Eric Bristow (13 page)

One day we had a lovely fifteen-course meal and we got some good beer to drink but in tiny bottles. When the translator who ate with us asked me if I’d like some sake I said, ‘No, tell him I want more of those beers. Tell him I want sixty of them.’

The translator couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The beers were coming every five minutes, much to the astonishment of him, the waiters and the other people
eating
in the restaurant. The Japanese and Chinese can’t drink lots, you see. They have a genetic intolerance to alcohol, so to watch me downing all these beers and not get drunk was a mystery to them. When the boys and I used to take these Japs out we got them absolutely rat-arsed in no time, it only took a few bottles. It’s hard to get really drunk in Japan because you seem to be eating every five minutes.

At that time the men would eat at one end of the table and the women at the other. It didn’t bother me, but it annoyed Maureen, especially when we’d get there and I’d jokingly say to her, ‘You get over there with them lot.’ She didn’t like that.

They were fantastic times. We were young, we were seeing the world, and the BDO were bringing more and more foreign tournaments into the world rankings.

There was the Australian Masters. Maureen and I went as representatives of Britain and I was one dart away from going out in the first round. I was sweating, thinking: Have I really come all this way for a match that isn’t going to last much longer than thirty minutes? But this guy missed the double and I went on to win the match and the tournament.

Finland held theirs in a different place every year, meaning we got to see every part of that country. However, in tournaments held in places like Boston and Chicago, where it was the same every year for eighteen
years
, someone like Big Cliff would walk into the hotel after a year’s gap and the barman would know him by name and say to him, ‘Same as usual?’

The American barmen loved having darts players around because every time you bought a drink it was customary to tip. With up to four hundred players in these bars at any one time, all drinking beer at a rate of one every ten minutes, the barmen were making an absolute fortune. Money was no object when playing abroad because everybody wanted to live it up a little.

I went to so many countries I ended up knowing them better than my own. Years later, in 1987, I was playing in an American casino when a Yank came up to me and said, ‘You crazy mad Brits, shooting all those people in Hungerford.’ He was referring to the Hungerford massacre when Michael Ryan shot and killed sixteen people with two semi-automatic rifles and a handgun before turning the weapons on himself.

I said, ‘I’ve never heard of Hungerford, you dickhead. What are you on about? This is what you Yanks do all the bleeding time. It doesn’t happen in England, you dozy twat. Hungerford must be in America.’

But I was wrong, even though I was right about America.

An American postman round about the same time as Hungerford happened had gone in to the Post Office where he worked and shot his boss as well as twelve others. It happened all the time in the States. For
instance
, I was in Hawaii with Maureen when she went out shopping. As she bought her things she was unaware that on a roof close by was a guy taking pot shots at people. He killed about eight and they never caught him. After we split I used to tell people, ‘It’s a shame he didn’t have a pop at her. It could’ve saved me a lot of money.’

America was full of Michael Ryans. Later, I was in Vegas with Jane, my future wife, and we were standing outside the Flamingo Hotel when we saw a van and a car racing each other along the strip and cutting each other up. They pulled up right where we were and the guy in the car got out and went up to the van’s windscreen to remonstrate. The guy inside the van simply pulled a gun out of the glove compartment and popped this guy. The bullet went straight through the windscreen.

A similar thing happened in New York. It was nine in the morning and Jane went off to shop at Bloomingdales. I was having a drink in an Irish bar in preparation for a $10,000 tournament I was about to play in. Suddenly Jane appeared, as white as a ghost and shaking. She’d been in a cab on her way to the store when a cop climbed on top of it. He pointed his gun at a van in front and shouted, ‘Get out of the damn van or I’ll blow your head off.’

Jane just crumpled inside the cab. She was sure that she was about to become the victim of a shoot-out. I
had
to get her a couple of large vodkas. She said to me plaintively, ‘I only wanted to go out shopping.’

In those early heady days of the late seventies I may have been seeing the world but I wanted more: I wanted to see it as the official World Champion. The title had eluded me for two years now. Was it going to be a case of third time lucky?

SEVEN

Champion of the World

THE 1980 EMBASSY
World Darts Championship couldn’t have got off to a worse start. I was drawn against a player called Tony Clark who is still playing now and recently made the last eight of the Welsh Open. Back then the result should never have been in any doubt, it was a no-brainer: I should have murdered him and fully expected to. I went into that third championship vowing that things were going to change. I was more determined than I’d ever been in my life to make my mark on this tournament and become its leading player for years to come.

He stepped up to the oche and threw his first three darts to hit 140 which was a good start. It settled his nerves and made me think that maybe I was in for a harder battle than I’d initially thought. Then I went up and threw. My first dart bounced out, the second dart did the same, and the third landed in one. I couldn’t believe it. I started to think that yet again it wasn’t going
to
be. My third World Championship had started with a score of one! The crowd was buzzing. They immediately sensed another upset was on the cards. I lost the leg but regained my composure and won quite easily after that by two sets to nil. Lowey went out in that early round, which was a bonus because he was the main stumbling block to me winning it. In the quarter-final I was drawn against Jocky Wilson.

Jocky is a lovely bloke, but he was the craziest of all of us and of any player since. He had no control over himself when he hit the bottle, and he simply didn’t know what he was doing when he was drunk which, in hindsight, was a bit sad really. However, he was a fantastic darts player, even if he didn’t have the most perfect throw in the world. On his last dart he used to jump in the air a little when he threw. I used to stand behind him when we played and if he needed double top, which was his double, I didn’t look at the dart board. Instead I’d see him jump and for that split second think I’d got another throw. Then I’d hear the announcer say ‘Game, shot,’ and be left wondering how the bloody hell that dart went in when he was bouncing about as he threw it.

Although he enjoyed his darts and was right up there with Lowey and me, all he really wanted to do in life was fish. He had a couple of boats moored at Kircaldy up in Fife, where he lived, that he bought from his
winnings
. The highlight of his life was to go on the river in them and fish. Unfortunately he got in with some bad people; so called friends who only knocked about with him because he had a bit of money. In the end the money ran out and he lost the boats and in 1997 was declared bankrupt. It really hurt him when he lost those boats because he’d worked hard for the bit of money he had.

He now survives on a disability allowance and lives in a one-bedroomed flat back on the council estate where he grew up. It all hurt him so badly that he has shut himself off from life and become a recluse. He won’t have anything more to do with the darts world. We have tried to bring him back to present trophies and things like that and to get involved on the exhibition circuit but he just doesn’t want to know. Basically he hit the top shelf during his darts years, drank far too much and in 1995 got diabetes as a result. He hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol since.

It’s a shame what has happened because he would have been quite happy if he could’ve kept one of his small boats and gone fishing two or three times a week. He loved going to Canada. We went with an organiser called Ed Oliver who took him fishing for three days. Once on the lake Jocky wouldn’t touch a drop of alcohol. He’d just fish all the time and never once thought of drinking. He only drank when he played darts. Then after a few drinks he would turned into this Jekyll and
Hyde
character. His drink of choice was vodka. I used to think all Scotsmen drank whisky, but a lot of them like their vodka, which I find a bit baffling because there’s no taste to it. I’ve always found that to be a dangerous thing.

One of the first times I encountered him was at a TV tournament at the Seashore Holiday Village in Great Yarmouth in the late seventies. Lowey was there and all the top players including Jocky who was just starting to establish himself on the scene. The night before the tournament Jocky had hit the bottle in a big way and the following morning he came into the practice room and was bad, really bad. He couldn’t focus, he had the shakes, everything was going wrong for him: ‘I don’t think I’m going to play,’ he said to me.

He’d been to the toilet moments before and there were splashes of sick on his shirt. I told him not to be silly, took his shirt off him, washed it in the toilet basin, put it under the dryer and said, ‘I’ll sort you out, no problem. You come with me.’

I took him to the bar and got him a port and brandy, which is two shots of port to one measure of brandy. Jocky looked at me and snarled, ‘What sort of girl’s drink is that?’

‘It’ll settle your stomach, Jocky,’ I said. ‘A couple of these and you’ll be fine.’

I had to have one with him; otherwise he’d think I
was
trying to poison him. That was the way he was, he didn’t trust anybody – but he liked it so he had another one. I left him there and he was fine. An hour later he was practising away as if nothing had happened. Five hours later the final was on TV. I was playing him, and he ended up stuffing me. He’d been on the port and brandies all day and halfway through our match he winked at me and said, ‘These are fucking great, they are absolutely fucking great.’

‘You were only supposed to have two,’ I said. He’d had about twelve of them.

When I told Dad about it he laughed and told me, ‘That’ll teach you, son. You look after your own game, don’t worry about the others.’

Although Jocky was jovial and had a smile on his face 90 per cent of the time, you didn’t go out with him at night. He’d embarrass you. For instance, one time I was at a casino in Denmark, playing blackjack. I was sitting next to a Japanese man and Jocky came and sat on the other side of him. Unfortunately this Japanese bloke couldn’t play the game and he was doing some crazy things like twisting on eighteen and getting a ten or a picture card. Jocky, sitting next to him, was getting more and more frustrated because he’d be holding eleven or ten and be watching this bloke on seventeen or eighteen twisting, drawing a picture card and going bust when it could have been him getting that card and sticking on twenty or twenty-one. This happened three or four times
and
Jocky was getting more and more irate. Suddenly, on the next occasion this happened. Jocky snapped. He grabbed hold of the poor bloke by the throat and wrestled him to the floor where he pinned him down and screamed, ‘You’re taking all my fucking cards. Stop taking my fucking cards, pal.’

This Japanese guy couldn’t speak a word of English and didn’t know what was going on. His eyes looked as if they were about to pop their sockets and he was jabbering to Jocky in panic. I had to wrench Jocky off him.

That was Jocky through and through. He was a danger to himself and in the end he just pushed the self-destruct button once too often. If we were in places like Denmark, Sweden or Finland, he’d come downstairs in the hotel for breakfast and apologise to everybody. We’d say to him, ‘What are you apologising for, Jocky? You didn’t do anything.’ But the thing was he didn’t know whether he’d done something or not because he’d been too out of it.

Despite his drink problem he had a great sense of humour. He was going to play an exhibition match at a Roman Catholic club in Ireland, and as usual had proved to be a top draw – tickets had sold out within hours, as they would today if he ever made a comeback – but just before the big day someone ran off with all the money. When Jocky arrived he was confronted by embarrassed organisers who weren’t able to pay him.

‘Go ahead and play,’ they said to him. ‘We’ll get your money by tomorrow.’

‘OK,’ said Jocky. ‘No problem.’

The exhibition was going well and the crowd loved him. After the interval, and one or two large vodkas, Jocky came back on stage in high spirits and noticed a large effigy in the hall of Christ crucified.

‘Ah,’ he said at the top of his voice and with a wave of his hand, ‘I see they caught the bastard who stole my money.’

Jocky got me during a World Cup game. He was playing for Scotland and I was representing England in the final of the singles up in Glasgow. We were both standing at the back of the stage waiting to go on, the TV cameras were running and everything was set. Then the announcer said, ‘Representing England we have Eric Bristow.’

Just as I was about to bounce on stage and give the booing crowd some gyp Jocky took a run at me and kicked me as hard as he could in the shin. He took about two inches of skin off as his shoe scraped up my leg. Christ it hurt, so I grabbed him by the throat and I was going to kill him, but five officials managed to prise me off, and shoved me on-stage into the bedlam of lights, television cameras and baying crowd – they were Scots, what do you expect? I could feel the blood dribbling down my leg as I stood on stage, and all I could think was that I’d have to shake this tosser’s hand
in
a minute. As Jocky came up he looked at me with beady, squinting eyes, fearful that I might go for him again, but we shook hands and I proceeded to thrash him. I had to after what he did to me. I was fuming all the way through the game. When it was all over he put his arm around me, pulled me close to him, and with a smile on his face said, ‘I’ve got to try to beat you somehow.’