Authors: Eric Bristow
After the 1991 final defeat I went away to lick my wounds, knowing that without the yips I would’ve beaten both Dennis that year and Phil the year before. Then, twelve months later, in the 1992 Championship I got knocked out in the second round, beaten three sets to two by Welshman Martin Phillips. I shouldn’t have lost to him. He wasn’t a good player. My game had gone and with it the fun. I would have quit, but things were changing – for better and for worse.
THIRTEEN
The Marriage and the Split
WHEN I SPLIT
with Maureen in 1988 it was party time again, but the party didn’t last long because only a few months later I met Jane. I was at a tournament in Middlesbrough and had gone clubbing with two other darts players, Alan Warriner and Chris Johns, as well as my driver Trevor. They were my new party gang. We went to a club in the town centre called The Mall which had a big disco upstairs, and downstairs a place where you could sit and have a drink. Jane was with her pregnant mate. I asked her for a date and added, ‘I don’t want to pull you now. Let’s have a date tomorrow night.’ I didn’t want to go with her half cut; it would’ve been messy. I wanted to do it properly when I was sober.
We hit it off straight away and within weeks she had moved down to Stoke to live with me. She then came to tournaments abroad, much to Trevor’s despair, but, unlike with Maureen, we cherry-picked the best ones to go to as a couple such as New Orleans, ’Frisco, LA and
Vegas
. Then, a few months after we’d met, I proposed to her in Canada.
We were in the back of a mate’s car. I’d been thinking about kids, and how nice it’d be to have a couple, and Jane seemed the right person to have them with because she was a nice girl who was very religious. She even went to Lourdes every year. I didn’t want to wait until I was in my forties or later to have children because it’s not fair on them. They can’t play football with their dad if he’s stumbling about with a Zimmer frame, can they? So I proposed and we got married in September 1989. All the big names from darts were there, people like Ollie and Lorna Croft, Tony Green, Bobby George and Mike Gregory to name but a few.
A couple of nights before that a dozen of us got a mini-bus and went to a nightclub in Birmingham for my stag night. It was a big club that held about three thousand people and we had our own VIP section called the Piano Bar. We stayed there until about three in the morning and on our way back we stopped off at some services for breakfast. When one of the lads went to the toilet we did his fry up; egg, bacon, sausage, it was all gone when he came back. Then, when he went to get his fags, he found black puddings stuffed in all his pockets. He wasn’t very happy about it. He had what I’d call a Keith Deller sulk on him. We got back to Stoke about six in the morning, had no sleep and just started boozing again. For our breakfast Trevor and I had two
large
vodkas and grapefruit juice. It went on, drink after drink after drink, until midday; we’d been boozing then for twenty-four hours. That’s when everyone started falling asleep and that was the end of it, but what a session it was.
Two days later I was married. It made papers like the
Mirror
and the
Sun
, but there was no way I’d do what other celebrities do now and sell my big day to a magazine. The idiots that do that just want money for nothing because most of them have millions anyway. They sign away control of their wedding to a magazine, yet it’s their wedding, nobody else’s. They must be barmy. I could understand if someone was short of a few bob, but then the magazines wouldn’t want their wedding anyway.
We didn’t have a honeymoon. There was no point because I’d taken her everywhere she wanted to go by then.
That wedding capped what was a great year for me, not in darting terms, but personally, because I was awarded an MBE in the April. I was playing in the British Open at the Rainbow Suite in Kensington when I found out. I knew something was up because suddenly there was a buzz about the place. One of the BDO officials came up to me and said, ‘Have you heard, Eric? You’ve got an MBE.’
‘What are you on about?’ I said. ‘Stop winding me up.’
I’d been nominated by Ollie and Lorna Croft and it
was
accepted. Ollie couldn’t believe it; neither could I. Finally darts had been recognised for something: it had been recognised as a sport and had gained credibility. It was great for everybody really, but more so for me because you can win tournaments all your life but you can’t win gongs.
I was put in a predicament because you are only allowed to take two people with you to the Palace and there was Jane, who was then my fiancée, and Mum and Dad who I also wanted to take. I had to choose. I decided that it had to be Mum and Dad who went, after everything they’d done for me throughout my life, and Jane understood.
We all went down together and Mum and Dad went into the Palace to watch – and I messed it right up. All those who were to be honoured were taken into a room, just off where the ceremony was due to take place. In there a posh lad took us through the procedure and protocol involved. We had to line up, then at the right moment walk up to where the Queen was standing on a podium, because she is only little. We had to face her, she would pin a medal on our coat, and she would say what she had to say, then we had to reverse walk to another door, making sure we never turned our back on her. It was about twenty feet to this door which led outside to where the press were waiting to take pictures. I remembered everything, I wasn’t nervous and I was really looking forward to it.
When it was my turn I walked up to the Queen and she said, ‘You’re a darts player.’
‘Yes ma’am,’ I replied, and she said a few more words then pinned the medal on.
I stood up and walked towards the door leading to the waiting press. Halfway there I realised I’d not walked backwards and had turned my back on the Queen, so I stopped, turned round and said to her, ‘Sorry, darling,’ and started walking backwards. I was thinking: What the hell have I just called the Queen? She cracked up with laughter and I couldn’t believe it. The next thing I knew I was outside with this press pack screaming at me, ‘What did you say to her, Eric? Eric, what did you say?’ And there I was, as red as a beetroot, saying to them, ‘Oh nothing. I didn’t say anything to her.’
Later that evening I went to a party that Malcolm Powell from Bass had put on for me in celebration on a boat on the Thames. Jane was there, and Trevor, Ollie Croft, Dickie Davies and quite a few other celebrities. It was great. There was a photographer, and I spent half the night posing for photographs – which didn’t flaming well turn out. He was taking pictures with a duff camera. It’s typical of my life. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong.
I cocked up again in the presence of royalty at a dinner in honour of Mohammed Ali, who is the only bloke I have ever looked up to. I was at a table with Jane and all these other sportsmen, including quite a lot
of
boxers like Lennox Lewis, Audley Harrison and Naseem Hamed, and Ali came in and sat right behind me. He was within touching distance. I have never asked for anybody’s autograph in my life, but I wanted his. I felt a bit uneasy about asking him, so I got the official programme and said to this good-looking woman who was sitting across from me, ‘Excuse me, darling, will you ask Mohammed Ali for his autograph for me? Cheers, love.’
Her look nearly killed me. ‘You ask him,’ she snapped.
I just put it down to her having an attitude problem and thought nothing more of it, so I turned round myself and got him to sign my programme.
The next night we were at the Royal Albert Hall for the European Footballer of the Year Awards, and Ali was there again to present an award. He came down the steepest stairs I have ever seen and he was quite wobbly because the Parkinsons had taken hold. As he walked down there was silence as everybody, including me, held their breath until he got to the bottom. Right on cue you could hear the sighs of relief fill the place from an audience relieved that he’d made it down in one piece. Then they introduced the next person to give out an award. It was Princess Caroline of Monaco and as she came down the stairs Jane said, ‘Do you see who that is?’
I looked at her, turned to Jane and said, ‘Oh shit, I’ve done it again.’ What is it with me and royalty?
Around the same time I was invited to a garden party
at
the Palace to celebrate the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. That nearly turned into yet another disaster. There were thousands of us there, all invited because we were World Champions of one sport or another over the period of the Queen’s reign. It ranged from top sportsmen like Frank Bruno, Stirling Moss, Henry Cooper, Roger Bannister, Virginia Wade and members of England football’s World Cup winning side of ’66, to others from lesser-known sports such as the World Champion tugo-war team, who were from Stoke funnily enough. We had pictures taken together, and then we all sat down for lunch.
As we were eating, one of the Queen’s aides came up to me and said, ‘When you all line up to meet the Queen after lunch, she will stop and speak to nine celebrities. You have been chosen as one of the nine.’
I looked round at those that were being left out, people like Daley Thomson and Roger Bannister, and thought: Bloody hell she must hold darts in high regard to want to speak to me.
When this posh bloke was giving me the rundown on what to do when meeting Her Majesty, Jane started shaking. He said, ‘As she comes along, you and your wife have to step forward from the line, your wife has to curtsey and you have to bow.’
Then he left, and Jane in a complete panic said to me, ‘What, what, I have to do what, what do I have to do. I can’t do this, I really can’t do this.’
‘Of course you can,’ I said, trying to reassure her.
At the end of the meal all the top celebrities lined up, and as the Queen started walking along I linked Jane and we stepped out. As the Queen approached all eyes were on us. She spoke to me and then she turned to Jane. I now had my arm around Jane because her legs had gone, and as the Queen said something to her and moved along the line Jane’s legs went from under her. She had passed out. I had to hold her up for the few seconds that it took her to come round and find her feet again. If I’d let go she would’ve been on the floor, out cold.
That was one problem sorted. Then another one arose of even bigger proportions: nobody was smoking. It was a huge garden, out in the fresh air, and no one was lighting up. I decided to find a good smoking spot where nobody could see me, so I sneaked around this huge bush next to a lovely pond, got a fag out and lit it. In less than ten minutes I had about eighty people around me, the sound of their lighters going dink, dink, dink, dink, dink. Half an hour later I went back for another fag and there were about three hundred people round there. From the garden party side it looked as if the bush was on fire. Everybody had been frightened of being the first one to light up and they were waiting for someone to take the lead.
Those royal events were one of the major highlights of my life, together with winning the World
Championships
and the births of my children Louise and James. Louise was born in 1991.
I was with Jane’s mum and dad in the pub across the road from the hospital after Jane had gone in. I was well-oiled, it was about three in the morning and they were due to induce her the next day. Suddenly I got a call on the pub telephone to say it had started. I had been about to leave to go home and get some kip ready for the next day and I panicked. If I went into the hospital in the state I was in, then the nurses would probably smell all the alcohol on me and throw me out. I shoved a load of Polo mints in my mouth to hide the smell and fortunately got away with it.
James was born two years later. The timing was brilliant because I was playing golf and I’d just got to the eighteenth hole and was putting out when the call came to go to hospital. I got driven straight there from the golf course after finishing my round.
Although I was at both births and people say it’s a brilliant and wonderful thing to see, it’s not. It’s very, very messy and there’s a lot of pain. With James it was also extremely traumatic because they hit the panic button and everybody, including me, had to go out. The umbilical cord had got wrapped around his neck. That was frightening. I was scared – possibly for the first time in my life I was
really
scared – but then everybody was told to come back in and there was Jane with my son. I’d gone through every emotion in the space of
ten
minutes, from fearing for my son’s life to seeing him healthy and content in my wife’s arms. It was knackering. I wouldn’t want to video the birth like some people do. Why would you want to video that? What would you say to your kid? ‘Don’t watch
Dumbo
, son, watch the blood, sweat and tears of Mum having you instead.’
Jane’s friend was also there when James was born. She sat at the end of the bed watching the gory stuff. I was at the other end trying out the gas and air; it was good.
It was great when James was born because we had the set then, a boy and a girl. I was never going to have more than two. Even if I’d had two girls I would’ve stopped. I know some people who are desperate to have one of each. Tony Brown has five girls. Imagine what his Christmases were like when they were opening the presents: dolls, dolls, more dolls, another doll.
I loved having babies around the house. I was fine with changing nappies and mopping up sick, and when I’d done an exhibition I’d come home and deal with the baby when it woke up, giving it a bottle and all that, so Jane could have some sleep. I was a New Man before the term had even been coined.
When Louise was born I did try to cut back on the darts. It felt as if I was coming to the end anyway, and I wanted to spend some time with my baby, but my timing couldn’t have been any worse. Louise and James were born at possibly the most tumultuous and
politically
charged moments darts had ever seen. I wanted to spend time with my children, but I knew I couldn’t turn my back on the game because it was about to be ripped apart by some vicious in-fighting.