Eric Bristow (18 page)

In 1983 darts was very much a working-class sport with only the very best players able to earn a decent living out of it. The Crafty Cockney was a godsend to me because it meant I had somewhere to practise
and
I had somewhere to rest. It was the perfect training ground for the ’83 World Championship and I went into that competition fresher than I’d ever been.

It was a tough slog to the final, however. My first round vulnerability manifested itself again when I scraped through, beating Peter Masson two sets to one. Then I beat Dave Lee in the second round three sets to two and Dave Whitcombe in the quarters four sets to three, before hitting my stride in the semis and murdering Tony Brown five sets to one.

It was in the other half of the draw, though, that things were really happening because a new player had come on the scene and he was beating everyone in sight. When people talk about Keith Deller they call him a one-hit wonder, but we all knew him because he’d been on the scene two or three years before that, winning smaller tournaments and doing quite well for himself. He was no pushover and the 1983 Embassy World Darts Championship was where it all came together for him.

He was 66–1 rank outsider coming into that tournament, and when he drew Nicky Virachkul in the first
round
everybody expected him to go out, but he beat Nicky two sets to one to face another good player, Les Capewell. He beat him three sets to one. Then he played Lowey, who was the world number two, in the quarters and beat him four sets to three to set up a semi-final clash with world number three Jocky.

Jocky looked in control of that game until he missed double eighteen for a nine-darter. This was what cost Jocky the match. His head went down when he missed that double because he would’ve been the first one ever to have hit a nine-darter on television, and the prize money for doing that was astronomical. It was preying on his mind for the rest of the game and he lost it five sets to three. Keith had knocked out the world number two and number three. Now only me, the world number one, stood in his way.

The other winner in his surge to the final was my dad. He was there all week and before Keith played Nicky in the first round he said to him, ‘How do you feel, son?’

Keith is a bit lippy like yours truly and said to my dad, ‘I’m going to win this tournament.’

So Dad put money on him every round he played, and as Keith was always the underdog my dad won a pot load of cash, at least forty pounds every round.

The day before the final he bumped into Keith again and said, ‘How do you feel, Keith?’

‘I’m going to beat your son tomorrow, George.’

I knew I had a fight on my hands because Keith had hardly got to the final through the back door. He’d beaten the world’s greatest players. Dad didn’t bet on him in the final, but I bet he wished he had because Keith won six sets to five. It was a sensation, a huge shock, especially to me. It hurt me more than it had twelve months previously when I went out in the first round. Usually, by the time I got to the finals of these big events I was in my stride, I was unbeatable. I didn’t lose finals; my time to go out was earlier on in the tournament, so this was a new feeling for me and I didn’t like it. I didn’t play badly either. We were both taking our doubles and it was always a tight game. Both of us were cleaning up so there was no room for error, but I was always chasing the game. I was never in front, so I never felt I had control of the match.

In the last set he had a chance to win, but missed three darts at double ten. Basically his bottle went. In the next leg he had a 138 checkout to win, and because of what had happened earlier I thought there was no way he was going to get that. I could’ve checked out myself, but would have had to hit bullseye with the last dart, which was a big ask. So I left myself double sixteen, my favourite double, and then watched as he went dink, treble twenty, dink, treble eighteen and dink, double twelve, to take the world title. I was left standing there, smiling like a wally and thinking I should’ve gone for bull after all. I shook his hand and congratulated
him
when all I wanted to do was punch his lights out.

He was in my book after that checkout. I wanted my revenge. I had my chance a few months afterwards, and again I left him a 138 checkout, knowing that the odds of him doing it for a second time were heavily stacked against him – and the tosser went dink, dink, dink and did me again. I couldn’t believe it. You couldn’t have scripted it any better. I just cracked up with laughter. I was speechless.

Looking back on it, I’m glad he won the world title because it would’ve only meant one more title for me, but he’s still earning money from that win today. What’s the difference between winning five titles and winning six? It is nothing really.

He was like me, he was a young freak. And like me he was gobby. I don’t think it ever really sank in he was World Champion. Only eighteen months earlier he had been at work putting jam in doughnuts, which didn’t have the greatest career prospects to say the least, so to go from that to being top of the world was a bit of a head-mash for him. He was young in age and mentally young also. He’s still like that now. He has never really grown up. But he’s a fighter.

A couple of years after the World Championship I played him in the final of the World Masters. He’d had a tough year and wasn’t playing well, so much so that he had to get to the last eight to keep his top-sixteen world ranking. There was loads of pressure on him
before
it started, because if you dropped out of the last sixteen you kissed goodbye to TV tournaments. You weren’t eligible to play in them and lost quite a lot of income as a result. He played magnificently, raised his game and got all the way through to the final by playing some sublime darts. I drilled him in that final, however. I did him good and proper. Finally I had revenge, of sorts. I could scribble his name out of my little black book.

He’s got balls, I’ll give him that, though he is one of the biggest, if not
the
biggest plonker I’ve ever met in my life. You can always tell when he’s been practising because he leaves chalk all over the board and over his face, hands and clothes. I’ve never met anyone as untidy as Keith. All the other darts players looked after him because he constantly got himself into trouble. How he has not been hammered I will never know – he’s come very close though. There was a tournament in Wales at Prestatyn; it was a big tournament with about twelve hundred players. I was with my boys from Stoke; there were five of us, and a few other players who I knew. Suddenly Keith, who was practising on a nearby dart board, picked a fight with some geezer who then slapped him across the face and said, ‘I’ll see you outside.’

Keith, who had his wife Kim with him, ran over to me as white as a sheet and said, ‘Eric, Eric, I’m in a bit of trouble here.’

I said, ‘What’s the matter this time?’

‘This bloke’s going to fill me in.’ He really was worried.

I looked over and there were about five or six of them and eight of us. Turning to Keith I said, ‘Right, where’s your car? We’ll walk you to your car.’

As we took him out of the place these blokes followed us, so I said, ‘Don’t bother, lads, it ain’t worth it. Don’t get involved because it’s not going to happen.’

We walked him to his car and then I went back to where these blokes were standing and said, ‘Look,
we
know he’s out of order,
you
know he’s out of order, but who gives a flying fuck because he’s going home. He’s got his missus with him anyway, lads.’

So Keith got in his car and tentatively drove past where these blokes were standing. They’d accepted what I had said and just watched him, but as he went by the stupid sod started flicking the V-sign at them. They all went potty again and started chasing after the car, but he sped off. I had to take them inside for a drink to calm them down because they wanted a go at me then. I would’ve loved it if his car had stalled. Then I would’ve left him to his fate because he’d made me look a right prat. I’m surprised it didn’t stall because Keith is an idiot. How he ever passed his driving test is beyond me. He is impatient and always pranging cars.

The best one was when he phoned me to tell me that a car firm had agreed to sponsor him and given him a brand new motor. Dead chuffed he was. He got it and the next morning went out to drive it. It was cold and
frosty
on this day and the car had frozen up, so Keith put the windscreen wipers on, and the heaters on the front and back windows, but he was so desperate to drive this new car he couldn’t wait for it to defrost so he opened the driver’s door and stuck his head out to reverse. He slammed the car straight into a lamp post and that was the end of his sponsorship deal. Another time he parked in the middle of an empty field that stretched for miles. The only thing in this field was a concrete pillar. Keith managed to reverse straight into it and wrote the car off. It would have been easier to miss it, but not if you’re Keith.

Even when he managed to get from A to B without crashing he still cocked it up. There was the time he drove to the airport to meet me and my driver Trevor when we were all going to a tournament together in America. We were in the airport bar having a drink when I said to Keith, ‘Where are you parked?’

We’d all parked in one of the numerous long-stay car parks that were dotted around Heathrow.

‘Oh fucking hell,’ he said, ‘I don’t believe I’ve done that.’

‘What are you on about?’

‘I made sure I knew the level and number of the car park I was on by writing it in chalk in the car boot.’

This had me in creases. I’d written the car park details on a piece of paper and put it in my wallet. This idiot had written it inside his car.

‘What was the number?’ I said.

‘I can’t remember.’

‘You’re fucking joking! Nobody is that much of a wally. You’re having me on aren’t you?’

And he was looking at me all goggle-eyed saying, ‘No, Eric, I have, I’ve written it in the boot, honest.’

So when we came back from nine days in America we all went to look for the car because I wanted to see this number written in the boot. I still couldn’t believe someone could be so stupid. I had to see it with my own eyes.

When we found the car after a forty-minute search he opened the boot and inside, in chalk, he’d written the number fourteen.

Keith always, always does everything wrong. He was shouting at me on a plane once at the top of his voice, ‘I’ve gone deaf, Eric, help me, I’ve gone deaf!’

He was sitting there with two white things sticking out of his ears: tissues or ear plugs or something, he’d put them in but forgotten about them during take-off. I had to shout to him, ‘Shut up, you dick,’ and point to the plugs.

And he’s accident prone. I was close to an airport escalator when there was a kerfuffle with everybody standing around at the top of it looking down. I walked over and at the bottom was a heap of people. Somebody had fallen and taken everybody with him. There were writhing bodies, bags, everything. I said to an old woman
standing
at the side watching it with me, ‘I bet Keith Deller is at the bottom of that.’

Security was helping get all the bags and people up, and the last one to be pulled clear was Keith. He stood up, came into the bar and said to me, ‘Just my bloody luck. The person in front of me puts his bag right at my feet and the person behind falls on me.’

Even on something as innocuous as the London Underground, Keith can cause problems. One of the first times he ever went on the Tube, he spent the whole journey reading the world ranking lists in the BDO diary. He became so engrossed that he got off and forgot his bag. By the time he remembered, bomb squad officers had shut off part of the Tube line between Heathrow and London. People missed their flights because of him and he got a right bollocking when he tried to retrieve his bag.

Everything that can go wrong will go wrong for Keith and it’s funny the way he does it. He doesn’t kill or hurt anybody, it’s just happenstance. In America, in the big tournaments, they would set up about thirty boards to practise on and Keith would always be one of the first in the practice room in the morning. All these boards had just been put up and he’d throw three darts at the board of his choice and on the third dart you could almost guarantee that the board would fall off the wall. If there was one loose board in the thirty Keith would find it. He didn’t just do it once, he did it several times, yet it never happened to any other player. There was
never
anything wrong with the other dart boards, just Keith’s.

America was a bit of a hot potato for Keith. Things tended to go wrong for him there. A year after he won the world title all the darts players went to LA for the three-week beano, and we were all in a bar where Keith was chatting up a beautiful blonde. She was stunning, and he was getting somewhere with her as well. There’s no doubt he was only minutes away from getting her up to his hotel room and giving her one – that was until a player called Nick Miller sneaked up behind him and whipped Keith’s trousers down, taking his underpants with them as well. He was left standing, drink in hand, with his pecker hanging out. Everybody saw it and they were all shouting, ‘Hey, Keith, you OK, Keith?’ as he struggled to pull his trousers and underpants back up, and that took him a while because he nearly fell over twice doing it.

The blonde went. Keith was begging her to stay but she was off like a shot. Then he turned on us and snarled, ‘You bastards.’

Sometimes we do go a bit far in winding Keith up. He’s a great bloke to be with, a lovely bloke, but the boys and I do like to rib him. In Denmark we were sitting in a restaurant eating, about eight of us round a table, and Keith had been to get his meal. He’d come back with this massive full-Monty kebab. It had everything on it.

After taking a bite he turned to me and said, ‘Eric, try this, it’s lovely.’

I tried it and it was good, I’ll give him that. ‘This is gorgeous,’ I said.

The other players were saying, ‘Give us a bite then, let’s have a taste,’ so it got passed round the table and all the players were giving it bite, bite, bite, bite, until there was hardly any left. Then it got to Big Cliff, and he just opened his tunnel of a mouth and down it went.