Eric Bristow (24 page)

The other darts players were getting wary of him now. No one took the mickey out of him any more like they did twelve months earlier. He was gaining respect. They
suddenly
realised during that championship that he could play darts and he could play well.

Despite this, I still thought there was no way in a million years both of us would get through to the final. One of us was going to get popped, if not both of us. I won my semi-final against Mike Gregory quite comfortably and Phil was on next to play his semi against Big Cliff. All of a sudden I went from wanting Phil to win, from wanting me to train him up to be World Champion and bask in the glory of his success, to needing him to lose. When he won five sets to nil I was stunned.

I didn’t enjoy that final, not because I lost it, but because I was up there playing him. I wanted to be backstage watching it, and laughing afterwards at the player he’d beaten and saying, ‘That’ll teach you to say “Why did you sponsor him?”’ It took all the fun out of it for me.

He played well to beat me six sets to one in that final, but his being there definitely affected my game. Whether the result would have been different if it hadn’t affected me so much we will never know. What I do know is that I didn’t enjoy it one bit. I didn’t even enjoy the set I won, I just wanted to get off zero. It was a weird feeling, the strangest I’ve ever had playing darts, because it just wasn’t right. There was no rivalry there. I
wanted
him to be World Champion because that is what I’d trained him to be, but in that 1990 final I was the only person stopping him from achieving his and my dream.
It
was a stupid situation. When we both won our semi-finals I would rather have shaken hands, stuck two fingers up at the rest of them and gone home without ever playing the final. Every player had laughed at us twelve months earlier; we could’ve had the last laugh. That would’ve done me. It would’ve been a fitting way to silence our critics. But we played and Phil won. He was the vampire who had sucked all the knowledge out of me and would use it to win world title after world title after world title.

I didn’t mind him winning everything, as long as it wasn’t against me. I was never going to be as good as I was during the early to mid-eighties so he became kind of my Mini Me, winning the titles I would’ve won if I hadn’t been affected by the yips. The only reason I trained him, the only reason I created this monster of darts, was because he was a working-class lad like me – and years later he’s still got the hunger. He’ll still dominate darts for the rest of this decade because he remembers where he came from, he remembers the poor times and the Christmases when he would’ve liked to have bought the kids better presents. Remembering that makes you harder.

I always knew he was going to be good. I wouldn’t have wasted my time otherwise. In the early days he went to a tournament and rang me up, absolutely ecstatic, and said, ‘I made it to the final – I lost, but I made it to the final. Brilliant.’

I told him, ‘Phil, don’t phone me up to tell me you got beaten in the final. Next time you ring me up, tell me you won,’ and I put the phone down on him.

All of a sudden, from being over the moon, he was gutted – but why would I want to listen to him telling me he was runner-up? That wasn’t why I was training him. That hurt him. The next time he saw me he said, ‘You bastard, I only rang you up.’

‘Look,’ I said, ‘don’t ring me up unless you have won, understood? I don’t want to listen to losing shit.’

It riles him even now that I said that, but I’d spent hours of practice with him to get his counting right and to get his head right. For him to be happy to be second wasn’t the idea. It would’ve been a complete waste of thousands of hours of practice.

I beat him in the British Open one year and I didn’t like that. That was as bad as the World Championship final, and I gave him some gyp in his face afterwards. It was all part of his training.
Coming second is no good
: I was brought up to believe that by my father.
Nobody remembers the runner-up
was what he constantly drummed into me. The only time people do remember the loser is if an outsider beats them. They remember me in ’83 because Deller beat me. If it had been Lowey they wouldn’t remember.

Despite losing that final in 1990 and despite my condition, I still believed I was the best in the world. Phil just played very well in that tournament. He didn’t really
come
on until two years after that final, but winning it was the stepping stone for him. What I always wonder was how much
I
brought his game on in that final. Would he have played that well against someone he didn’t know? I doubt it. He knew he could beat me because we had played each other thousands of times, and he knew that if he lost that final I would’ve never let him forget. So he played my game. He finished the way I finished and he hit his doubles. It was a clinical job and one that wouldn’t happen in any other sport.

I used to say to all the players back then that if it wasn’t for my condition I would’ve killed them. I was still winning tournaments, still at the top of the rankings, and I’d hung in there for years, but then 1990 came and went and I really did start losing to dumb-dumbs.

After that nightmare final, Phil had made it. He’d paid off the money I’d put up to sponsor him and there was nothing more left for me to do. So we shook hands, I gave him a cuddle and we remained friends. That final was one career ending and another starting. Now he has thirteen World Championships under his belt and he’s changed from the raw person he was back then. He handles fame very well indeed, but one thing I couldn’t do was make him a personality. I could make him a good darts player but I could never make him laugh and joke and give it the bigmouth and the histrionics on stage like I used to do. In that we differ. That’s simply not his way.

He does make me cringe, though, sometimes, because he’s a perennial name-dropper par excellence and that really does my head in. He has never realised that he is a big star; it just doesn’t register with him. He rang me up after the 2008 Las Vegas Desert Classic and said he was in LA staying at Robbie Williams’s house. He was almost breathless as he said, ‘Robbie’s been singing to me all night. He’s been singing the new songs from his next album and asking me if I like them.’

I said, ‘Yeah, so what? What the fuck do I care?’ and that was the end of the conversation.

Since then he’s mentioned Robbie on telly on numerous occasions. He’s given it ‘my mate Robbie’ this, and ‘my mate Robbie’ that, never realising that he is a star in his own right. As soon as he gets in with anybody he keeps mentioning them on TV. The one before Robbie was Ronnie O’Sullivan, and the time before that it was Ricky Hatton. Me and the boys at Sky took bets on how long it would be before he mentioned Ricky Hatton after he met him, or how many times he’d say his name. We’d all throw a couple of quid in and the one who guessed correctly took the pot.

One time he said, ‘I would like to thank Elton John’s mum.’ What was that all about? People watching the darts at home must have been scratching their heads over that one. He doesn’t realise who he is and that annoys me because all these other stars are only the same as us. They’ve got two arms and two legs as well,
but
he still looks up to them. Why? To me Phil has still got that small-town Burslem mentality, which in a way isn’t bad because it’s meant he’s kept his feet on the ground and hasn’t adopted a starry persona, but he’s a brilliant darts player and he needs to recognise that fact. He’s a machine, a robot, the like of which darts will never again witness. I changed the world of darts with Phil Taylor. I gave the sport a phenomenon.

However, the thing with Phil is that he doesn’t have the love for the game that other players, including myself, have. He won’t miss it when he’s gone. He’s enjoying himself now, but in another few years he’ll leave the sport and probably get a nice place abroad and go and live there. He’ll put his arrows in his top pocket and never throw them again. I don’t even think he’ll watch darts on telly.

He used to hate playing exhibitions and would ring me up and say, ‘What are you doing tonight?’

‘I’m not doing anything,’ I’d reply.

‘Well, I’ll pick you up at six. I’m in Nottingham playing an exhibition at nine. Bring your darts and your shirt and play the first half. I’ll play the second half, we’ll split the money and then go home.’

He really didn’t enjoy doing those sorts of things, but now he earns over £300,000 a year in prize money and has a good agent, so he doesn’t need to do the exhibition matches any more. He hasn’t squandered his money, either. He’s not a waster like me. When he finally retires
some
time in the next decade, he’ll probably ride off into the sunset with Elton John’s mum and be remembered not only as the best player darts has ever seen, but as a nice bloke to boot. He’s got a good heart, but despite this a lot of other players don’t like him because they’re jealous of his success. He’s a bloke who had nothing, who had to answer yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir, and now he rules the darts world.

He has seen the end coming, however. He got a glimpse of it when he broke down after winning the 2008 World Masters against James Wade. That tournament took a hell of a lot out of him, and it’s not like him to show emotion as he did immediately after that win. I believe he saw in Wade a player who is going to usurp him in a couple of years’ time and steal his crown, and that’s why he cried.

For years commentators like Sid Waddell have predicted World Champions of the future, but if you had listened to Sid there would have been about sixteen over the course of Phil’s domination. Kevin Painter was going to be one, Colin Osbourne another, but where does it end? At the moment there is only going to be one person who wins the next two World Championships and that’s Phil Taylor. After that James Wade’s time will come. James is another quiet lad in the mould of Taylor, but he likes a drink, though he’s calmed down a lot now and keeps away from the booze until after the tournament finishes, which is why his darts has
improved
. I used to have a go at him for getting pissed during a tournament. ‘Get pissed when you’ve won the fifty grand first prize, not before,’ I said to him. When you mix with proper drinkers like James used to do it’s hard because you feel you have to go at their pace. James has learned from his mistakes and will benefit in the future.

He’s probably at the stage now that Phil was in 1990. Back then he was good but I still believed that despite the yips there was one more World Championship win in it for me. I kept getting pipped at the post. If I’d played Big Cliff, who Phil beat, I would probably have won that championship, and it was that thought that kept me going. I’d lose to a player in the final one year, then beat them in the quarter- or semi-final the next. I just needed a bit of luck: I needed to play certain players at the right time to beat them. If the jigsaw fell into place, then I felt certain I could win my title back in 1991.

Phil went out in the 1991 World Championship which was something of a relief to me. He got beaten four sets to three in the quarter-final. Why couldn’t he have gone early twelve months previously? I’d played well to get to yet another final, beating Kexi Heinaharju three sets to nil, Mike Gregory three–nil, Dave Whitcombe four–three and Kevin Kenny five–two. The quarter-final against Whitcombe was my greatest ever comeback. I was three sets to nil down and it was effectively all over,
but
I managed to raise my game somehow and poor Dave didn’t know what had hit him. He was distraught. He’d already lost to me in two previous finals; this had been his big chance for revenge, but it wasn’t to be.

I was to face the then unknown Dennis Priestley in the final. This time the crowd, rather than being against me like they were in my prime, were all for me. They didn’t want me to lose because they knew how much I’d been struggling. That’s the English for you: when anyone wins they don’t like them; as soon as they struggle they become the nation’s favourite. In America it’s different. They don’t like losers. Second is no good.

I expected to beat Dennis. I knew I could and I knew I still had it in me to do it. Dennis had been a good county player for years, but nothing special. Then, all of a sudden, it all came together for him. He simply turned the corner. Something clicked and he never looked back. This happens with sportsmen sometimes. I wish it had clicked twelve months later because he kicked the living daylights out of me in the final. I lost six sets to nil. Again he was a slow player and again it did my head in a bit. I thought I had learned from my first World Championship, but obviously not enough. The problem here was that he was slow but also very good, unlike Conrad Daniels in the first one who was rubbish. Dennis was going ton, ton, one-forty, one-eighty, ton, ton. I was playing catch-up from the beginning and the way I was playing, which was well
below
his standard, meant I never had a chance. I don’t even look back on that as one I should’ve won.

Days after the final it hit me, the thought that I hadn’t put up much of a fight, and it knocked the stuffing out of me. I had always been a fighter, but in that final, when I needed to dig deep there was nothing there. There were good players coming through, like Dennis and Phil, and others, and deep down I knew any chance of another world title had gone. From not losing finals I was now losing them year after year.

To look at it positively, Dennis was a good bloke to lose to because he is a very lovely and warm guy. He wasn’t a party boy though, mainly because he is a Yorkshireman i.e. a tight bastard – all Yorkshiremen are tight, it’s not a fallacy because I’ve met them. Every time he walked through the door I shouted, ‘ ’
Ow
much?’ That was his catchphrase. If he bought a drink he’d cry ‘ ’
Ow
much?’ and if anybody mentioned the cost of anything he’d say it again.

He’s clever, like Lowey. Those two are the cleverest of them all. Once Dennis got in the groove he would play a few exhibitions then go off to Tenerife with his wife for two weeks, come back, do exhibitions, and a month later he’d be off again. Lowey tries to do exactly the same. The Premier League didn’t do Dennis any favours, though, when he entered it in 2007. It messed his lifestyle up because he couldn’t have a holiday. He was playing every week for seventeen weeks. I told him
he
shouldn’t have gone in for it, but once he’d committed that was it, there was no backing out.