On Throwing Darts In A Straight Line

A sport-induced mental break.

The triple twenty space on the dartboard is where you want to be throwing the dart. It’s above the bullseye so it requires the person throwing the dart to really try and throw it as straight as possible. Throw it a bit left and it lands in the 5’s, throw it a bit right and you’re in the 1s. You just want to throw the dart in a straight line but with enough power that it makes its way three quarters of the board up into the magic triple 20. I spend quite a lot of my time at the moment trying to do this. 

Because if you get triple 20, that adds up to 60 and 60 is the highest score you can get with a single dart. If you’re playing down from 501, the more 60’s you throw the fewer darts you need to win. It’s also just cool, I think that’s the main thing about it. It feels really good to aim it at the tiny triple 20 space and then for the dart to actually go there. You kind of feel like you’ve briefly been the sole orchestrator of reality.  

It also feels really good because if I hypothetically gave you a dart, the person reading this - and I placed it in your hand, told you to stand where you’re supposed to stand and to try and throw it at the triple 20 - the chances are you actually wouldn’t be able to throw it at the triple 20. Maybe you’d drag it and it would land on the far right of the dartboard, somewhere in the amateur no-mans-land between 6 and 15. But maybe you wouldn’t even be able to manage that. Maybe you’d throw it and your action would be so technically inept, so antithetical to a smooth, accurate motion that the dart would miss the board entirely - crashing against the wall behind and then falling down onto the floor. 

And then I’d pick the darts up off the ground and hand ‘em back to you, tell you this time to lean a bit more forward and really focus your eyes on where you're aiming the dart. You’d throw them again and the chances are they’d be just as bad. Maybe the third dart would land somewhere just to the left of the bullseye and you’d go ‘oooooh nearly’ and look at me but I’d keep my eyes fixed firmly on the board, knowing that you were in fact aiming for the triple 20, as instructed. You’d become demoralised. “This game’s impossible”, you’d say, and I’d laugh and tell you that it gets easier over time. 

Then I’d get a hold of the darts. I’d roll them around in my hand. I’d get into my stance, my right foot at a 45 degree angle from the oche and I’d begin the process. Keeping my elbow nice and high I’d set up my fingers in the perfect grip, my thumb slightly underneath the dart to the left, my index finger to the right side and my fourth finger rested just against the end of the barrel, as a guide. I’d wait for the dart to be perfectly still before drawing it back in a line towards my right eye and releasing it. ‘Set, pull-back, release’, ‘Set, pull-back, release’, the Phil Taylor mantra. I’ve done it a thousand times. This time I’m doing it in front of you, though, and you’ve just been a disaster. But I’m good, I’m better than you. I’m a hundred times better than you.

The dart comes out perfectly, headed like an arrow down the triple 20 parabola that by now I know so well. It lands slap bang in the middle of the triple 20 and you gasp. How has he done that? I smile inwardly, registering on an energetic level your disbelief, but I’m not planning on stopping there. I throw again, replicating with a kind of robotic efficiency the process of the first throw and it yields the exact same result, the dart this time ending up slightly in the right hand side of the triple 20 space. 

And now I’m closing in on the 180. The 180, for fuck’s sake. It’s not a nine darter but for an amateur like myself it’s not half bad. I’m a bit nervous now, weirdly. You’re already impressed that I’ve managed it twice, it doesn’t matter if I do it again - but I want to do it again. I want to throw it and for it to hit the triple 20 and to have achieved the perfect 180 score. That’s what I want to happen. In the context of everything that’s going on in my life right now, this is something I really need to happen. I need you to think that I’ve done something marvellous, something spell-binding.

My hand is shaking a bit now but that’s fine, that’s natural - that happens to the best of them. The dart feels slightly alien in my hand all of a sudden but I chalk it up to a subtle change in humidity. The triple 20 looks a lot smaller than it did thirty seconds ago. It’s not tinnitus, but there’s a slight ringing in my right ear that’s throwing me off centre a little bit. Two pigeons are noisily trying to mark their territory on the rooftop above me and they are making a fucking din. The expectation I’m feeling from you is starting to fuck me off a bit now, actually. I’ve already done it twice, but that doesn’t appear to be good enough for you. You want the 180. 

‘Set, pull-back, release’. I begin the process but I don’t release the dart, the pull-back bit was a mess, my hand was wobbling and my wrist felt tight and locked up. Take a deep breath, just take a deep breath. Clear your mind. In the midst of all this you’ve somehow found time to unlock your phone and I can hear you scrolling through Instagram distractedly, as if to make some kind of comment on my sudden absence of rhythm. Just ignore them. My mind is racing with thoughts and I can’t think straight. Countless memories of pulling the dart into the 1s or the 18s or releasing it too early and it flying way above the double 5 flood into my psyche.

I take a step back from the oche to reset. You’re perplexed - why am I taking so long? Because I need to get this right! This is something I’m good at, this is one of the things that I’m good at. This is something, who knows, I could one day even master. Gerwyn Price got his tour card when he was 27 and only started playing after he was forced to retire from playing a whole other sport. It’s not then outside the realms of possibility that if I put enough hours in and really hone my craft, I could also play in the PDC.  Sure, the lifestyle isn’t perfect. A lot of travelling, a lot of bouncing between random European airports. It would be hard to balance it with whatever I had going on in my personal life and I’d probably have to retrain after I retired (unless I was MVG good)...but saying that I could just go into commentary because I watched an interview with Mark Webster and he said that the Sky lot just threw him right in without any training or anything and I know he’s gone back into Q school for the 2022 season but he’s still earning a decent living off comms. 

I’d have ‘Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)’ by Nancy Sinatra as my walk on song. I know what you’re thinking - not entirely in keeping with the general theme of darts walk on songs but it would be powerful in its own, implied way. If the PDC shareholders didn’t like it for some reason I could always just mix it with a beat that comes in just after she goes ‘shot me...down’. I’d wear a navy blue shirt with a black trim and my nickname would have to be something like ‘Sharpshooter’ or James ‘Razor’ Sharp - Barry Hearn wouldn’t let me pick anything else with two such factory-made nicknames like that ready to go. And yes I know Barry Hearn is ‘retired’ now but let’s not sit here and pretend he still doesn’t most certainly pull all the strings. You wouldn’t catch me shuffling around on stage to Pharrell Williams like Dimitri Van Den Bergh - I’d be a little more circumspect and enigmatic...no late night pub sessions with Aidy Lewis, no social media presence, one word answers in the post-match pressers, that kind of vibe. So what if the darts fans’ find it alienating to begin with, eventually they’d see the light. 

But for now I just need to throw this dart I’m holding into the triple 20. A wave of confidence washes over me and the knot in my stomach unwinds. I nod gently to myself and a wry, almost imperceptible smile can be seen beginning to take root at each side of my mouth. Just like all the Nick Faldo visualisation videos I’ve been watching on YouTube tell me to do, I form the desired trajectory in my mind’s eye. I adjust my fourth finger ever-so slightly just to make sure that the dart is perfectly straight upon release and I check to make sure that my weight is over my knee and that I’m balanced and won’t somehow topple over after release. If I were a pilot, I’d be signalling that I’m ready for take-off.

You’ve put your phone back into your pocket and watch on as I finally release the dart. You and me are frozen in time. It seems to be travelling forever. A random, mosaic-like array of pint glasses, whiteboards and bright colours whooshes through my tiny mind. 

The dart lands about...an inch or so above the triple 20, like it always does. Like it always does. No. No. NOOOOOOO. All I can think is ‘NOOOOOO’. ‘NO, NO, NO, NO’.  A guttural, shapeless wormhole of despair envelops every last corner of my consciousness and the world feels infinitely darker. You do an impersonation of a kind of generic darts announcer and go ‘oneeeee hundred and fooourty’ from just behind my right shoulder. Goes without saying but I’m feeling utterly apoplectic towards you for doing this and misjudging the vibe so catastrophically. 

“Have you ever got a 180?” you ask off-handedly with a genuinely warm tone of voice. 

I pause momentarily.

“You’d have thought I would have by now, wouldn’t you”, I say, looking into your eyes.

You’re a bit taken aback.

“Really? You’ve never got a 180 before?”.  I absorb the words as if they were bullets and feel like throwing up. 

“Nope...never got one”, I then say.  You, the reader, chuckle incredulously. “But you’ve been playing for like over a year now haven’t you?”. 

“A year and a half, mate”, I reply, with a thin edge to my voice, trying to play down my hurt.

“That must have been quite a big moment for you then”, you say, earnestly, not meaning any harm by it.

I sit down on the little bench thing next to the dartboard and retire into the more grim expanses of my own mind. I try to watch you throw some darts but you look like you’re standing about a thousand miles away and I can’t see you.