said to 'im, 'You're a bit of a bully. You're out of order.' He said, 'Oh, yeah, can you play?' I said, 'I never played the game in me life. I'll play you for fifty pounds.' The guy was the best player in Barkingside. I beat him. Within a year I was the local masters champion. I had a gift."
To understand the gift you must know that tournament darts is 501, a game in which both players start with 501 points and try to "check out," or reduce their scores to zero, three darts at a time. The final dart must be either a bull's-eye (which is worth 50 points) or a double. Thus, 180 (three treble 20s) is the most an arrowman can score on three darts, a feat that always elicits an orgasmic cry from the referee: "One 'undred and aye-teeeee!" It requires extraordinary physical reserve to repeatedly hit, from an oche seven feet, nine and a quarter inches away, the double and treble beds, each of which has a surface area smaller than a fortune-cookie slip. That is why there is a £50,000 bonus offer at the Embassy to any arrowman who makes a "nine-darter": seven treble 20s, a treble 15, and a double 18 for 501—the lowest possible checkout. "A nine-darter is like making nine holes-in-one," says George. "You need a lot of skill, and a bit o' luck."
At its highest level, professional darts is almost entirely a mental game, and not merely because the arrowmen, nearly all of them school dropouts, are arithmetic savants. Give them any number below 170, the highest score from which a player can check out on three darts—treble top (top is 20, at the top of the board), treble top, bull's-eye—and they will instantly convert it into the currency of darts. One hundred nineteen? Treble top, 19, double top. One hundred twenty-six? Treble 19, 19, bull's-eye. All arrowmen can do this all night, and it is arresting to hear them do so.
"But the game itself is simple," says George. "We could all be world-class. If you can see and got nothing wrong with your arms, there is no reason you can't be the best in the world. One sixteenth of an inch on this side of the wire, you're good. One sixteenth of an inch on that side, you're world champion. The difference in the end is nerves, what we call bottle. You gotta have the bottle."
Ted Hankey was all bottle in winning the Embassy a year ago (with a final three darts of 170), for which he earned £44,000. The final is always best of eleven sets, with each set a best of five games. Hankey won last year's match 6–0, in an astonishing forty-six minutes. How had he made his living before winning the Embassy—and, with it, a year's worth of exhibition bookings? "I were on the dole," says Hankey, who lives in North Wales. And before that? "You name it, I done it."
"We're just working-class people," says his manager, a retired lorry driver named Dave Lovatt, and in that one word—just—is an aching multitude: of class repression, of quashed ambition, of knowing one's place.
The antihero of London Fields is a petty criminal, Keith Talent.
A casual darter or arrowman all his life, right back to the bald board on the kitchen door, Keith had recently got serious," Amis writes. "He'd always thrown for his pub, of course, and followed the sport: You could almost hear angels singing when, on those special nights (three or four times a week), Keith laid out the cigarettes on the arm of the couch and prepared to watch darts on television. But now he had designs on the other side of the screen …
And television was all about everything he did not have and was full of all the people he did not know and could never be. Television was the great shop front, lightly electrified, up against which Keith crushed his nose. And now among the squirming motes, the impossible prizes, he saw a doorway, or an arrow, or a beckoning hand (with a dart in it), and everything said—Darts. Pro Darts. World Darts.
Embassy Darts. A dart is not merely rocket-shaped. It can be a rocket and generate escape velocity to break free from the gravitational pull of poverty. An easy alternative is to accept your lot, to convince yourself that money and success are fraught with problems, and that you're better off without them. Gabby Nolan illustrates that with a story one night in his current darts pub, Nolan's Freehouse, Vauxhall, South London.
"You know George Best?" says Gabby, referring to the Belfast-born bon vivant soccer star of the 1960s. "One of the great footballers of all time, liked to knock about with women and all that? Well, one night here in London, he won forty thousand pounds at the Hilton casino on Park Lane. Ended up in bed with Miss World. They order champagne, and an Irish porter brings it up. He walks into the room and sees George Best in bed with forty thousand pounds scattered about and Miss World in her knickers. And the porter just shakes his head and says, 'George, where did it all go wrong?'"
Bobby George, blessedly, has no such aversion to pleasure. He lives in a forty-room, eighteen bedroom estate that he built in Colchester. Darts has been good to George. He has flogged boards on QVC in the United States and thrown darts on the very stage trod by Elvis at the Las Vegas Hilton. ("They had a board backstage," says George. "Apparently, Elvis and them liked to throw darts before they'd go on.")
"When Bobby started winning," says Gabby, "he'd play a lot of exhibitions in pubs. He had to go up to Scotland on the train once, and he complained that he was gonna be bored. I told him to get a book, and he said, 'I can't read.' He couldn't read or write. People would ask him to sign an autograph 'To Mandy' or 'To Patricia,' and he'd ask me how to spell 'Mandy' or 'Patricia.' He educated himself."
Today George writes a monthly column in Darts World, does color commentary for BBC2 at the Embassy, and enjoys—in his spare time—what he calls the "booze, fags, and cars" lifestyle that darts has afforded him. He has, in other words, no complaints.
Then again, what is there to complain about? All the arrowmen are staying in a hotel adjacent to the Lakeside supper club. The hotel lobby has two bars. One is called the Lounge Bar. A sign on its door says, THIS BAR IS FOR HOTEL BUSINESS GUESTS ONLY. DARTS PERSONS USE PENINSULAR BAR. THANK YOU. Across the lobby the Peninsular Bar—whose sign has been modified, by Darts Persons, to read PENIS BAR—is full at eleven o'clock in the morning.
When I ask Hankey how he will prepare for his semifinal, he says, "I'm gonna lie in bed with a sandwich and watch the darts on the telly, and if anyone phones up for an interview, I'm gonna tell 'em to fuck off." Fair enough.
Still, the Count graciously agrees to remove his darts shirt—like a bowling shirt, or the shirts once favored by Ferdinand Marcos—and do a brief roll call of his manifold Dracula tattoos. "That's a Drac, that's a Drac, that's a Drac, that's a demon, and that's for me," he says of the tattoo on his right arm that reads donna. The full-length Dracula on his back, alas, is but one third complete. (Fordham, in addition to his Reaper tattoo, has, on his right forearm, a skull and the name bob. I don't ask.)
Fordham versus Hankey is the second semifinal on a Saturday afternoon. The first semi is won by John Walton, whose nom de darts is John Boy Walton. "Fordham wants him banned from darts," emcee Fitzmaurice tells the crowd, "and the reason is—get this!—he doesn't drink." Lusty boos lap up at the stage.
Moments later Walton is serially drinking pints backstage. "I don't drink," he explains, "before matches." Which nevertheless makes him, in darts, a teetotaler. Walton is the rare arrowman who can abstain before a match and win. "Any one of those guys goes out there without a drink, and he'll do nothing," says Mary Nolan, Gabby's wife. Yet the arrowman must also know when to say when.
"I played Colin Monk here once," notes Fordham, "and I got him drunk beforehand." Fordham won that night.
Such "windups"—the head games played before matches—are often more memorable than the matches. "One that sticks in me mind," says Mike Gregory, who lost the most dramatic Embassy final ever, in 1992, "happened at the Old Nun's Head pub in London." Gregory played all comers in exhibition matches, occasionally for a few quid. "There was this bloke named Jake," he says. "Jake the Snake. He said, 'Before we play, we're gonna have you on a bit.' I thought, okay, the usual, here come the strippers. But the bloke brings out an albino python and hangs it around me. I'm deathly afraid of snakes. He says, 'You've had the baby, now meet the da,' and he brings out a thirteen-foot boa. These are the things people do for an advantage."
As for Hankey, he now rises from the bar and dons a black cape. Upon hearing his name introduced outside, he bursts through the doors of the bar and strides toward the stage. His fanfare is chilling vampire-movie music. Several women in the audience have battery-operated bats on their hats that flap their wings.
Fordham, whose face is three quarters covered by beard—which explains his nickname, the Viking—enters the arena to "I'm Too Sexy," by Right Said Fred. Alas, to the disappointment of the hundreds who have come wearing plastic Viking helmets, Fordham doesn't have it tonight. Hankey's darts are tungsten-tipped missiles, guided by laser. Fordham needs a mere 33 on his final three darts to keep the match alive, but he can manage only a 5, a bounce-out, and a 1, for 6. Hankey then checks out from 134 for a spot in the final. Even so, the crowd sings (to the tune of "Guantanamera"), "One Andy Fordham! There's only one Andy Fordham! One Andy Forrrrr-dham! There's only one Andy Forrrrr-dham!"
"Ladies and gentlemen," announces Fitzmaurice, eager to clear the club after five minutes of this ovation, "Andy Fordham has left the building!"
If Fordham is the most popular player in world darts, it's because he is—as anyone will tell you at the pub he manages, the Queen's Arms in Woolwich—"a lovely bloke." Pulling a perfect pint of Guinness there one night, Fordham says, "I'm just a normal laid-back geezer." Within minutes he is pulling out photographs of himself as a rail-thin twenty-one-year-old aspiring soccer player. "Lookit," he says, an eternity of longing in his voice. "Lookit what eighteen years'll do to you." He takes comfort in a giant novelty birthday card on the wall behind him, hanging above the cash register. IT'S NOT A BEER BELLY, reads the card, IT'S A FUEL TANK FOR A SEX MACHINE.
Three years ago his wife, Jenny, contracted a cancer she seems to have thrashed. She shows me an old photograph of herself, bald from chemotherapy but smiling broadly. She keeps another photo, of Andy, in her locket, for the arrowman travels often. The next day he is off to the Netherlands, where darts is second in popularity only to soccer among televised sports, and where Fordham—a fixture in the English press only during Embassy week—is like a rock star. "In 'olland," says Fordham, trying to phrase this diplomatically in front of his wife, "the birds get their tits out for you to sign." Jenny rolls her eyes, but he goes on. "I signed a bird's bum once. She pulled up 'er dress, and she 'ad a G-string on underneath. She bent over, and I went like that with a marker." He makes a Zorro slash. "You couldn't read it," he says, taking a pull of his pilsner, "but she couldn't see it anyway."
In England darts reached a peak of popularity in the 1980s. "Holland is now where England was then," says Gregory, speaking only of the public's appetite for the game. "They took over darts. That's the way it goes here: football, cricket—we used to be on top in them, too."
Holland's top two arrowmen are both at the Embassy. Ray Barneveld is a two-time winner of the tournament. (He's a former postman turned darts millionaire.) Co Stompe is an Amsterdam tram driver, matchstick-thin, who speaks impeccable English in a Cockney accent. ("Because we spend so much time 'ere," says Stompe, whom I later overhear saying, "Fuckin' 'ell.") The Embassy is televised live on the Dutch network SBS6. "There are seven million people in Holland," says English pro Kevin Painter, "and five million of 'em are watching us on TV." (In fact there are about sixteen million people in Holland, three and a half million of whom watched Barneveld win the highest-rated final.) In the United Kingdom, the Embassy has been exiled to a nightly tape delay on BBC2, though it is rerun endlessly throughout the next afternoon.
In the eighties, eight tournaments were televised annually in England (now only two are), and there was a popular darts game show (called Bullseye). Thus arrowmen like Jocky Wilson were famous beyond all reason. Wilson was a toothless Scotsman. Gabby Nolan's children bought him a set of false teeth, but they weren't made to measure, so he wore them on a chain around his neck. It didn't hurt that oche rhymes with Jocky and that Wilson always entered to an emcee calling, "Jocky to the oche," a phrase that still resonates in England. His appeal transcended darts. When Dexy's Midnight Runners appeared on Top of the Pops in 1982 to perform their hit "Jackie Wilson Said"—a cover of the Van Morrison classic—an engineer at the BBC keyed in, as a backdrop, footage not of Jackie Wilson (soul man) but of Jocky Wilson (arrowman), naturally assuming the song was about him.
When I ask Tony Green—the eminent darts play-by-play man for the BBC and a witness to all twenty-four Embassy tournaments—why darts declined in popularity in England, he pauses for a very long time and says, "I'm going to be perfectly honest with you. I think it was the introduction of the Breathalyzer. Pub leagues dwindled, and the game dried up a bit at the grassroots level. But you'll never take darts out of the pub. You wouldn't want to."
"A lot of youngsters go to university now and make money and don't have time to go to pubs," says Gabby Nolan, "but you'll still find good publicans who put their hearts into darts." So Nolan's pub has two boards and six league nights a week, and thirteen thriving teams whose kindly (if profane) members contributed £1,300 to charity last year. "All from one swear box," says Mary Nolan. "And we only enforce the swear box on Saturday nights. Even then, only during the karaoke."
Though professional darts is still great craic, the game I am witnessing at the Embassy is, incredibly, a sanitized version of its incarnation of the eighties, when players could drink and smoke on television. Now they're not allowed to drink alcohol on camera, and—absurdly—Evian bottles chill in a champagne bucket at the oche. "It was a mistake to take the drinkin' and smokin' off the stage," says Gregory. "Two thousand people in the audience are drinkin' and smokin', and the guy throwin' darts has a bottle of water? The reason people like watchin' darts is that they know the people onstage are like them."
Jocky Wilson, alas, is retired to Kirkcaldy, disillusioned with darts and the media machine that ate him. (At least the Sun, the lurid London tabloid, bought him a proper set of teeth in thanks for his years of providing fodder.) The best player in the world now—the best ever, by most estimates—is Phil (the Power) Taylor, who has won nine world championships: two Embassies and seven of the eight Professional Darts Corporation titles. The PDC is a rival tour, started in 1994, with Taylor and other players who don't play the Embassy, which is run by the venerable British Darts Organization. Darts, like boxing, has no unified title. The field at the PDC championship, televised on Sky, is said to be more talented at the top. The thirty-two-man Embassy has a deeper field and more prize money.
I arrange to meet Taylor at the players' hotel, and he brings a buddy: a big bloke, with half an ear, whom Taylor introduces as Holyfield. Last year the queen declared Taylor a member of the Order of the British Empire—one step short of a knighthood—an astonishing feat for an arrowman. Tonight he will be honored at the Embassy, in a rare rapprochement between the tours.
Astoundingly, Taylor didn't play darts until he was twenty-six. (He is forty now.) He threw every Tuesday night at his Stoke-on-Trent local, the Saggermaker's Bottom-Knocker. (Saggermaker was a job in pottery, and Stoke was once a pottery center. Whatever, pray tell, is a bottom-knocker is a question perhaps better left unanswered.)
"I was," Taylor says of those first league nights, "a natural." Within a year he was picked to play for his county, and within another year he quit his engineering job. He resolved to crawl through his television and into pro darts. The man had three children—he has four now—and his dole check afforded him, after household expenses, only £6 a week in pocket money. "That's what made me a winner," he says. "That pressure." At his first Embassy, in 1990, he went off at 250-to-1 with the bookies. Everybody in Stoke bet on him. "Everybody," he says. "An old lady told me she had seven pounds left from her pension check and put it on me." And everybody won.
Parked outside in the hotel drive is Taylor's blue Peugeot 406—a complimentary dealer's car, painted with his name and nickname and the outdated boast 8 TIMES WORLD CHAMPION. He has made roughly £2 million in tournament winnings, exhibition fees, and endorsements. "People have called me Tiger Taylor, but I don't think of myself on that level with Woods or Michael Jordan," says the Power, a short, potbellied, extremely polite man with the arrowman's requisite tattoo on each forearm. "I do get congratulated a lot. People are very proud of me here because England don't win at too many things anymore."
As we speak, Taylor's buddy, Holyfield, is at a grease board in this hotel conference room, silently drawing a detailed lion's head in orange marker. (It is majestic—moving, even.) "The biggest thing that will ever happen to me," says Taylor as we prepare to make our good-byes, "will be meeting the queen of England. No, I never, ever would have dreamed it."
It may never happen. Eight weeks after our conversation, Taylor will be convicted of indecent assault for having groped two twenty-three-year-old women with whom he had engaged in an epic drinking contest after a 1999 exhibition in Scotland. (His sentencing was scheduled for March 27.) Tabloid headlines will call Taylor a DARTY OLD MAN and his victims, DARTS TARTS. They will quote him as longing for his days on the dole queue and telling the judge, "This case may well split up my family." Even the quality broadsheets will report that the queen may strip Taylor of his MBE.
All this from a man considered to be, by professional darts standards, too boring. "I suppose Taylor is the best ever," Gabby Nolan says one night at the Freehouse, "but until fairly recently he could go into Sainsbury's supermarket and not be recognized." How different from a decade ago, when elegant Eric Bristow—the Crafty Cockney—was a charismatic rival of Jocky Wilson's. Bristow found himself in New York City, walking down the street, when a fan's disembodied voice came from across Fifth Avenue. It screamed, simply, "One 'undred and aye-teeeee!"
The bad news is, no one can turn back the clock. The good news: There's no need to at the Lakeside—Club Mirror magazine's Club of the Year from 1976 to '80—where a bygone age is preserved in amber. The walls are filled with signed publicity stills of long-forgotten or never-recalled acts: Grumbleweeds, Keith O'Keefe, the Fantasticks. Machines on bathroom walls dispense packets of cologne called Zazz and Obsess. The entire place exudes a touching (if maudlin) showbiz sincerity, with an 8-by-10 glossy of the Candy Man taking pride of place on one wall. "For as long as Lakeside has existed," reads the caption, "we dreamed of the day that Sammy Davis Jr. might appear. He was booked to appear on October 13, 1990. Unfortunately, he had a prior engagement—in heaven."
In Sammy's stead, this has become the Lakeside's biggest night, the Sunday evening of the Embassy final, Hankey versus Walton, televised live throughout the United Kingdom. At the backstage bar John Boy calmly throws darts, nurses a few fags, sips at his coffee. The Count, conversely, is sinking pints, smoking like Vesuvius, and making frequent trips to the loo.
Nerves don't serve an arrowman well. Sweating palms are the enemy. "I couldn't win in America," says Gregory, "because of two things: Budweiser and air-conditioning. The condensation from the longneck bottles got on my fingers and affected my release."
The enormity of tonight's match is inescapable. Kate Hoey, member of Parliament and Britain's minister of sport, has arrived. Backstage, Hankey sneers and snaps on his cape. Walton blinks madly through thick glasses. Standing with both players is a BBC announcer who opens the live broadcast by saying, "Beyond these doors is the most unique atmosphere in sports!"
With that, the doors are thrown open, and the players crash through—first Walton, to "Cotton-Eyed Joe," and then Hankey, to his vampire aria. The place goes absolutely batty. Perhaps literally so, in the case of the young female Count enthusiasts, who are back, wearing their hats with mechanical bats.
The match starts badly for Hankey. He makes a sickly 22 on his first three darts, while Walton makes "one 'undred and aye-teeeee!" From there, things quickly get worse for the Count, and he goes into his trademark stall, taking an eternity to walk to the board and remove his arrows. This actually helps a little, and he's only down three sets to two at intermission, when he steams into the bar backstage and shakes several empty cigarette boxes on as many unbussed tables, desperate for a fag. At last he finds one—and smokes and sips from a pint glass while his manager, Lovatt, slaps him softly on the face, whisper-shouting, "Stop fuckin' about!"
Walton sips coffee and coolly throws darts. The abstainer has stolen the pintman's tranquillity. "I was so relaxed," he'll say later, "I felt like I was playin' in the pub." After the break Walton takes the sixth set, and the seventh, and in the eighth he needs only 25 on his final three darts to kiss the trophy. He throws only the first two. "Nine, double-eight, thankyouverymuch," the new champion says an hour later, recounting the highlight of his life in two digits. "I wanted to fly."
A thirty-nine-year-old former laborer from industrial Doncaster, Walton began playing darts at age nine, in the back room of a bingo parlor, while his parents, in the front room, looked for a B-8 or an I-17. He began playing professionally, he says, after wrecking his back on the job. "A laborer with no back," he says, "is no use to anyone."
No use to anyone? Tonight, with his weeping fiancée at his side, Walton leaves the Lakeside in the Mercedes 450 SEL with the jonboy license plate and the oversized novelty champagne bottle in the backseat. The sterling Embassy trophy is in the front seat. In the mail is a check for £46,000. His life is changed forever. Yet it isn't changed even for a day. Tomorrow night he'll be back at his local, in his regular weekly league match. "At the Alma in Doncaster," he says. "I don't miss Monday night."
Because that's what darts is all about: the craic with your mates down at the pub. So the mixed league is playing Monday night at Nolan's Freehouse, where Gabby tells me one last story. Years ago he and Bobby George would drive around London in the latter's used Rolls. In those days, at the wheel, Bobby always played a tape of his favorite song, "American Pie," and he'd sing along in his Cockney accent: "Drove me Chevy to the levee …" So one night the pair washes up at Bill Bartlett's pub in Brentwood, and one thing leads to another, and three bookies at the bar bet Bobby five to one that he can't put three straight darts in the double-1 bed. Gabby slaps a hundred pounds on the bar, and Bobby sticks the first dart. Then, just next to it, the second. The King of Darts returns to the bar, and sips his pint, slowlike. The blokes are a bit wound up now, so they double the stakes for the last arrow, and Gabby slaps another hundred pounds on the bar. Bobby walks to the oche as if he were John bloody Wayne—and finds, with the final dart, the last square micron of space still available: double-1.
Gabby is giddy all over again at the memory—of himself and Bobby legging it out of there with what was, in their youth, a small fortune. "Some lovely stories," says the Irishman, wistfully recalling the people and places and predicaments one finds in thirty years as a London publican. "I've sometimes thought of writing a book."
When I tell him he ought to, lest the stories disappear, Gabby reassures me. The oral history of darts and pints and London pubs will survive unto eternity. "The cows come and go," says the wise publican, pulling another pint of Caffrey's and placing it, unbidden, before me. "But bullshit lasts forever."
We raise our glasses.
(April 2, 2001)
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