He is a sporting hero and he’s currently touring the country as part of one of the biggest darts events ever. Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor meets Dave Fowler to discuss his triumphs, tough times and how he became king of the arrows.
It’s 10: 00pm on Thursday 17 February, 2005. Two thousand pumped-up punters are packed into the sold-out Wellsprings Leisure Centre, Taunton for the third leg of 888.com’s Premier League Darts tour, live on Sky TV.
So far, they’ve howled abuse at Peter ‘One Dart’ Manley, donned orange wigs for Dutchman Roland ‘The Tripod’ Scholten, and gone cider-loopy for West Country pin-up Mark ‘Flash’ Dudbridge. Now, the night is reaching its beer-fuelled climax as local hero ‘Flash’, in his second match tonight, goes head-to-head with the undisputed darts champion of all time, Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor.
The crowd are restless with anticipation. Some order six-pint jugs of foaming ale from buxom serving girls. Others spark up fags, pondering the merit of oversized hot dogs over cheesy chips. A drunken bird totters off her chair and spills out of her top, all nipples and giggles. A bouncer who asks her politely to cool off helps her to her feet. No chance.
Back from the dead
Tonight’s punters are the new breed. They’re the people who, along with Barry Hearn’s PDC (Professional Darts Corporation) and Sky, have breathed life back into a sport perceived only a decade ago as moribund and naff. Today, grass roots support for darts is massive and growing. TV ratings are smashing snooker. Darts is back with a vengeance, and this time, it knows how to party.
At 10: 05pm, Taylor enters the arena through a specially guarded walkway. Everyone knows this because a truly massive sound system erupts with Snap’s pounding 1990 hit The Power. Fans swarm over to slap Taylor’s back, ruffle his hair and feel the full-beam blast of sweeping spotlights. Sweat drips from the ceiling as around us hundreds of pints of lager are raised in salute by men standing on chairs chanting ‘Pow-ah, Pow-ah!’ in unison.
Like Maximus entering the Colosseum or Ian Rush in his 1980s Liverpool goalscoring pomp saluting the Kop, Phil turns and acknowledges the masses. Finally, an announcer with a voice honed on Senior Service and cheap whisky rasps ‘Gaaame Oooon!’ down his mike. The Power grins, raises 24 grams of tungsten and nickel, and joins the battle.
Power source
Phil Taylor is Britain’s greatest living sportsman. Never in the history of sports betting has one athlete so utterly dominated his chosen field -12 world titles in 15 years speak for themselves.
Astonishingly, you could have got on the first, back in 1990, at a sensational 125/1. The bookies got sharp soon after, of course, but even as a perpetual odds-on favourite Taylor never – well, hardly ever – misses the mark. He’s the living embodiment of a racing certainty: imagine a combination of Red Rum, Desert Orchid, Roger Federer and Michael Schumacher – with a thick Potteries accent. He’s the punter’s favourite.
Pile on to The Power and your only issue is where they’ll take your thickest bet. Get on The Power, in fact, and you’ll never switch off.
‘I’m glad you’ve managed to win a few quid on me,’ laughs Phil, chatting while he sips tea (and doesn’t smoke) backstage before the match. ‘Half of Stoke backed me at my first world championship win against Eric Bristow. I had people coming up to me thanking me for getting them a new fridge or washing machine. Even my missus had £20 on.
Not a gambling man?
‘But I hardly ever gamble on myself and never really put that much on. I only had about a tenner on the first nine-dart TV finish I threw, at the Stan James World Matchplay Championship. I fancied myself to throw it the night before… I don’t know why. The odds were rubbish really, about 25/1.
‘But I still got excited about picking up my winnings from the bookie’s – more than picking up the £150,000 waiting for me for winning the tournament. When I threw my second nine-dart finish at Bolton recently, I didn’t have a bet on. I won a few bottles of Bud and that was it. Well, that and a 50 grand bonus!’
Nice work if you can get it. But then this year Taylor is set to be the first darts player in history to earn £1 million in 12 months. That’s a distant cry from his boyhood years in Burslem, Stoke, where he spent five years in a terraced house with no hot water, collecting copper wire from derelict sites to help pay the bills. Straits were so dire the family even ran the unlicensed TV from next door’s electricity supply. It was a life of catalogues and weekly payments, but a happy one nonetheless.
By today’s standards, Phil may have been materially deprived, but his family were squarely behind him. Father Doug was a hard working sports-lover who introduced him to darts played on the kitchen door; mother Liz couldn’t stand losing and gave him an unquenchable thirst for victory.
Leaving school at 15, Taylor grafted in a succession of local jobs; delivering meat, making handles for toilet chains and beer pumps. He threw darts in his first money match against local boy Kenny Massey and beat Welsh national champions on caravanning holidays to win bottles of plonk. But a career as a pro player seemed unlikely. Not only was he far too interested in chasing women, but the money in darts back then was rubbish.
All that changed when Taylor met Eric Bristow, the ‘Crafty Cockney’, who’d won the Embassy World Championship in Stoke in 1985, relocating there to open a darting palace called (you guessed it) The Crafty Cockney a few miles from Taylor’s house. Next, Brissy began to suffer from dartitis (a condition which meant he was unable to release darts properly from his hand). He started looking for a protege. Taylor, shooting up the local regional leagues at the time, was that man.
‘I never realised the potential I had and I didn’t want to risk taking the plunge. Brissy changed everything. He didn’t give me money as such, but sent flight tickets to international events to my house. He gave me the knowledge, the ability to play – largely by bullying the balls off me.
Bully for you
‘If I was second in some tournament I’d call him from the other side of the world with the good news. He’d just say “Call me back when you’re the bloody winner” and hang up. He could be a right bastard! Brissy taught me to be tense enough to compete but relaxed enough to play the game, though. That was everything.
‘It took me two years to get the hang of things on the circuit. The first year I won a couple of things, but I was in awe of the players. By the second year, I didn’t give a monkey’s and put a run of form together.’
Central to that were grinding practice sessions at home and at The Cricketers, the pub he redeveloped and ran for eight years. At home, he set up an oche in his bedroom. Wife Yvonne would read a novel in bed as darts flew past her head into double top. Strip darts was also part of the training, although Phil won’t say more today than: ‘Well, I have got four kids!’
At The Cricketers, Phil dealt with a poltergeist, faulty beer pumps and life as a celebrity landlord. Famously, there was free beer on the house all day when, in the Embassy 1990 final, landlord Taylor came up against his mentor Eric Bristow – and humiliated the former champion 6-1 in the final with a 97.5 average, eight 180s and a 170 finish.
‘I was tired of being in Eric’s shadow,’ says Taylor today. ‘Even my nickname at the time was ‘The Crafty Potter’, which I didn’t like. I got it changed soon after, when The Power track came out. I was my own man, and I wanted to show it to the world.
Pork scratching and a pint of… tea
‘I was actually part of a new generation of players. I never played with a pint or a fag in my hand. I practised properly and took the game seriously. Beating Eric was everything to me, but as soon as I won, my heart sank because I knew that inside he would be hurting really bad. As it happens, he wouldn’t speak to me for six months afterwards.’
By the early Nineties, title after title started to go The Power’s way. For Phil winning became as easy as downing a swift half was for Jocky Wilson or Bobby ‘Dazzler’ George. Taylor (in what he now calls his ‘leery period’) also worked hard on his image at the oche, famously wearing spangled shirts (specially made for him in Mexborough), a green glitter cape with Power on the back, glitter shades, a baseball cap and a Zapata moustache.
He learned to play his opponent, not the board, so that whenever he needed to raise his game – against a legendary opponent like John Lowe – he could. With his razor-sharp mind in shape, other players began to wonder if he was ever beatable.
But it wasn’t all glitter, lager tops and 180s in the world of British darts in the Naughty Nineties. A bitter argument between the British Darts Organisation (BDO) and what would later become the Professional Darts Corporation (PDC) erupted over players’ rights and who ran the game. The PDC (including Taylor and other top players) split away and, with the eventual backing of Sky, became the dominant force in British darts. From a sporting perspective, Taylor proved the superiority of the PDC when he demolished BDO champ Ray Barneveld in the World Grand Prix ‘Match of the Century’ 21-10 in legs, with seven 180s and an average of 103.5.
‘It was a massive game, and it’s fair to say I butchered him!’ grins The Power. ‘Just like I did last week, actually! I prepared well, eating pasta, drinking tea and practising three hours a day for a month. In that match I really put my career and the reputation of the PDC on the line. It was a head-to-head that neither of us could lose – but he did. I enjoy a fight. Just like my grandfather – he was a bare knuckle champion.’
Just when it seemed that nothing could go wrong in the world of The Power, it did in 1999. Up for an MBE for sporting achievement, Taylor got into an alleged situation with a couple of young, boozed-up Scottish female fans in the back of his touring camper van.
For legal reasons, he can’t tell exactly what happened, but sources close to the star claim he was set up. Foolishly, he tried to hide the incident from his wife, which turned a storm in a pint pot into a media debacle. He totally lost control of the situation, the tabloids had a field day and the MBE was withdrawn.
‘I was pissed off about that,’ is all Taylor will say now. ‘They couldn’t even be bothered to find out if the allegations were true or not. It was just politics.’
Oche-y dokey again
Unbowed and unbroken, even after an ill-advised speed diet temporarily affected his form, Taylor was back at the oche doing what he does best – winning. He worked hard at his game, claiming at one point that ‘darts requires more physical effort than archery, shooting or golf.’ He drew inspiration from self-propelled, self-motivated grafters in other sports like Roy Keane and friend Ricky Hatton.
His life-long dislike of snobbery was reinforced when he was invited to Downing Street with a host of other British sports stars. He decided to wear a green jacket and was mockingly asked by Nick Faldo which major golfing tournament he’d won.
‘There’s still a lot of snobbery towards darts players because we’re just basic, normal working class people,’ explains Phil. ‘I see a lot of sports people change once they become celebrities. They forget where they come from. Most successful sports people are sound as a pound, though… it’s always the wannabes you have problems with.’
After chatting about his imminent appointment to Port Vale FC’s board and his desire to move to Spain, Taylor is escorted into the PDC practice room for an hour. Next time we see him, he’s taken the stage. The crowd erupts, but Taylor just smiles and chats with them between points, a steely glint in his eye.
Incredibly, The Power drops three games in a row to go 4-1 behind. It looks like a walk-over for opponent ‘Flash’ Dudbridge. Most punters betting in-running would’ve piled on the youngster. Taylor, though, laughs off the deficit and storms on to win the tie. Was he toying with Dudbridge? Did he really only raise his game when he had to? Maybe – but either way, the punters who backed him walked home happy yet again. And that included InsideEdge, £350 up on the night!
POWER QUOTES
Ten quotes to remember from Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor
On rival Alex Roy’s recent claim that The Power farted on the oche to put him off:
‘Ha ha! Complete rubbish! I’ve shit myself a few times up there, but I’ve never farted!’
On the most he’s won in a single match:
‘In February I won £150,000. That equalled my previous best for a nine-dart finish.’
On the skills honed in darts that make him a handy poker player:
‘Bottle, that’s the thing… not cracking when you’re under pressure. In darts, you make all your own luck – that’s the big difference.’
On his chances of landing another nine-dart televised finish:
‘There’s every chance I will. If the opposition is tough, I’m more likely to throw it. Actually, I reckon I could throw two in a match. What would be the odds on that?!’
On whether he regularly gives form tips to supporters in the ‘Power Posse’:
‘Not really. I’m always pretty consistent. I keep myself well practised.’
On being called ‘the most hated man in sport’:
‘That’s bollocks. People want to beat me, but they don’t hate me.’
On telling rival Kevin Painter to ‘Fuck off’ on the oche recently live on Sky:
‘It wasn’t on the oche; I did it when the curtains were drawn back. In which sport don’t blokes swear at each other, by the way? I got my wrist smacked and it’s over.’
On darts as an Olympic sport:
‘I’d like to see it. They’d have to ban the alcohol, naturally, but a lot of the younger players don’t bother these days anyway. Any final in the UK would have to be played at Blackpool’s Winter Gardens, naturally.’
On his renowned post-match crooning:
‘I developed my singing while singing in the bath. In Japan, they call me Mr Karaoke.’
On the most dangerous outsider – and best each-way bet – in darts:
‘Young Mark ‘Flash’ Dudbridge from Bristol.’
