Eric Bristow (27 page)

A few other players saw the exposure we got and wanted to come over to us from the BDO. After about three years the prize money started going up and we were away, but there was still a lot of non-forgiving among the players. Some of our lot wouldn’t have anything to do with the others whatsoever. I wasn’t like that. I held no grudges with any of them, apart from Mike Gregory. But it was a close call. We nearly didn’t make it. This time there could be no repeat of 1982, when there were still seventeen tournaments a year on telly and the money was good so people didn’t want to upset the BDO. Nobody would come with Lowey and me back then. Fast forward ten years and when players were deserting the BDO I got them all together and told them in no uncertain terms, ‘There’s no going back
from
here. If this doesn’t work none of us will ever play for the BDO again, so we have to stick together for the good of the game. If we stick together we’ll succeed.’

And we did stick together and we did succeed. If we’d have gone back to the BDO with our tails between our legs they would have picked us off one by one, they would have found any excuse to ban us, but it didn’t happen and our organisation succeeded. My only regret was that I was never able to play for my country, my county or my league again. I loved playing for England and played in eight world cups and eight European championships. My and Lowey’s record in an England shirt is fantastic.

I missed the county darts too. I had played for Staffordshire County up until the split with Maureen and then I joined Merseyside because it was a good laugh up there. I couldn’t play for Staffordshire any more because I’d given Maureen the Cockney and they still played in there, so it would’ve been too embarrassing for me. Instead, one of Merseyside’s top players called Jimmy McGovern invited me to play for them when he heard I was leaving. He’d become a good friend of mine after winning a competition to have a meal with Maureen and me years before. After the meal I got him on port and brandies. It was vintage port and we had a good session. Then, when we left the dinner table, we went into the bar where we ordered more port and brandies,
only
this time it wasn’t vintage port, it was something much cheaper. He took one swig, scrunched his face up and said, ‘This isn’t right.’ He had suddenly become a connoisseur of port.

So I played for his team and Trevor played for the B team. I really got to love the Scousers, they’re great. They don’t have any money, but they somehow manage to find enough cash to play golf every day and go to the pub each night. They’ve got life sussed. They were a good team because they cared about each other and looked out for one another. In other teams you tended to get cliques, but not with them. We organised a charity night after the Hillsborough disaster and they brought on a couple who had lost their son. Everyone started singing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ and it was tear-jerking. Big grown-up guys were crying their eyes out. It took my breath away. But all darts teams are like that. They do lots for charity because they are all working-class people who’ll dig deep in their pockets to help others less fortunate than themselves.

I lost them thanks to the stubbornness of the BDO and I lost a lot of friends as well. I’m on speaking terms with a lot of them now, but it’s all polite. The cheekiness is not there any more.

When I see darts on Sky Sports now, and the number of tournaments they play plus the huge sums of money they’re getting, it makes me proud to think I was one of the pioneers who made that happen. I didn’t want
to
see darts die, especially after all the knocking it had had for its booze and fags image. They don’t knock it any more, now it’s a success. I could never understand why they kicked darts off terrestrial TV, just like I could never understand why
Bullseye
went. The whole idea behind the PDC was to keep darts on telly. It wasn’t for loads of prize money. We had to keep the game alive because it was dying.

After a few years the prize money did start to go up, then Vegas came in with a tournament, Blackpool came in and the BDO became a distant memory, part of another moment in time. This was a new era. With the BDO Ollie did all the negotiating, but with the PDC it was Barry Hearn, the boxing promoter, and he is the ultimate mercenary, with a lifestyle that is beyond compare. I did a show with him in Monaco where I had to appear in a tournament played in a big marquee. It was a PR stunt to sell the game of darts to TV companies from all over the world. These TV bigwigs were desperate to secure the rights to his boxing matches, but he kept saying to every one of them, ‘If you want boxing you’ll have to take one hundred hours of darts as well.’

They didn’t want darts but he was adamant. ‘No darts, no boxing.’

He really was the main man. That night I joined them all for a meal, but there were too many of us to sit round this table so Barry said to me, ‘Eric, would you
mind
sitting with these four Americans on this other table?’

‘No problem,’ I said.

So we had a laugh and I taught them how to play spoof with coins. As we played we started ordering bottles of vintage champagne. Bottle after bottle kept coming and I said, ‘Put it on Barry’s tab.’

These Yanks could hardly walk by the end of the night. One of them couldn’t even get up out of his chair. When Barry saw the bill he just looked at me and laughed. ‘I see you kept them entertained,’ he said. He didn’t mind. He’d just sold over two thousand hours worth of sport.

Years later the BDO offered me an olive branch. Ollie phoned me up to invite me to their 2006 World Championship final when Raymond van Barneveld was about to equal my record of five BDO championships.

I said to him, ‘If you pay me to go, I’ll be there.’

He said no, they couldn’t pay me, so I told him I wasn’t going, and I thought that would be the end of it. But then von Barneveld’s wife Sylvia rang me up, pleading with me and saying, ‘You must come, you have to come down. Barney wants you there for when he makes it five.’

So I went reluctantly, but when I walked into what was effectively enemy territory at the Lakeside I could sense there was still a big rift there. I strolled into a back room where the TV people were preparing the cameras
and
had a bit of a laugh with them, and then I went into the players’ bar. It all went a bit quiet when I walked in. Hardly any of the players who had come to watch the final said hello to me.

Bobby George was in there and he did come over, but I shouted, ‘Hey Bobby, this is the first time you’ve had a decent darts player in here in fifteen years!’

‘You’re off again, are you?’ Bobby said. ‘Nothing changes with you, does it?’ But it helped to break the ice a bit and the mood in the room relaxed.

After a few beers I went out to watch the final with Barney’s wife Sylvia and a few members of Dutch royalty who I reminded myself not to call ‘darling’. During the break I got up to go into the players’ room where they had a private bar. I’d been in there for a good two hours before this thing had started and I wanted a quick pint during the interval. I was met at the door by a BDO official who told me, ‘You’re not going in there.’ There were two steps behind him, leading through this door to the bar, so I launched myself at him with my shoulder and he flew down those two steps and landed in a heap on the floor of the bar. Walking in I said to him, ‘Now who is going to throw me out?’ I was sick of all the BDO and PDC rubbish. I just wanted a drink.

Barney lost the final, seven sets to five, to Jelle Klaasen, meaning he didn’t equal my record and the whole idea of inviting me had become a bit of a pointless exercise – and he played rubbish which didn’t help matters. He
ended
up with a low nineties average which was Mickey Mouse darts.

I went to the presentation dinner with Barry Birch, who had become my driver after Phil died, and we both had to sit with Barney, his wife and all these people who had come over from Holland for a big celebration. It was more like a wake. I said to Barry, ‘We’re having fun here aren’t we, mate? Go and have a look on the winner’s table and see if there are two seats over there. I’d rather party with Klaasen and his boys.’

It got worse when I was asked in a BBC interview for my opinion of the final and I called it amateur darts. That caused the rift to widen no end, but I said it on purpose. If it had been good darts I would have acknowledged it, but it wasn’t. It simply wasn’t as strong as the darts played in the PDC championship. I became public enemy number one again with the BDO after that.

Darts had always been my motivation in life and I don’t like to see it suffer. In the early years I wanted to win championship after championship, then, when I got the yips, I had Phil Taylor as my motivation. When he started winning everything and we parted company, darts was plunged into turmoil with the breakaway and that kept me going for a while, but after that I lost my way a bit. That’s when the trouble started.

FOURTEEN

I Fought the Law and the Law Won

WHEN I WAS
a young lad there were hundreds of reasons why I should have been arrested. Whether it was burglary, petty theft or violence, you name it I did it, but I always got away with it. I always seemed to be one step ahead of the police.

In the 1990s it was payback time. Suddenly I was getting done for what seemed to be no reason at all. There was the incident I’ve told you about with Trevor outside Stringfellows and that served as a warning for other incidents to come. Two of the most notorious involved a six-foot fibreglass snowman and a kebab.

In 1995 I’d just asked my pal Dave McGuiness, who was a scrap metal merchant living in Stoke, to be godfather to my son. He said yes and we all went out to celebrate. There was me, Al Pal, a guy called Mickey Longsden, Barry my driver, and Dave. Back then our local was a pub called the Wheel, and at Christmas the landlord Jeff put a white plastic snowman outside. We’d
had
a good session, and about half past one in the morning Jeff said he was going to put the snowman away, otherwise it would’ve probably got nicked by a passing drunk. I was a bit merry and in a party mood so I said I’d go and get it.

The police were on a drink drive clampdown at that time and every night, without fail, Barry would take us home and get pulled. It was getting annoying. On this particular night they were on patrol and had parked round a corner, waiting for us to finish drinking and for Barry, who was stone cold sober, to drive us home. I didn’t know this when I went outside.

I picked up the snowman and started dancing round the car park with it. Suddenly a police car screeched up beside me. Quick as a flash I put the snowman on the cop car’s roof and said to the driver, ‘You better take him home, officer, he’s had far too much to drink.’

I could tell he didn’t find it amusing. He gave me the sort of look Lowey used to give me when I’d just beaten him. Then these two coppers got out of the car, by which time my mates had come out of the pub to see what was going on.

One of the coppers looked at the snowman sitting there and said, ‘You’ve scratched the roof of my car.’

Dave, who isn’t short of a bob or two said, ‘Look, how much is it? I’ll pay for the damage.’

This copper looked at him all stony faced and said, ‘Oh, so you’re trying to bribe a police officer are you?’

I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘For fuck’s sake, boys, let’s all just calm down.’

But that was it, they were on their radios calling for assistance. Within minutes more police cars came, meat wagons turned up, the dogs were brought in, everything arrived. All they needed was a helicopter to complete the set. There were five of us and we weren’t causing any trouble; it was a ridiculous situation.

This young copper then tried to handcuff me. I said, ‘You’re not putting handcuffs on me, pal. You’re not big enough to handcuff me,’ which in hindsight was probably not the wisest thing to say.

I started mucking about as he tried to put the cuffs on, moving my hands away and shaking my wrists, but in doing this I accidentally smashed his wristwatch. The cops were already happy because they had me on a charge of resisting arrest. Now that I’d smashed his watch they were ecstatic because they could get me on an assault charge, which they did. I got banged up for the night and was eventually fined £1,800. Talk about an over-reaction. I felt like a hitman when all those coppers turned up.

When I went back to the Wheel after being fined the snowman was back outside, even though it wasn’t Christmas, only it had ERIC painted on it in big letters. Then, for months afterwards, every time I walked into the pub all the regulars would break into a chorus of ‘Frosty the Snowman’. I even got good-luck cards with
snowmen
stuck to them, posted to me in the run-up to the court case. It’s not an easy job being a copper, but sometimes they just completely lose the plot.

That was only the start. Two years later I was in court again after being accused of inciting a riot at Blackpool’s De Vere Hotel during the World Matchplay championship. I got done for threatening behaviour and fined £250. This time it involved a straight fight between two people – darts player Scott Cummings and Sky TV lighting expert Gary Nolan – over a woman. All I did was stop other people getting involved – there were people there who wanted to stop it, but I wouldn’t let them because it was a straight one-on-one fight and I’ve always been brought up to believe that in a one-on-one fight you let them get on with it. Why I had to get involved I’ll never know, but I did, and the next thing I knew I was getting done for allegedly kicking this Sky bloke in the head when he was down. That was a load of rubbish. I can state quite categorically that despite punching and kicking many people in my time I never laid a finger, or foot, on him.

Before I was due to go in court I asked my brief, ‘What’s the worst thing that can happen here?’

‘You can get eighteen months to two years,’ he said.

I readied myself for the worst and was determined to show no emotion in the dock if I did go down. Fortunately I escaped with a fine.

I gave up on Scott shortly after that. He was only
twenty
-seven, but he drank too much. His drink of choice was Scotch and he liked large ones. I took him out for a couple of years as part of my gang, but I was wasting my time encouraging him in his darts career because he seemed more interested in having a Scotch or ten with the boys and me. He could drink all these large ones and you’d not notice any change in him at all. That was frightening for someone so young. We had some fun, though.