Eric Bristow (22 page)

It was the same in the Cockney. I’d be there working behind the bar all day and playing the occasional county game for Staffordshire, and having a few beers as well, and then at eleven o’clock at night when everybody had left, about ten of us would stay behind for a lock-in. This would infuriate Maureen who’d say to me, ‘You’ve been in here twelve hours, why do you need to have a lock-in?’

Again I’d say, ‘I’ve been working for twelve hours. I’ve been behind the bar and I’ve been organising and playing darts.’

Maureen couldn’t hack it, even though by about half past midnight we’d be done. She just didn’t get it. I needed time to relax and when I relax I like to have a beer. It was just little things like this that added up to one big explosion, and when it came we split and Maureen gave up darts as well. Not many people last any more. Marriage and relationships are lethal, as I was to find to my cost years later.

When I split with Maureen I went to live with a bloke called Al. I called him Al Pal. He was an alcoholic, a Guinness drinker who never ate. I’d try and make him eat, but Guinness men never do. Every night we went to the pub together and afterwards we’d go to the local Indian for a meal, only he never had a curry. He just sat drinking Irish coffees. Then we would go to the casino. I lived with him for eighteen months. He’s dead now. He went into hospital when he was bad and they put him on a bottle of Guinness a day for medication, to give him iron. He said to me, ‘Fucking hell, Eric, I’ve even come in here and they’re giving me Guinness. I can’t escape the stuff.’

Those eighteen months were absolute mayhem. We’d have all sorts of people back, mainly women, and I was living the life of a mad teenager, sowing my wild oats and doing all the boozy things I’d missed out on because of darts. What made matters worse was that I needed a driver when Maureen left so I employed a mate called Trevor Band.

The trouble was, Trevor was as loopy as Al Pal, if not loopier. He was a good darts player and played to County B level. On his day he could beat anyone. This was a dream job for him. He was a single lad travelling the world and getting paid for it, and what made it better for him was that he really loved darts. His nickname was Two Hit Trevor, because he’d hit you and you’d hit the floor, that was it.

We were a bad influence on each other and we did get into trouble. Shortly after I employed him we went on the lash to Stringfellows in London and got absolutely smashed in there. Coming out we were both stumbling about when a copper decided to have a go at Trev, telling him he’d had one too many and warning him to behave. Trevor wasn’t doing anything wrong, so he got the hump and started having a go at the copper, fronting him up and getting a bit stroppy with him. This policeman took one look at all six foot four inches of Trev, and called for back-up. When it came they tried to arrest him. That got me riled, so I said to them, ‘If you do one, you have to do the pair of us.’

They nicked us both, but what could I do? I couldn’t walk off and leave him.

The next day in the newspapers it was all ‘Eric Bristow Arrested!’ The articles mentioned Trevor, but only in the context of ‘Eric and a friend’. I just couldn’t win.

I had some good times with Trevor and we travelled the world together, but he died a few years after I
employed
him, and when the end came it was shocking. It was his night off and he was in his local pub, the Park Inn in Stoke, with another of my pals, Dave Bould. At the end of the night Dave asked him if he fancied an Indian, but Trevor didn’t have any money. Dave said he’d stand him one. In the restaurant Trevor went to the toilet; it was one that didn’t have stand-up urinals. Trevor went in and ten minutes went by. No Trevor. Twenty minutes passed, then twenty-five minutes, and still there was no Trevor, so Dave went to look for him.

The door wasn’t locked so Dave pushed it and Trevor was behind it, lying on the floor and out cold. He hadn’t drunk a lot so it wasn’t as if he’d passed out through alcohol. He was wedged between the toilet itself and the door, so they had to call the fire brigade to take the door off. When they finally got in there Trevor was dead. He’d slipped on the carpet going in, and as he fell his chin had smashed against the edge of the toilet bowl which snapped his neck and killed him instantly. It was a stupid way to die for somebody who had so much to live for and such massive energy for life.

Dave went into shock when they pulled Trevor from the toilet. He walked from the restaurant to my house, which was five miles away, and knocked on my door at three in the morning. I came down all blurry-eyed and said, ‘Dave, what the hell do you want at this time?’

‘Trev’s dead.’

I couldn’t comprehend what he was saying. ‘What are
you
on about? Come in for a cup of tea and tell me what you want to tell me inside.’

He said, ‘No, I don’t want anything. I have come to tell you that Trevor’s dead.’

And with that he walked off and I have never seen him since. I lost two mates that night. He felt guilty because he was the one who took him for a meal, but that’s got nothing to do with it. What happened, happened. I was devastated. We’d had four absolutely mad years together, Trevor and me. It was a silly and a senseless way to go.

My next driver, Phil Dacasto, has also gone. He was sensible and didn’t drink. The deal was he’d drive me home from the pub at eleven-fifteen, because I was married by the time I employed him, so, unlike Trevor, he kept me out of trouble rather than got me into it. His only vice was he liked a smoke every now and again, which could account for him getting cancer.

He had to go into hospital to be operated on and before he went in he was convinced he was not going to get out of there alive. It was a big job. They cut him open from both sides of his chest, all the way down to the bottom of his torso, and the surgeon had to go in either side with his hands to let his lungs down, then they cut out all his cancer.

Phil went through hell and back in there and when he was released from hospital he had to start going on daily walks to build his lungs back up again. He did that
and
walked for longer and longer distances each day and eventually got over it and was fine. Then, months later, he woke up with pains in his chest, went back to hospital and got them to check him out. Initially they couldn’t find anything and told him he was OK, but then a senior consultant decided he wanted a more thorough check and took him for a full body scan. Afterwards this consultant told him the cancer had come back and basically he had ten days to live. He had gone through that initial operation, all the pain of it and the discomfort, only to be told that it was all worthless in the end and he was doomed. The poor bloke didn’t deserve to die, he deserved another three or four years, but once you get cancer you are never really over it. Even when the doctors tell you it’s all clear it often comes back.

Phil died a couple of years ago. I lost a driver, a mate and a brilliant MC. He could have made it as a stand-up comedian if he’d wanted to. Once you got him on stage the quips just came out one after the other. Away from the stage he was as quiet as a mouse. I suppose you could call his on-stage persona his alter-ego.

I’ve got a third driver now, called Barry. He used to be my doorman at the Cockney and is another one who doesn’t drink. These non-drinking types really suit me now. I couldn’t do with another Trevor type, however good it was back then. I’m on the wrong side of fifty and I don’t need it any more: an Indian and a few beers
will
do me. If I did now what I did back then with Trevor, I’d be a goner. My body wouldn’t cope with it. I have my odd little bender watching the football in the local, but whereas years ago I’d be in there at noon and out at midnight, now I turn up from three in the afternoon until midnight instead and have a sensible drink. Losing people like that has taught me one thing: that life is for living and you have to enjoy yourself.

That applies now as much as it did back in the mid-eighties when dartitis served to bring a premature end to my glory years and rob me of a few more world titles. The 1988 World Championship was the first one I’d gone into with that condition. I started well, beating Ray Farrell three sets to one in the first round, Richie Gardner three–nil in the second, Jocky four–two in the quarter-final and then, yet again, John Lowe stood in my way in the semis. My game failed me. I didn’t play well and lost five sets to two. Whether it was the yips or not I’m not sure, but I was totally and utterly gutted because I just didn’t play well at all. Bob Anderson was the other finalist and he had raced there, dropping only one set on the way.

I was sick of Lowey beating me so I went to a bookie and told him I wanted to have a bet. I opened an account with him and Anderson was four to six on to win the final. I had eighteen hundred pounds on him, the biggest bet I’ve ever had on a darts match. He won the final
six
sets to four, and I won twelve hundred pounds. That went some way to easing the pain, but he made me sweat for my money.

Anderson was the new kid on the block and he had an impressive CV. He threw his first maximum aged seven, and as a teenager he was a champion athlete who was picked as a javelin thrower in the British Olympic team of 1968. However, he broke his arm before they left for Mexico, an injury that ended his athletic career. He turned to football next and played for Lincoln United, Guildford, Woking and Farnborough Town. Then, when a broken leg ended his footballing ambitions in 1970, he turned to darts. Injury seemed to follow him, and two years after his World Championship success he underwent surgery to fix a back problem. When he returned to the game he was never the same player and failed to match the success he enjoyed in the late eighties.

Back then he was a little bit crazy. Whenever we toured abroad and he stepped off the plane, he adopted the accent of whichever country he was in. So if he was in America, he’d become a Yank. If we were off to somewhere like Quebec I’d say to him, ‘What are you going to be today, Bob, an Englishman or a Canadian?’

They loved him abroad, especially in Canada. Because he could speak a bit of French they made him an honorary member of the Quebec Darts Association. He was a very consistent and very dangerous player who
watched
and took in everything during his rise up the ladder. He used to follow my game all the time. In my first World Championship he sat at the front, and you can see him if you watch it on YouTube. Years later he won it.

By then, things had changed for me; my whole outlook was different. In 1988 I was hoping to win the championship, whereas prior to that, in fact only twelve months previously, I
expected
to win it. I still got to finals, which surprised me, and my averages were still up there, but it just didn’t feel right in my body. Whereas before I’d put the dart wherever I wanted to put it in the dart board, now I had to work to put it there. Before, when the dart left my hand, I knew where it was going. Now I felt as if I had to push it towards the board and I was never sure exactly where it would land. Sometimes I’d hit treble twenty and think, Bloody hell, that was going above it, and when I was on for a double I just hoped to get it instead of expecting to get it first dart. Things were definitely changing. Prior to 1988 if I’d had three darts at double sixteen anybody I played put their darts away in their top pocket because they knew it was over. Now they kept them out. They knew I was there to be had.

However, I wasn’t going out of tournaments in the first round and that’s what kept me going. From ’88 onwards, if I had started going out first round in every tournament I would have packed it all in, but I was still
there
or thereabouts. I got to four World finals with this condition. I loved the game and I didn’t want to turn my back on it, so I kept going.

I won the WDF World Cup Singles in 1989 so it wasn’t as though I was constantly losing, but all the fun had gone out of it. It had become hard work: instead of looking forward to a tournament I became worried in the run-up to it, wondering how I was going to play. All the other top players knew I was struggling, but a lot of them thought it was a good thing: it meant I was no longer winning everything and there was chance for them to dip their fingers in the money pot. My dartitis opened the doors for other players to win things. In sport one man’s loss is another man’s gain and that’s life. I just carried on. I’ve never managed to get rid of the yips, and I’ve never been the same player since I got them, but we are what we are and you can never look back.

In 1988 I was looking forward, to the next World Championship. I’d had a decent run up to it, and if I’d lost games I wasn’t losing to idiots.

In that championship there was no sign of the yips. I beat the Canadian John Fallowfield three sets to one in the first round, Steve Gittens three–nil in the second, Peter Evison four–three in the quarters and Lowey five–one in the semi-final. That was particularly satisfying after what happened twelve months earlier.

I was up against Jocky in the final. He had hit his
career
height, although after the final it was all downhill from there for him. I was already on my way down, but despite this still contrived to produce one of the greatest sporting spectacles darts has ever seen.

At the break in that final I went in five sets to nil down. He was absolutely walloping me. I went backstage and my sponsors from Harrows were all doom and gloom. Many of them couldn’t even look me in the face, they were that embarrassed for me. I just went to the bar, ordered a pint of lager, turned to them and said, ‘Right, we better start playing now then. I’ve given him a start.’

It was more wishful thinking than anything which made me say that, because even I would’ve been loath to predict what happened next – I managed to claw it back to five sets to four, by which time the whole place was on fire. It was a monumental struggle, akin to a darting version of Ali versus Frazier.

In the first leg of the next set I had eight darts at double eight. I had him by the bollocks and could tell that he’d gone. Jocky is all right when he’s winning, but as soon as he starts losing, his head goes down – and it was almost on the floor at this point.