Eric Bristow (3 page)

When they’d thrown everything out of his window on to the spikes they went into the vacant flat, and as if by a miracle they didn’t check the wardrobe. If they had they would have found Eddie with hammer in hand and his heart going nineteen to the dozen. I’ve no doubt he would’ve followed the rest of his belongings on to the spiked railings below and probably wouldn’t be here today. Or if he was he would’ve been left severely paralysed. If I’d have stayed in that flat they would’ve thrown me out of the window as well. However, they just walked around the two flats, someone said, ‘No one’s in here,’ and they were gone. If they’d have just opened the wardrobe door Eddie would’ve been a dead man. You didn’t mess with the wrong families back then. As soon
as
this happened he packed his bags and moved to Las Vegas. He was a dead man walking in London. He’s still there now, working as a croupier, and has a few properties. The minute that happened he was gone and he’s never come back.

I always wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t ended up playing darts. I’d probably have ended up in prison or drifted into big-time crime. Darts was my salvation. I tried to get the gang into darts when I was sixteen which was a big mistake. We formed a team and we might as well have called ourselves The Lunatics because they were potty. We played my league team, the Arundel Arms, who I threw for a couple of nights a week when I first started out. My lot wanted to fight them when we lost. That was an embarrassing moment. Their idea of a darts match was to play, have a load of beer and then beat up the opposition. It didn’t last; it couldn’t last for the sake of my career.

So I left, and didn’t see most of them again, except that when I was seventeen I did get invited to the wedding of one of our top lads, a bloke called Sully. What a disaster that was. All the boys were there and it was a bit of a reunion. Unfortunately on the bride’s side of the family was a rather large contingent of lads, many of whom had been involved in run-ins with our lot, including yours truly. As the beer began to flow and the day progressed so tempers got fraught, and one of our gang decided he was going to fill in this bloke who
he
didn’t like. They weren’t doing anything wrong but they sensed trouble so they managed to get a police van on standby outside, just in case a fight needed breaking up. It was the sensible thing to do. I’d had enough. I didn’t want any trouble and could tell there was a big fight brewing, so I decided to go. The last thing I wanted to do was fight at a wedding and spoil someone’s big day. However, by the time I got outside half the force in London had been tipped off that there was going to be a mass battle between a known gang and some other lads and they were ready to go in, round up our boys and nick them. When they saw me come out of there they must have been rubbing their hands in glee. As soon as I got about a hundred yards down the road a police van started following me. I knew they were going to do me so I tried to run but got caught. Back at the station the duty officer took my belongings. It was obvious what they were going to do, they were going to take me down to the cells and give me a beating, so as soon as I handed over my jacket to this officer I decked him with one punch; logic told me that as I was going to get done over I might as well hit one of them. That was it; they dragged me to the cells and about half a dozen of them laid into me. They beat me so hard my nose exploded and there was blood everywhere. After it was all over they called in a doctor to check me out.

‘What happened to you?’ he said.

‘I fell over,’ I mumbled through thick lips.

Saying that meant that they didn’t charge me. It was no good saying I’d been beaten up because they would’ve thrown the book at me. I left that police station not knowing if Sully’s wedding ever did erupt in violence, the people there knew nothing of the beating, but knowing that this sort of life – doing things wrong and getting in trouble with the law – was something that just didn’t give me a rush any more. Darts was where I got my buzz now. I need a buzz and a thrill – they get me through life and make it enjoyable. Without that adrenaline rush life is not worth living. In the early days it was being with the gang and living every day on a knife edge. By the time I was in my late teens it was the arrows that did it for me and gave me my main focus.

Years later I did meet up with Sully again. I was the World Champion by then and I was doing
The Cockney Classic
at Truman’s Brewery in London for ITV. I did darts and Steve Davis did snooker. My mum had bumped into Sully and a guy called Hursty who used to live with him and was also an old friend of mine, so she invited them to come and meet me after the programme. Sully was still married, had four kids and was running a removal business. They came and joined me and all these top nobs from ITV who took us for an Indian. As we sat with producers, directors and quite a lot of top executives I said to them, ‘Did you enjoy it?’ It was the first time they’d been to a televised darts match.

‘It was brilliant, great,’ Sully said.

‘Well why don’t you come next year?’ I replied.

‘OK,’ said Sully.

‘I can’t,’ said Hursty quite loudly. ‘I have to go up the Old Bailey next month. I’m getting a seven to ten stretch for armed robbery.’

You couldn’t have scripted it any better. All these execs and producers nearly choked on their curries and you could see the blood draining from their faces. The whole place went so deathly quiet you could have heard a pin drop, apart from the sound of the ITV bosses taking nervous gulps, that is. It was left to me to break the silence.

‘You never bloody change,’ I said, and roared with laughter.

But that was the last time I ever saw him or my old crew. By the time I was World Champion those days had been left far behind.

TWO

Pub Darts

RIGHT FROM THE
start I loved playing darts. At school I was always good at maths; my maths got me into Hackney Downs Grammer School when I took the eleven plus exam. Darts was an extension of this. I’d spend hours working out different permutations to finish on, all that sort of thing. An early way I practised was to throw a dart at the board and if it hit twelve I’d have to put the other two darts with it. I just tried to follow the line of my first throw. Doing this got me good at hitting numbers all around the board and I became nuts about the game in no time, so much so that when I was fifteen I’d call for my mate Eddie Rayson, who lived round the corner from me and who was also a good darts player, and we’d be in the pub at eleven in the morning and play darts until three. Then we’d go for something to eat and be back in the pub for six and play until closing time. I should have been at school, but they let me leave six months early, well before my
sixteenth
birthday. There was no point in staying: I wouldn’t have passed any exams because I didn’t do any work. I was just mad at school, nuts. I told the teachers I didn’t need an education because I was going to play darts, so that’s why they signed me off for the last six months and told me I could go home.

I never liked school; I hated it. I got a new bike off Mum and Dad for my first day and rode the two miles there, chained it up by the playground and at the end of lessons when I went to fetch it someone had nicked the front wheel. That annoyed me intensely. I had to walk the whole two miles home with a one-wheeled bike. Then, three days after starting I got the cane for beating up another boy. It was the quickest time from starting school any newcomer had been caned. After that I just thought sod it, school wasn’t for me.

If there were tests or exams I’d do my best to get out of them. In January 1971, we were due to have a German test. I’d learned so little German that I made the decision I had to get out of it at whatever cost. So I and a few others hatched a plan to scupper it: I phoned Scotland Yard from a call box and told them a bomb had been planted at school and was due to go off at the exact moment the test was due to start. Chaos ensued as pupils were evacuated to the safety of the school playground and the fire brigade and police arrived en masse. There were five of us behind the hoax, all chuckling away to ourselves. Thirty minutes later we
went
ashen-faced as our names were read out one by one on the school loudspeaker and we were told to report to the headmaster’s office. Someone, I don’t know who, had found out what we did and grassed on us. We got bollocked but we didn’t get the cane, which amazed me, and still does to this day.

I was always getting caned by the headmaster Alec Williams. One time I put a thin book down the back of my trousers as padding.

‘It is the first time you have used this book to good effect,’ Williams said drily, which made me laugh.

Then I was thwacked.

Another time, as I was being caned on the hand, I asked: ‘Can’t you hit harder?’

Williams launched himself at my hand as hard as he could, only for me to move my hand away at the last minute. The cane smashed down on the table and split.

By the time I was fourteen I was refusing to be caned and the teachers were beginning to realise I was a lost cause. Darts was my escape. I used to play all the kids in school at darts for money and beat them, which was understandable considering how much better I was. Soon nobody would play me: they all knew they were on to a loser straight away. So I played ‘ten pence up the wall’ which is a game where whoever got their ten-pence piece closer to the wall was the winner and could keep their opponent’s money. I was as good at that as I was at darts and would often leave school at the end of the
day
with five to ten pounds in ten-pence pieces. I used to walk to school with a mate called Brian, who was part of my gang, though he tended to avoid trouble, and on the way home I’d buy him a portion of fish and chips out of my winnings.

I had lots of gambling schools going, anything in which I could win a bit of money, anything apart from actual school work. Even going to school was a way of getting into a scam. In the morning I’d nick two pints of milk off somebody’s doorstep, but I’d make sure I never did the same doorstep twice. As I drank them I didn’t think anything of it. There was no guilt. It was thieving, but it was just the way you were brought up around those parts. Nobody made you feel as if you were doing anything wrong. It was just part of life.

Things really started changing for me when I got to fourteen. Every Saturday I’d go with my dad to the bookies. That’s how I got my first pair of tungsten darts. Back then I played with brass darts – tungsten were too expensive – but on this particular day dad had a £5 each way accumulator on six races, and the first five came in with the sixth horse being placed. He’d backed them singly as well, so he’d won a tidy sum. With the winnings we got two buses to the darts shop. I took my brass darts to be weighed. They were fat little things and came in at 21.8 grams. I got a pair of tungsten ones for the same weight but with a much more slender barrel. They were a relatively new thing, and I’d tried some out a
couple
of weeks previously: a machinist called Harry who threw for my local had a set. I had picked them up and thrown 180. I knew instantly I had to get some. They were a revelation; they just felt right when I held them. My dad was watching and decided to get me to the dart shop to buy some at the first opportunity. They transformed my game forever. My averages shot up.

I always remember Dad saying to me when I was young, ‘Everybody is good at something. It’s just finding out what they are good at.’ To that end he took me to pitch and putt to see whether I was good at golf, he took me to play snooker, I went boxing; he did everything with me really. At school I captained the football team and was a decent cricketer. But darts was what I was really good at.

When I first started, I played in my bedroom for hours against my old man and we had some close games. Dad was a good darts player in his time, but he had no bottle. He was brilliant on the floor, but put him on a stage and he would go to pieces, which was sad really because he was quite a thrower. He couldn’t have been a pro, but he could’ve been a decent league player. By the time my twelfth birthday came I was beating him, and I was beating him by two or three hundred points in games of 1001. A few months after my fourteenth birthday he came into my bedroom on a Sunday morning and said to me: ‘Right, son, when you’ve got yourself washed and dressed I’m going to take you down the pub.’

It was one of those rights of passage moments between a father and his boy. At half past ten that morning he took me down to his local, the Arundel Arms, where he went every Sunday from eleven until two before coming back for Sunday dinner at two-thirty. We were the first to arrive and the first on the dart board. Back then you played for sixpence a game and while I played my dad other people came and chalked their name up to play the winner. I beat Dad and played another bloke for sixpence. I beat him and then played from eleven until 2.15, never losing a game. I ended up walking home with a pocketful of sixpences and knew I had found my road in life. One thing that puzzled me though was that when I beat my dad he never chalked his name up for another game. He loved playing darts and had spent most of his Sundays on the pub dart board. Instead he just sat down now with a couple of mates in a corner, chatting and drinking, but I could see that every now and again he was looking up to see how I was doing and having a little chuckle to himself because I was making all this money. It must have made him very proud because I killed every bloke I played.

Soon a lot of the pub regulars were getting fed up with me and wanted to knock me down a peg or two. They’d offer me a game of darts for a fiver or a tenner. Most people, if they could play darts the way I could play, would have snapped their hand off. Not me. I used to wind them up and say, ‘Look, you’re not good enough
to
play me for money, so go away.’ That used to rile them even more, and when they were riled it was easier to take more money off them.

They’d snap back: ‘What do you mean, I’m not good enough?’

‘You’re not,’ I’d say, ‘you’re simply not good enough to play me for money, now go away.’