Eric Bristow (28 page)

If you go out together you go home together, that was the way I was brought up. You never leave anyone on a night out. The problem was, I would be the one who hit the next day’s headlines when it all went pear-shaped. They say you learn as you get older, but as
I
got older I started getting done for things that were never as bad as the newspapers made them out to be.

A typical example of this was again in 1997. This time I was in Belgium for the Primus Masters and there was a fight. Two guys went for me. I was practising with Merv King – a 42-year-old former World Matchplay Champion who had only recently defected from the BDO to the PDC – and these geezers started having a go at him. I told them to shut up and all hell broke loose. As one of these idiots came towards me I knew he wasn’t coming to say hello, so I kicked him as hard as I could in the nuts. I must have pushed them up to his throat because he fell to the floor screaming like a pig. Suddenly I was surrounded by five of his mates, all
trying
to have a go at me. I escaped with nothing more than a ripped shirt and went to a bar upstairs where I knew a few of my mates would be. They were drinking by the side of an arty pane of glass, about six feet high.

My mates decided to keep me out of the way, so they made me sit and have a drink with them, but suddenly one of the gang appeared, and from the other side of the glass started threatening me and making throat-cutting gestures.

I said to him, ‘Yeah, whatever, pal, now fuck off.’

As soon as I said it, he started trying to climb over this glass to get to me, but as he got his leg over, the whole thing shattered. He fell onto the shards below, cutting himself to pieces, and had to go to hospital. As he lay there bleeding I stood up, walked past him and said, ‘You’re just a silly fuck.’

Under normal circumstances I would’ve got arrested for that, but I didn’t. Luckily I didn’t wallop him as he lay on the floor, but I was sorely tempted. If I had, I would’ve been in big trouble.

It didn’t stop the headlines screaming, ‘Bristow in Hotel Riot’ the next day. I’m like a dream for the tabloids, it’s just one incident after another, but that’s my life. It’s exciting and people like being with me because they know that nine times out of ten things are going to happen. Whenever I go abroad the players say, ‘Where’s Brissy going tonight?’ because they all know it’s going to be good fun.

My gang in the nineties was Alan Warriner, Rod Harrington, Trevor, Chrissy Johns, Chris Mason and Jamie Harvey. They were proper drinkers, and when we went out we’d all come back together as a group. In America we went everywhere in stretch limos. The darts finished at twenty-past eight in the evening and forty minutes later we’d all be showered and ready to hit the town.

It’s changed now because they’re not the same lads. Jamie’s not there any more and Chris Mason has calmed down a lot since he got jailed for battering a bloke with a hammer. That was stupid because he’s a handy lad and he didn’t need a tool. That incident has left a lot of people frightened of him, but he’s all right, he just lost his way for a few years. He’ll bounce back. He’s not really a fighter, or that aggressive. Some people want to fight the world after a few beers but not him, he’s not that way inclined. Even so, he is very much like me in that trouble seems to follow him around. I don’t mind that because it gives me a bit of a break. It got to the point where I couldn’t even walk into a kebab shop without hitting the headlines, and towards the end of the nineties came my most infamous moment, when I made Bravo TV’s
Street Crime UK
.

What a joke that was. I’d been booked to play Phil Taylor for a business crowd at the Grand Hotel in Stoke. There were two hundred people having dinner and watching us play the best of eleven sets, five legs to a
set
. It was a proper game, a long game which I liked, and all my buddies turned up to watch me – only I never had a chance because Phil did one of his silly acts where he has a 115 average. It meant he ripped my head off and spat down the hole. He was awesome. I lost six sets to nil. I was playing well going ton, ton, ton, one-forty, ton, but I wasn’t getting a shot at a double because Phil was hitting one-eighty after one-eighty. He made me look a fool.

After the game we both did a bit on the mic, but I was more concerned with getting round the back to the bar and having a few beers to ease the pain of my humiliation.

In the end it turned out to be a good booze-up and in the early hours of the morning it was time to go, so I left with my driver Phil.

We drove up to the car park barrier but, just my luck, you needed a token from the hotel to go through it. Phil got out of the car to go back to the reception and get one, and I spotted a kebab shop across the road. I got out too and staggered over. I’d had a few and was basically smashed.

Inside the shop I was just about to order when this spotty youth pushed in front of me. I grabbed him by the throat, frogmarched him to the door and threw him out. Then I went back in and ordered two kebabs – I always order two; one never seems to be enough because they’re moreish.

Suddenly from outside I heard a hum and everything lit up. I knew it was a TV camera because I’ve been in television for most of my life. This particular camera belonged to Bravo who were filming
Street Crime UK
. Basically they went to a different town each night, tuned in to the police radio and followed them to any trouble. Someone must have reported me for throwing this lad out and they were there in a shot. Talk about bad luck. I shouldn’t have been in there, I should’ve been in the car on my way home. Phil came across, and as we walked out this camera was on me. I could feel the heat from the light. In front of me stood a copper, who looked no older than about ten, with this star-struck look on his face because he was about to have his two minutes in the spotlight. I didn’t know what was going on and could barely string a coherent sentence together. That’s probably why I just kept saying to him, ‘I haven’t threatened nobody, I haven’t threatened nobody,’ which was a stupid thing to say, but I was pissed.

I was very thankful when he let me go. It would have been so easy to nick me – but how unlucky was that, to find the one cameraman who was travelling the whole of Britain looking for trouble? That clip is now one of the most downloaded on YouTube. In my defence I’d argue that nobody goes into a kebab shop at one in the morning sober. Who the hell eats a kebab when they’re sober? It wasn’t even a crime. That lad was out of order. You don’t push in, it’s rude.

I had another kebab shop incident in the Isle of Man, though fortunately the cameras weren’t there to record that one. Again it was in the early hours of the morning, again I was pissed, and again I was ordering two kebabs.

The kebabs came and just as I was about to pay, this bloke picked one of them up and started to eat it.

I said, ‘Oi, that’s mine!’ but he just carried on munching away so I got the other one and slapped it full in his face and said, ‘Here, have that one an’ all.’

It had lots of chilli on it and he fell to the floor, tearing at his eyes with his hands, screaming, ‘I can’t see! I can’t see!’

I just walked out and said, ‘Good night.’

Can you imagine what would’ve happened if the cameras had been there for that one?

The nineties were a bad time for me because I did tend to hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons. The worst moment came in 1994 when the
News of the World
was delivered. I picked it up and there across two pages was a picture of me with my arm round a lad who played Super League with me. Above it was the headline ‘Eric Bristow’s Pal is Child Killer’.

I needed that like I needed a dose, and I never saw it coming. Nobody had warned me it was going in. I just sat down, read every word in utter astonishment and thought: Why does this always happen to me?

The guy in question was Robert Black. He was a good darts player who played Super League with me for a
pub
called the Robin Hood, close to where I lived in London in the early seventies. He was a scruffy sod who had nicotine-stained fingers and dirty teeth. I’d see him every week, and he was just one of the boys. He hired two rooms off my pal Eddie Rayson and his wife Katherine in Stamford Hill.

Nobody was ever allowed in these rooms which had great big bolts on their door. Maybe that should’ve set the alarm bells ringing, but nobody batted an eyelid. They just saw him as a very private person. Then, all of a sudden, this person who we all knew as a darts player was arrested and done for murder. The papers were calling him the biggest child killer this country has ever had.

He got caught in Scotland. He had bundled a six-year-old girl into a van and sexually molested her, but he’d been spotted by a sharp-eyed retired shopkeeper who phoned the police. When they got to the van they found the little girl bound, gagged and trussed up inside a sleeping bag. Minutes later and she probably would’ve been dead.

When police raided his flat they discovered more than a hundred child pornography magazines and fifty videos in there. He was later charged with three more murders: eleven-year-old Susan Maxwell who was raped, strangled and her body dumped by the side of a road near Uttoxeter in central England; five-year-old Caroline Hogg whose naked remains were found in a
Leicestershire
ditch; and ten-year-old Sarah Harper who Black kidnapped from Leeds, raped, murdered and then dumped in the River Trent.

The police, however, suspected him of the disappearance of dozens more. That’s when they came calling for me. I had the CID boys round almost the minute the picture of us appeared because they were convinced he’d done children from my area as well. I had to tell them all the darts teams he played for and get the BDO diary of events out to show them where he was on particular nights. They wanted to cross-reference when these children went missing and if he was playing darts that night. It was a laborious process, but the police were brilliant. It did seem ironic though that when they weren’t arresting me for the most trivial matters they were asking me for help in a mass murder investigation.

Robbie Black has made me question my faith in people. We played darts with this guy and I had nights out with him. Nobody would ever have guessed what he was really like. If we had found out what he had been doing he would never have got out of the pub alive; we would have killed him on the spot. When the newspapers found out I was helping the police out, they came knocking on my door and asking for a comment. I gave them a no comment: I’ve got two children – what if that pervert got out? He might come after my daughter. I just didn’t want to get involved because eventually these scumbags get released. Knowing my luck,
the
minute I did make a comment and said, ‘Hang the fucker,’ he’d escape, so I wasn’t taking any chances because I know how things happen in my life and they don’t always turn out for the best.

It’s made me distrust all but my closest friends. You don’t know people when you just meet them in a pub. Back home they can have completely different personalities. There was a guy who used to come in the Cockney with his wife. They were a lovely couple, but she always wore revealing clothes. Even in the middle of winter she’d come in with a mini-skirt on.

Around this time a prostitute got murdered down Burslem way and the police pulled in this woman’s hubby. He was called Freddie. He’d been with this hooker an hour before she died. That was an eye-opener. Nobody in the Cockney knew that Freddie went with prostitutes, but they soon found out when he was pulled in. Then the cops went to Freddie’s house to have a look round and found a load of bondage gear that he and his missus had been using for their sex sessions. There were whips and everything. This nice bloke we knew in the pub was a bit of a Peter Pervert on the side. He didn’t have anything to do with killing this hooker, but he hardly ever came into the pub after that because on the couple of occasions he did, as soon as he walked through the door we all said, ‘All right, it’s Freddie the Murderer. What are you having to drink?’ He was branded for life. That happens to people who lead double lives and then
get
found out. There’s nothing better than being honest – but if you’re murdering little girls you’re not going to be honest, are you?

All the drama of run-ins with the police and child murder investigations failed to disguise one important fact: in the 1990s I was a shadow of the player who had dominated darts throughout the previous decade. I barely caused a ripple playing in PDC tournaments, although very occasionally during this period I played darts like I could play back in my heyday. Things would click and the dart became my sixth finger again. Although the yips were ever present in my game I did feel that if I conquered them, if only for a short period of time, I could’ve given Phil Taylor a run for his money.

Then suddenly it was my Indian summer, as it were. When I went into the ’97 World Championship the yips had gone. They’d been on and off in the run up to it – I’d have two weeks with them and two weeks without – but for the period of the championship there was no sign of them.

The old Bristow was back as I steamrollered the number three seed Bob Anderson by three sets to one in the group stages, and did enough against Canadian Gary Mawson to go through to the quarter-final where I beat the number six seed Alan Warriner five sets to three. That set up a semi-final clash with my protégé Phil Taylor which this time I was itching to win. I always
used
to see me and Phil as having that teacher/pupil relationship, but this time I had no reservations about playing him. He’d been on his own for years and hadn’t needed my coaching since his 1990 win, so I wanted to go out on stage and enjoy myself. Above all I wanted to destroy him.

I was up for that game – and utterly down when I lost it. I should’ve beaten him. I missed three darts at double top which would have set me up for a historic victory, but then there was a delay as the board came down and my game went a bit when we got back on the oche. Before the match had even started all the talk in the hotel was of how I wouldn’t win a set off Taylor – but there was no way in a million years I was not going to win a set. In the end I lost by five sets to three. It was a good game and I did play well, so it was good to have at least one decent game against him on stage.