Get Her Off the Pitch! (19 page)

Still, there was a positive aspect to all this. By the time
the actual sporting action commenced, it was - relatively - heaven. When you've just spent an hour explaining to a jobsworth that you don't have a parking voucher because the only way to obtain a parking voucher is by going inside, which involves
parking first
, it is bliss to look at a team sheet, a blank scoreboard and a bit of grass with lines on it and think, ‘Here at last is something organised. I know where I am with this.' I went to some rum and improbable events in my time, but however unfamiliar I might be with the rules of darts, or croquet - or indeed those of quite big sports such as cricket or rugby union - the rigidly circumscribed comings and goings of an unfolding game stood in wonderful contrast to the random petty annoyances and difficulties presented by real life outside. I remember Simon Barnes telling me (the first time I met him) how sport always got you this way, and that he'd once been immediately sucked - quite against his will, apparently - into the drama of a lumberjacking competition involving axes, logs, a lot of frantic chopping and an enormous shower of wood-chips.

I soon realised he was right. They sent me to Olympia for the show-jumping once, and on the undercard (as it were) was a dog agility competition that turned out to be sheer drama. There was a Great Dane called Blake who was clearly capable of all sorts of top dog agility, but would tantalisingly weigh up the pros and cons of each obstacle before deciding to take it on. For the impartial spectator, whose only interest was in sporting tension, this was dynamite. Would Blake go up the seesaw and down the other side? Well, it was touch and go. With precious seconds ticking by, Blake would stop first and give it some serious
doggy thought. And then, with a visibly resolute, ‘Yep,
OK
, I'll do that!', off he would bound, to huge encouraging applause from the crowd. What about this little tunnel, Blake? Yes? No? Come on, boy, what do you think? ‘Yep,
OK
, I'll do that!' What I loved about Blake's approach to his sport was the way he repeatedly excercised (and indeed embodied) the sometimes forgotten principle of free will. Stan Collymore used to do the same thing in the footie, didn't he? But without the equivalent charm.

However, the best gig I got, I reckon, in the whole four years, was the
BDO
World Darts Championship at Frimley Green on a cold weekend in January 2000 - and not only because the round trip from my home in Brighton to Frimley Green (in Surrey) was so agreeably short. No, it was just that it had everything you could possibly require from a sporting event, if you are prepared to leave out fresh air and athleticism. From the moment I arrived for the Saturday semi-finals (Ronnie Baxter v Co Stompe from the Netherlands; Ted Hankey v Chris Mason), I knew I was going to love watching this stuff. It took place in a large, packed, carpeted and artificially-lit function room usually used for knees-ups and weddings. It was billed as sport but the blokes had corny nicknames and silky capes and ‘walk-on music', like professional wrestlers, and the place was full of families in holiday mood. The stage was spangly, and there were big screens on either side. The all-day bar was emphatically open, and there was a range of high-cholesterol hot food for sale in a spot-lit buffet. Since Holland produces many top-ranking darts players (such as Stompe), there were many larky Dutch people present - although, sadly, none with root vegetable adornments.

And since darts is one of the few sports the bbc can still afford to cover, the dearly beloved Garry Richardson was in attendance - a circumstance that has never failed to raise my spirits.

It was larky, this semi-finals day, but it was also very serious. These players had already played three rounds to reach this point. Darts turned out to have the same sort of organisational palaver as boxing, with rival outfits staging their own world championships, and attempting to lure players into separate leagues - so there was the honour of the
BDO
(British Darts Organisation) at stake here, on top of everything else. By the time play commenced, I'd learned a bit about the players (Co Stompe used to drive a tram!) and was avid for oche action. And I had already worked out some of darts' potential advantages over other spectator sports - which mainly concerned how straightforward it would be to officiate. No room for the players to contest any line calls here, for example. No need to consult a snickometer. No hunting for lost darts in the rough. No dodgy penalties awarded by blind-sided refs. Darts is, in fact, a doddle of a game, save for the lightning mental calculations entailed when suddenly everyone in the room knows that if you need 158, you quickly subtract 3 × 17, then 3 × 19, and then 50. Another interesting fact about darts is that, whereas in cricket ‘throwing' is sometimes illegal, in darts it is positively encouraged. In fact, without throwing, there is absolutely no game to speak of.

To my shame I'd never heard of the semi-finalists before, even though young-gun Chris Mason had apparently been making a name for himself all week, charmlessly casting
aspersions about the other players. Instinctively, I supported the Dutchman, partly because he wasn't the usual shape for a darts player (his nickname was ‘The Matchstick'), but mainly because I found it very touching that he used to drive that tram. But the first semi-final, between Stompe and Ronnie Baxter, was in all respects the lesser contest of the day, and Stompe didn't put up a great fight. Matchstick-like, he snapped under the strain. It was the best of nine sets (each set consisting of five legs), and Baxter took his winning five sets rather easily and gracefully (the eventual score was 5-2). I didn't particularly warm to Baxter, nicknamed ‘The Rocket', but I did admire his choice of walk-on music. Queen's ‘Don't Stop Me Now' was very well suited to his style of play. But although there was skill in this match, there was little drama. There was tension, but not much. At the end of the first semi-final, I still had no idea what glories a good game of darts had to offer.

The second semi-final pitched Ted Hankey (‘The Count') against this young chap Chris Mason (‘The Prince of Dartness'). Having a nickname when you're a darts player seems to be non-negotiable, by the way, but the unsmiling Hankey took the joke further than most. Pale and balding, he played up his resemblance to Dracula, chucking vampire paraphernalia to the fans, grimacing, and occasionally transmogrifying into an immense black dog (oh all right, he didn't go that far). Hankey was the number five seed in this championship; Mason was unseeded, but the bookies' favourite. From a superficial look at the two players, I jumped to the happy conclusion that here was a classic true-grit contest between age and youth - the
tight-lipped old gun-slinger teaching some manners to the young, twitchy rodeo punk; John Wayne v Montgomery Clift. Someone would end up humiliatingly headfirst in a rain barrel at the end of this, I thought, and it probably wouldn't be Hankey. It was at this point that I checked the player information and found that Whipper-Snapper Mason was 30, while Old Geezer Hankey was 31, so bang went that idea.

The game was again best of nine, and Mason led from the start, on account of superior finishing, but from the beginning the standard of play on both sides was obviously exceptional. This match was to set the record (I think it still holds it) for the number of perfect 180s scored in a nine-setter - Hankey and Mason threw a total of 38 between them. But Hankey was having trouble with that old rule about ending with a double, and by the interval, Mason was up 3-1 and looking pretty smug. When Hankey retrieved a set to make it 3-2, Mason quickly upped his game again and re-established the two-set margin. With the score standing at 4-2 (i.e. just one set from defeat), Hankey looked washed out, stricken, deflated - a bit like the way Dracula does when someone carelessly parts the curtains. He sweated lot. He looked deathly pale. He put his hand inside his silk shirt and adjusted a medallion. Was he turning to dust in front of our very eyes? He
really
didn't look 31, by the way. I simply couldn't get over that.

But just when Mason was looking unbeatable, Hankey fought back - and all one's hopes about true grit were rewarded. In the seventh set, he started to put pressure on the younger man, and Mason responded by making mistakes and talking to himself ! Mason didn't have what it
took!
Thud, thud, thud
came those relentless 180s from Hankey.
Thud, thud, thud
. People were leaping to their feet to yell their appreciation. Hankey won the seventh set and then the eighth, pulling level at 4-4. By this time the Kid was seriously rattled. He threw wildly and talked to himself even more. And suddenly he was trailing! He'd been two sets up, and now he was fighting to stay in the match. Honestly, a Borg v McEnroe five-setter was only ever so slightly better than this, in the wider sporting scheme of things. Come on, Ted. Show him how it's done, son. This is all about character. You know you can do it. In the final set, Ted won the first leg, and the second. In fact, suddenly, hang on, Ted required only 45 to win the match!

We held our breath. He shot a five, and then - oh no

- missed the double 20 with both remaining darts. Oh my God, don't you play darts
for a living
, Ted? This gave Mason a chance, but he likewise blew it. The pressure was beginning to tell on everybody. People in the audience were dancing with agony. Ted tried for the double 20 again. He got a single! He tried for the double 10. He got a single there as well! With the last dart, he tried for the double five. Some of us couldn't bear to watch. Dividing five is notoriously difficult in a world consisting only of simple integers. If he missed the double again, he'd have to wait his turn and then go for a one and a double two. And then, if he got only a
single two
…The world stood still. Get the double five, Ted, for God's sake. Get the double five. (He did.)

‘Tragedy' by the Bee Gees was played for the benefit of Mason, who didn't need reminding: he was openly in tears. Dealing with defeat was not something Mason had
any ambitions to be good at - and he wasn't. On the telly afterwards, he told Garry Richardson, ‘I was the best player here this week, but my name wasn't on the pot.' So no old Corinthian nonsense about the best man winning on the day, then. But it had been a brilliant match, and in people's memories I believe it has quite overshadowed the final, which was played the next day. A complete let-down, the final was, a whitewash, with Hankey beating Baxter 6-0 in the fastest
BDO
final on record (46 minutes). Personally, I never went to darts again, but I felt I didn't need to, after an experience as perfect as that. According to the internet, all these blokes are still playing, but not at the same level, and not all for the same organisation.

It's quite interesting, though. Chris Mason renicknamed himself, for example. Nixing the rather clever ‘Prince of Dartness', he became ‘Mace the Ace'. He has been in trouble with the law a couple of times - once earning himself 180 hours of community service; and you can't help thinking that this particular figure was picked for a quasi-humorous reason, when the bench knew it was dealing justice to a professional darts player. Meanwhile, Ronnie Baxter jumped ship from the
BDO
to the
PDC
(Professional Darts Corporation) and his world ranking (at time of writing) is 15, which isn't bad. But there is tragedy in Baxter's story, too: in the 2008 Las Vegas Desert Classic, he threw his first ever nine-darter in a qualifying round, and it wasn't televised. Co Stompe stuck with the
BDO
until 2008, and then joined the
PDC
, as a result of which he dropped down the rankings. After 2000, the furthest he got in the World Championships was the last 16. Finally, Ted Hankey won the title again in January
2009, bringing him - suitably - back from the dead. In the intervening years he had gained a reputation for complaining about crowd behaviour and for quarrelling about whether the air conditioning should be switched off; in 2008, at the
BDO
World Championships, he received a warning for punching the dartboard, and told Ray Stubbs on the bbc that he was considering quitting the game. You can put a lot of this stuff down to chronic vitamin d deficiency, but I suspect he doesn't want to know.

Some sports were slower and more reluctant to reveal their treasures, sadly. They didn't all have the simple
thud, thud, thud, hurrah
of championship darts. There is a story beloved of sports writers (and it's told about different people, so its origins are probably now lost) of one sports writer saying to another before an equestrian three-day event, ‘I think I'm going to enjoy this,' and the other one saying, ‘Ah, you can enjoy it; I have to understand it.' Part of my remit was to strike an interesting triple variant to this usual professional axis of enjoying and understanding sport: I had to a) enjoy the fact that I didn't understand it; b) understand exactly how far I didn't understand it; and c) understand and enjoy the fact that I couldn't enjoy it as much as people who understood it. This was naturally quite tiring, and sometimes it couldn't be managed. Sometimes I merely got grumpy and said, ‘I'm not enjoying this and I don't understand either.' Attending just the one Grand Prix at Silverstone, for example, I wanted to gnaw my own leg off, I hated it so much. For once, I had no fellow-feeling with the spectators; I thought they were mugs. A well-meaning
man in a draughty cafeteria tried to strike up a conversation with me by saying, ‘Great day out,' and regretted it instantly. ‘How is this in any way at all a great day out?' I snapped at him. ‘You can't see anything, mate,' I said. What's the point of a spectator sport where you can't see anything? Even if you've paid hundreds of quid for a decent grandstand seat to sit in (open to the elements), you still have to watch on a big screen and listen to a commentary, just to have a vague idea of who's winning. Lesser mortals who had paid a mere 75 quid for admission (Yes! £75!) got nothing at all. They had merely bought the privilege, it seemed, of wandering around this puddly and bedraggled former air-field, trying to negotiate a route avoiding all the unexplained roped-off areas, in search of a free bit of miserable chain-link fence to watch a bit of track through.