Authors: Eric Bristow
Throughout the eighties there were about sixteen tournaments on terrestrial TV. By 1992 that number had gone down to one: the Embassy World Championship which was still shown on the BBC. Unfortunately, Ollie Croft had proven to be a poor negotiator in securing more televised tournaments. Either that or he had some bad advisors. The BBC weren’t interested in darts any more, but they did want to keep the World Championship, mainly for kudos, and they didn’t want to just hand it over to a rival. Ollie being Ollie just let them have it when they said they didn’t want anything else. What he should have done was told them they couldn’t have the big one unless they had four of the other tournaments as well. It was bad negotiating.
All of a sudden there was just one tournament a year and if any player went out of that tournament in the early rounds he’d get no exposure for another twelve months. It was no problem for me because I’d made my name by then, but for players like Phil Taylor and Dennis Priestley, who were just coming through, it represented a major problem. The TV money had gone and darts players were struggling financially. It was so bad that some top-ten players even got part-time jobs to make ends meet.
In the run-up to the 1993 Embassy World Championship sixteen of us, mainly the top seeds, decided enough was enough. Sky had expressed an interest in running a tournament with us, so it was time to confront the BDO and ask them what the hell was going on.
I went in to a meeting with Ollie only a day before the championship was due to start, and asked him three questions.
I said, ‘Ollie, can you give us more than one tournament a year on TV?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘OK,’ I replied, ‘would you mind if we ran our own tournaments on TV, because our livelihood is being affected here?’
‘Yes, I would mind,’ he said.
‘OK, if we did run our own tournaments on television, what would happen?’
‘You’ll be banned.’
And that was it. I had to go back to the other fifteen players who were all waiting for me at the Lakeside Hotel and I told them what he’d said. They listened and then were all in agreement: they were going to pull out of the 1993 Embassy World Championship. Remember, this was only twenty-fours hours before it was due to start. I was stunned. I never expected that reaction.
‘You can’t all go home,’ I said. ‘How can you go home?’ I could see a bit of fear in one or two players’ eyes so
I
added, ‘You can’t simply walk away from this. Embassy has never done us any harm. All they have done is look after us year after year. How can you let them down? How can you let Peter Dyke down? He has given us everything we asked.’
They’d said it in the heat of the moment, so when things had calmed down a little I added, ‘Look, let’s play this tournament. We are all on money and the winner will get £30,000. Even the ones who lose in the first round still get to bank a couple of thousand. It’s stupid to just walk out. Embassy has sponsored us ever since the tournament started. It’s not nice on them to just walk out.’
I managed to pull them round to my way of thinking, but the tournament itself was a dud because you could feel the players’ animosity towards the BDO. The tournament officials knew exactly what was going on, so it became an us against them situation. Actually, they
wanted
us out because they thought we couldn’t survive on our own and therefore wanted to teach us a lesson.
I didn’t play well in that tournament at all – I got hammered in the second round by Bob Anderson three sets to nil – but for the first time in darts I was glad to be out of it. I nearly didn’t make it to the second round at all. I was within a centimetre of being banned. I played the Dane Per Skau in round one and in the first set I lost three legs to nil and in the second I was two–nil down and heading for yet another early exit. Then
I
won a leg. I don’t know what possessed me to do this, but I just turned round, punched my fists in the air, shouted ‘Yeeessss’ and pretended to headbutt him. I only did it for a laugh, but then I saw it replayed on TV later that night and I went cold. I was within millimetres of landing him one right on his nose. I would’ve been finished as a player if I’d connected. No wonder I beat him after that; he’d gone. He probably thought if he knocked me out of the World Championship I’d knock him out. It was a good thing I did it, though, looking back, because it got me through the game, but it still makes the hair on my back rise watching it now. I was warned by the BDO for improper conduct. I hadn’t meant it, but they had to give me a warning because it looked bad. That’s me. I always get things wrong. That’s not the way to get sponsors for the breakaway boys is it?
Lowey won that one, his third title in three different decades by beating Alan Warriner six sets to three in the final. Afterwards we announced the breakaway from the BDO and in retaliation Ollie banned us so we couldn’t play darts for our country, our county or in the Super League. We couldn’t play in exhibition matches either, because he then announced that any Super League players who played with us in exhibition games would also be banned. It got very, very nasty.
Our argument was that the BDO should just run the amateur game because they were no longer left with
a
credible World Championship once all the top players had gone. However, their pyramid structure is brilliant, and even their retaining a weakened World Championship wasn’t necessarily bad for the game because with us going it gave thirty-two other players a chance to play on TV and get some experience, something they never would have got if we’d hung around.
The breakaway split darts. I didn’t speak to Ollie, who had been like a second father to me in the early days, and he refused to have anything to do with me. I’d travelled the world with this guy, and he was my England manager, so it was a sad loss for both of us.
It had to be done though. For the love of the game there was no choice. All the big names came with us, apart from Bobby George, but in my opinion he made exactly the right decision in sticking with the BDO because whereas in the PDC all the players who joined were fully committed to the game in that it was their life and their be all and end all, Bobby, on the other hand, had other commitments. Darts was never the sole focus of his existence. He made his money through the building trade. That was his main profession and one that made him a lot more dosh than the darts. So Bobby had no real reason to rock the boat and leave the BDO. He’s a great showman Bobby and has brought a lot of razzamatazz to the game and for that he should be applauded but when he looks back at his achievements
he’ll
probably be slightly disappointed he didn’t win more titles. He won the
News of the World
and North American Open, which are hard tournaments to win and he beat me in the final of the European Cup singles. But if you look at his career it never really took off like Lowey, Jocky or mine did. He made one more world final when all the big boys had defected but got hammered by John Part. So it was the right decision him staying, and it has proven to be so over time. Now he’s doing well as a darts frontman for the BBC and is getting a lot of exposure. He made the right decision. But then he has always been shrewd in all his dealings. That’s why he has been so successful financially. But then the BDO started to try and get players back off us and that was a much more serious matter. They promised Welshman Chris Johns he’d play for his country if he came back to the BDO, and being a proud Welshman that appealed to him greatly, and they also guaranteed him a steady income playing exhibition matches.
Next, Mike Gregory announced he was going back to the BDO. He’d been my room partner for four years and we were good buddies. We’d had some great times together. He was a practical joker like me. One time in Canada we were asleep and I woke up in the middle of the night to use the toilet. I didn’t turn any lights on because I didn’t want to wake Mike. As I was standing there having a wee all I could hear was what sounded
like
drums beating, and my legs and feet were getting soaked. The tosser had put clingfilm over the toilet seat. I had to mop the mess up with towels, it was everywhere. Then I jumped in the shower to clean myself. I’d only gone in for a wee and had to spend about an hour in there. The next night I borrowed Jamie Harvey’s Deep Heat spray and sprayed Mike’s pillow with it. Mike came in that night, a bit worse for wear, flopped in bed, went to sleep and the next morning when he got up his face was red raw.
We were always playing pranks on each other and we were close mates. When he went I couldn’t believe it. He didn’t even have the courtesy to discuss it with me beforehand. I could at least have talked to him about it and discussed the pros and cons, but there was nothing. He just walked out on us. I’ve never spoken to him since and never will. If another ten players had done what he did, we would have been destroyed as an organisation, but the BDO had promised him this and that and he fell for it. I roomed with Jamie Harvey after that.
The first time we roomed together was in Denmark. I had a Crafty Cockney suit holder that had all my shirts and stuff in it. I just hung it up in the hotel wardrobe and that was me sorted: I didn’t have to worry about ironing anything or worrying where anything was because it was all in there.
As we were leaving to return home Jamie, being
helpful
, looked in my wardrobe and picked up my suit holder. I said, ‘Oi, get your hands off my gear. Sort your own gear out.’
He just stared at me in bemusement and said, ‘All right then, keep your hair on.’
We both finished packing, went downstairs and took a cab to the airport. When we got there I pulled my bag out and thought: Where is my suit carrier?
I turned to Jamie to ask him where it was. and he looked at me, gave me the finger, and said, ‘Fuck you.’
I had left it behind and I had to take the cab all the way back to the hotel.
What a start to our room sharing – but we got on great after that. In Chicago we were playing in a $10,000-dollar tournament and I went to my room at about two in the morning and set the alarm for eight so I could wake up, have breakfast and put in some practice before the tournament started at eleven. Jamie stayed out all night, but when he eventually came in, absolutely bladdered, he woke me up and said, ‘Wake me up at seven.’ He then passed out on the single bed which was next to mine.
I looked at the clock and it said ten to seven. I couldn’t believe it.
I was knackered but I wanted to see this, so I got out of bed and sat on the edge of it, facing Jamie who was snoring away. I lit a fag and watched the clock.
Ten minutes later, at seven o’clock exactly, I woke
him
up and he went, ‘Yep,’ and went straight into the shower.
While he was showering I shouted, ‘Give me a call at eight,’ and went back to sleep.
‘No problem,’ he shouted back – and he did.
I went downstairs for breakfast, we practised together, and then I got beaten in the last thirty-two. Jamie, who had only ten minutes sleep the night before, made it through to the last eight. We were splitting the money so he gave me half of his $2,000-dollar winnings. ‘You know you only had ten minutes sleep last night,’ I said. ‘Did you realise what time you came in?’
‘I knew it was late,’ he said.
Jamie’s a good lad, not like Mike. Mike’s decision to leave hurt us badly because he was a good player and the good players really did need to show solidarity. When he defected back to the BDO we were down to fourteen and panic was setting in. The only way to settle it was through the courts. The BDO decision to ban their players from playing against us in exhibitions was crippling us financially.
The court case dragged on and on and on and we had to fund it all ourselves, each player putting a couple of grand in. Some players couldn’t even afford that. We were almost dead but we fought back. It went to the Old Bailey. A morning session there cost eight grand and it was all adjourned, adjourned, adjourned, eight grand, eight grand, eight grand, and we had three weeks
of
that – but we won the right to play in exhibitions and to co-exist with the BDO who had to recognise us as a bona-fide organisation.
The players had held their nerve, but even with them chipping in for court costs we would never have got through it if it wasn’t for the generosity of John Raby, the founder and head of JD Darts. His promotions company staged ranked and non-ranked tournaments around the UK, and he believed players had a right to play their sport when and where they chose. When he discovered what the BDO were trying to do to us, he immediately put forward about sixty grand of his own money to help us through the court case, and he wasn’t a wealthy man. Without him there wouldn’t have been a PDC.
He battled motor neurone disease and cancer in later life, and died during the 2008 Las Vegas Desert Classic. They put his body on ice for the funeral which was held when all the players had come back from that tournament, but I was the only one out of the original breakaway group who turned up. I felt gutted for him. They should have all turned up out of respect for the man who saved the game and effectively put money in their pockets. Some players couldn’t make it because they had commitments and that’s understandable, but for the ones who simply stayed at home and couldn’t be bothered turning up, shame on you.
Thanks to John the original fourteen who stuck with
the
Professional Darts Corporation never looked back. The first PDC World Championship was held in 1994. Because there were now twenty-four of us we had eight group stages initially, with the winners of each group going through to the quarter-finals. Rod Harrington won the group I was in and Dennis Priestley beat Phil Taylor in the final by six sets to one. When the competition was over there was the feeling that we were over the worst, and Sky couldn’t believe the viewing figures, which, although satellite TV was in its infancy then, were high by their standards. The only sport that beat us, and the only one that still does, was football, and then only for the big games.