Heart of Dart-ness: Bullseyes, Boozers and Modern Britain – Ned Boulting
Read: Feb. 18th 2024
Published: 2018
Country: UK
Length: 352 pages
Good book! I’m into darts now. Bought a set because of this book. I liked when he talked about how much booze they drank.
Brief Summary:
In Heart of Dart-ness, TV’s Ned Boulting sets out to answer the forty-something year old What exactly is darts? Is it a sport, a freak show, a side-show, a pantomime, a riot or a party?From Purfleet to Minehead, Milton Keynes to Frankfurt, Ned embarks on a journey back to the beginning of the modern game. He tracks down some of the household names who graced childhood television screens and are still among us; names such as Andy Fordham, whose fifty bottles of Pils a day habit led to his near death on the oche, Cliff Lazarenko, whose prodigious drinking was the stuff of legend even among his not exactly abstemious peer-group, Phil Taylor, the greatest of all time, as well as the Europeans, Michael van Gerwen, and Raymond van Barneveld.Is it entertainment, or exploitation? To answer that question, as well as every other, he learns that all roads lead to the Heart of Dart-ness, and the biggest character the game has ever produced, Eric Bristow. Perhaps darts is after all, just exactly what it sets out to be; an anti-sport sport, a two-fingered salute to the establishment, a piss-up in a brewery, the ultimate escape. The best night out.
Quotes:
- “Darts was a constantly reloaded torpedo, crashing into the bull at the heart of the board in the centre of the stage amid the chaos of Wolverhampton Civic Centre in the middle of England one week in November. It was uproarious: a twenty-first-century reinvigoration of an outmoded game. Darts was an affront to taste…”
- “Waddell was, until his untimely death in 2012, the undisputed Voice of Darts and one of the modern game’s founding fathers, in whose honour the World Championship trophy itself is named. And it was Sid Waddell who produced the most memorable, the funniest, and the most pretentious line of commentary in the history of televised sport. When commentating on Eric Bristow’s first-ever World Championship, he opined enthusiastically that: ‘When Alexander of Macedonia was 33, he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer. Bristow’s only 27!’”
- “But the Pils consumption was just the baseline. He could sit at a table in a Chinese restaurant, eat not a thing, and consume six bottles of white wine on his own.”
- “The spotlight of the oche is remorseless, and takes no prisoners. No other sport, you might argue, revels to such an extent on the physical imperfections of its protagonists.”
- “And then there was the famous occasion when Bowen asked a contestant what he did for a living. When the man told him he was unemployed, Bowen, unfazed, replied, ‘Smashing, super, great.’ I had always taken this to be an urban myth, but when I ask Bowen about it, he confirms that he did indeed say just that. ‘I didn’t listen. I wasn’t listening to his answer. I was looking at the cameras like a demented shepherd.’””
- “He went on to tell me how he was an obsessive viewer, a big admirer of the game. And ‘game’, for him, was the important word. ‘I don’t really like sport as such. I like games and darts is a supreme example of why I enjoy them so much. It’s the human drama, the tension, the rhythm, the whole “narrative” that plays out over the course of the legs and sets of a tournament.’ Underpinning all the pantomime, there was, according to Fry, a heavy-lidded, knowing wink; a wry and clear understanding that this was all just a monstrously overgrown giggle. The parade ring of professional darts was a remarkable place, a stage on which to celebrate the very contrast between their assumed identities and their real selves. ‘The true personality is always revealed on the oche,’”
- “Nonetheless, there is of course a need, or perhaps a desire, to label and classify human experience. We need to know what it is that we are looking at. ‘Is it art?’ for example, remains one of the most enduring questions, to which Britain’s favourite cross-dressing potter Grayson Perry rather brilliantly suggested that (and I paraphrase), ‘if it’s in an art gallery and there are men with beards and oligarchs’ wives looking at it, then it probably is.’”