Authors: Eric Bristow
Phil spent the whole of the match shaking and trying to combat double vision. He had the whole crowd against him, and that was a unique experience for him which he struggled to handle – plus I was winding him up at every opportunity. I hit a cracking 141 finish against him at one point and could see his head had gone. Then in the final set, needing sixty-six to take it to a decider, I went straight in the middle and missed two darts at double eight to take it all the way. Who knows what would have happened if I’d got that double.
I was pleased I’d played well, because my record from
’92
onwards seemed to be playing well in exhibitions and then badly on telly. Unfortunately, 1997 became my swansong because after that I played badly in all TV tournaments. In ’98 I lost both my group games by three sets to nil and Phil won his sixth world title. I did try to stop him beating my world record in ’97, but it would only have postponed the inevitable by a few more years because back then there wasn’t the strength in depth within the PDC to stop him. If all the BDO players had come over to the PDC right from the start, he wouldn’t have as many world titles as he has now. He would’ve beaten five, but most probably he wouldn’t be in double figures yet.
A year later, 1999, I got beaten three sets to nil by Peter Manley and that was rubbish. It really was the worst darts I have ever played on TV and possibly the worst darts ever witnessed in a televised tournament. The yips had come back and my confidence had deserted me. I had no fight. I just wanted to get off the stage. When his final dart hit the board, I breathed a sigh of relief mixed with elation that it was all over. It was embarrassing. I had people who had travelled a long way to watch me and they’d brought their friends with them to cheer me on. They sat in the front row and witnessed a horror show. I just kept turning to them and shrugging after I lost leg after leg and mouthed ‘Oh well.’
They didn’t mind. They were the same people who
had
cheered me on when I was good and they were determined to follow my career to the bitter end.
That ’99 Championship should have been the end for me, but I found it hard to let go. I still dreamed of one more World Championship. In the 2000 Championship I had a titanic struggle against Steve Brown whose father Ken I had played with in the England team when I was a teenager. I came from two sets to nil down to level it, but lost the deciding set.
It was only prolonging the agony because when you are struggling to get past the first round stage that says it all, really. A lot of players who play in the World Championship could play for twenty years and never win it. I had joined that group by the turn of the millennium. In 2001 I failed to qualify. I missed six darts at the double in every leg and that hurt. It was a bit sad really because also in that qualifying hall were Deller, Lowey and Big Cliff. We’d become ghosts of the past.
I decided it was time to leave the stage for good and went into retirement.
Now it was a question of what to do next. I couldn’t just sit at home because I would’ve got very, very bored. All I have ever done is play darts and I had had a busy life. I didn’t know any different and found it hard to adjust. If I’m at home and there’s no sport on TV I’m lost.
I decided to continue playing exhibitions and making
personal
appearances as well as concentrating on my new-found focus which was golf.
It was Deller and Jamie Harvey who got me into golf during the mid-nineties. They started doing these pro/celebrity tournaments so I started practising with them. We played for money, a tenner for the front nine, ten for the back nine and ten for the game. It was two pounds off every player for a birdie and one hundred pounds for a hole in one. No one ever got a hole in one.
I enjoyed these little games and got to a standard where my handicap was eighteen. That was when I got an invite from Howard Keel to play in his tournament at Mere Golf Club in Cheshire. I accepted, having no idea how big this thing was going to be.
I arrived the day before and was put up at the Piccadilly Hotel in Manchester. On the same day I was told I could have a practice round at the club with two other celebs who would also be appearing. They turned out to be Francis Lee and Rodney Marsh. I did a round and it was a proper course, much better than the ones I had been playing on, with good bunkers and everything. I just thank God I had that practice because I was a novice compared with most of the other celebs who were appearing. In the bar afterwards I bumped into Eddie Large who invited me to come and watch his team Manchester City play Middlesbrough. So there I was, in his executive box at Maine Road watching his side lose
one
–nil. Eddie was gutted. Afterwards in the executive lounge Middlesbrough’s manager Lennie Lawrence came in and we hit it off straight away. Eddie just sat in the corner growling to himself. He took his football very seriously.
The next day was beautiful, so I popped down to the course to take a look about an hour before I was due to tee-off. Other celebs had already started and my legs nearly buckled when I saw about fifteen hundred people gathered around the first tee. I didn’t need that sort of attention, so I told Trevor to get the Bailey’s out. He always carried miniature bottles of the stuff around with him. I drank them at breakfast before a darts tournament, usually no more than two or three, but now I downed about a dozen. I needed some Dutch courage.
I strolled to the first tee, slightly the worse for wear, to face the crowd which had now swelled even more. As I teed up the announcer said, ‘Now don’t go round in one hundred and eighty!’
I wasn’t laughing. All these people were standing round and I thought that if I sliced the ball, which I was prone to do, one of them would get hit. Fortunately I hit it straight down the middle of the fairway.
I played a lot of pro/celebrity tournaments after that. Johnny Mathis was at the Howard Keel event and invited me to play in his Johnny Mathis Classic. He played off twelve at the Howard Keel and fifteen at his own. I
went
loopy when I found that out. I couldn’t believe it – that was a bit naughty.
Golf is the reason I have a nasty scar across my nose. I had been playing in a TV tournament at the Royal Oxfordshire Golf Course, and my driver Phil, who I was sharing a room with, had gone to bed while I was on the lash in the hotel bar with other celebrities. I came to our room hammered. It was pitch black and I didn’t want to wake Phil so I got undressed in the dark. Suddenly I lost my balance, toppled over and hit the jagged edge of a brick TV cabinet with my nose. The blood spurted out.
I just lay stunned, crying out, ‘Phil! Phil!’
‘Where are you?’ he said.
‘I’m down here in trouble.’
When he turned the light on there was blood everywhere. He had to get a load of towels from the bathroom and cover my face.
‘What’s it like?’ I asked.
‘It’s not too bad,’ he replied.
But it was bad. I should have gone to hospital. That’s why I’m left with a scar now.
Golf has given me some marvellous memories, as well as some daft ones. True to form the daftest day on the golf course involved Keith Deller, when I was playing with him, Trevor and Phil Taylor in New Brunswick during a Canadian tour.
We’d hired buggies for the day. I was in one with Trev,
and
Phil was with Keith in the other. These things can go about thirty miles an hour if you put your foot on the pedal and as Phil passed me and Trev, he winked at us, swung the buggy round sharply to the left and Keith just flew out. He was rolling around the fairway and got up covered in grass stains. That was it then, the red mist descended and he wouldn’t let Phil drive any more.
Trouble was, Keith then parked the buggy on a hill that backed onto a pond and forgot to put the hand-brake on. Suddenly it started rolling down towards the pond. Trevor was the first to spot it and went in hot pursuit. He was desperately trying to grab hold of it to slow it down, so that he could put the brake on before it splashed into this pond. He stopped it with only yards to spare.
Then, on the same course, I hit my ball and it landed on a strip of what appeared to be white concrete – but it wasn’t concrete, it was quicksand. I stepped onto it and went in down to my knee. I couldn’t get out and it took all three of them, with all their strength, to pull me free. When they did get me out my golf shoe had disappeared. If I’d gone in there with both feet I would’ve been in big trouble.
At the end of the round we went back to the club house and it looked as if we’d been in the wars. Trevor was knackered because he’d been chasing after a golf buggy
and
pulling me out of quicksand, Keith was
covered
in grass stains, and I had mud up to my knee and only one shoe on. We looked a right set of prats.
If I thought retiring from competitive darts was going to lead to a quieter life with more time for the golf course, I was in for a rude awakening. The decade that followed the end of the nineties proved to be the most testing, stressful and surprising I had ever known. To get out of it in one piece was nothing short of a miracle, and darts had nothing to do with it.
FIFTEEN
Oh Brother!
AS THE NEW
millennium dawned I looked forward to a new century away from the pressures of the dart board. Mum sold her house in London and bought a simple two up two down in Leek so she could be closer to her grandchildren, and every Monday night I took her for a drink with me and the lads. She never really drank, but Monday nights were her big one. All the lads bought her drinks and she would more often than not leave the pub at closing time a little the worse for wear, in which case I’d send her home in a cab or one of the boys would take her in his car.
On one of these Monday nights, as we were sitting at the end of the bar talking about family and stuff like that, Mum took me to one side and said to me, ‘Eric, I just thought I better let you know that you have a brother.’
I was forty-five years old. For forty-five years I was led to believe I was an only child so it was a bit
difficult
to take in. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to her. ‘Can you run that by me again?’ I was stunned to say the least.
I don’t know if it was Dutch courage that made her tell me, or the fact that she wasn’t feeling very well and knew something about her health that I didn’t, but I’ve never got to the bottom of the reason why she chose to tell me at that moment. She had been seeing a doctor in London before moving to Leek, and after the move she got a new doctor and saw him regularly so something was afoot.
‘Right,’ I said to her, ‘who is he then? You have to get hold of him.’
‘Would you mind if I did?’ she said.
‘Of course I wouldn’t. He’s your son, just like I’m your son.’
Mum had been terrified I’d go mad at her wanting to meet him, but all I could do was tell her to go. I said, ‘For Christ’s sake, Mum, go and meet him,’ but I had to keep repeating this to reassure her. I was worried, though, because if she did try to contact him and found out he’d died, it would’ve devastated her.
She got into contact with a group set up to bring long lost relatives together. He’d also been in touch with this group and had wanted to contact her for the past ten years. A liaison lady encouraged them both to write to each other and she passed the letters on. It was nice the way they did it because she couldn’t just appear on his doorstep and say, ‘Hello, I’m your mum.’
After a few months and quite a lot of letters the liaison lady said they were ready to meet. Mum was as nervous as hell, but at least the letters had allowed her to piece together something of his life. He lived in London, at Purfleet, very close to the Circus Tavern where I had played darts for years.
The meeting went well and she asked me to meet him.
‘I don’t want to, Mum,’ I said. ‘I’m forty-five and it’s a bit late for me to start meeting long lost relatives.’
But she was persistent, and I wanted to make her happy, so I agreed to meet him. He’d seen my mum for a couple of months and they were getting along fine, but before I went I needed to know the history behind my long lost brother.
Mum told me he was called Kevin, he was two years older than me and he was the result of a brief fling with an Irish boy, nobody knows who he was, who disappeared shortly after getting mum pregnant.
In those days there was no such thing as abortions on the NHS, and illegitimacy was frowned on. So, rather than go to a back-street abortionist, she gave him up for adoption. Shortly after that she began dating my dad.
Kevin did well for himself and became quite a successful businessman, and when his stepmother died at the beginning of the nineties he decided he wanted to find his natural mother. He put the letter into the
agency
and over ten years later Mum got in touch. How surprised must he have been to get that call out of the blue after such a long time.
I arranged to meet Kevin at a hotel in Purfleet and took a mate with me called Michael Longsden for moral support. Mum had given me instructions to come back with a picture of Kevin and me together, so Michael could take some on his mobile phone.
I was as nervous as my mum had been but I shouldn’t have worried. When we met we got on fine. He was a lovely bloke. It was hard, though. You can’t just go back in time and be brothers in the natural sense. When we had that first meeting we just started asking each other silly questions. I wanted to know if he played darts, but he didn’t even like the game. It would’ve been funny if he had been a darts player in a local league – there would’ve been every chance we’d have met before this, and neither of us would’ve known we were related.
That first meeting was a case of catching up and there was a lot of it to do, over four decades worth. I found out he had been married and divorced but then was remarried with two kids, and obviously he knew of me through darts. What most impressed me about him was that he never mentioned the adoption and he didn’t resent what had happened at all. When I brought it up he said to me, ‘Those were the times, that’s what happened,’ and shrugged it off.