Eric Bristow (17 page)

I didn’t need that show because I was doing loads of others all the way through the eighties. Christopher Biggins did a good one called
Jungle Safari
. I was with this little girl and we had to scramble across ladders, climb ropes and do all sorts of things. Again my win at all costs attitude kicked in and we were easy victors. She did what she was told though. I was saying to her, ‘Now get on this rope, swing over to that one, give that back to me and get over there.’ I was focused on winning and I wasn’t there for anything else.

It was the same sort of mentality that I took to the
Leo Sayer Variety Show
. They wanted me to play the drums to the Bob Marley classic ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ and I had a drum kit in my house for five months practising for that show because I didn’t want to make a fool of myself. I made sure I could play those drums, otherwise what was the point of going on there? It was Dick, my manager, who lent me the kit. The funny thing was, every guest I had round to my house always ended up having a go on them. Everybody had to have a go on these bloody drums. I used to have bets with Maureen as to who would have a go and for how long they’d be bashing away on them. Leo Sayer’s show was good, as were others like
Punchlines
with Lenny Bennett and
Celebrity Squares
with Bob Monkhouse.

I actually fronted a programme myself as well, called
The Cockney Classic
. I was the darts presenter and Steve Davies presented the snooker. It was a straight knockout tournament and then I’d interview the players afterwards and get their thoughts on the game they’d just played. I’d get them the minute they’d stepped down from the oche.

I got one bloke who had won his match, shoved the microphone in his face and said, ‘How are you, mate? Bet you’re glad you’re through to the next round?’

He went, ‘Yep.’

I said, ‘How many darts teams do you play for?’

‘Three.’

‘Oh right.’ I said, getting desperate. ‘And who do you fancy playing in the next round?’

‘Not bothered really.’

‘Who do you think will win then?’

‘Dunno.’

I’d asked him four questions and got three one-word answers and a three-word one.

I turned to the camera and said, ‘I’m not interviewing this fucking idiot any more. He is a fucking prick.’

Then I turned to him and said, ‘Fuck off, pal, just fuck off,’ before throwing the mic at him.

That moment probably spelt the end for any presenting ambitions I had. It must be hard for interviewers when their subjects are freezing in front of them, but he did it on purpose, this tosser, I’m sure.

Despite this the actual
Cockney Classic
concept was good. There were tournaments all over the Home Counties and the last eight got on TV. The winner won £2,000 and played me. If they beat me their prize money was doubled to four thousand. It was the same for the snooker part. I actually lost a couple of matches as well. One was to a guy called Rod Harrington who turned pro shortly after he beat me and is now a Sky Sports pundit.

Back then, during the late seventies and throughout the eighties, I was always being asked to appear on TV
shows
, and if I liked the programme I’d appear on it, it was as simple as that. Now I still get invited to go on television, but not as frequently as in my heyday. Recently I was asked by ITV if I’d go on
I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here
. I said no, but looking back I wish I’d done it now. I would’ve eaten those bugs no problem. I’ll eat anything. I was invited again a couple of years ago, but they didn’t seem to have the same standard of celebrity as they did when it first started, so again I said no. I also had an interview for
Hell’s Kitchen
when that first began. Gordon Ramsey wouldn’t have spoken to me like he spoke to those other celebrities. All my mates were willing me to go on because they knew what could’ve happened if he’d had a go at me – he would’ve been wearing the pans on his head.

I’ve always enjoyed being in the limelight. I was lucky because fame came to me at an early age. I feel sorry for darts players who suddenly become famous in their mid-thirties; it’s a bit of a shock to their system at first when people recognise them in the street. With me I never really knew any different so it was easy to handle. Some of them are pressured into playing up for the cameras, like Terry ‘The Bull’ Jenkins. Terry is a quiet, quite reserved and quite shy man, but Sky were adamant he had to make his entrance on stage a bit better. They got him doing all these bull impressions and it’s just not him. I admire his bravery in
doing
it. He would rather go on a dart board, rip someone to pieces, then walk home and not bother telling anyone about it. Now he has to give it all this bully, bully.

NINE

The Milky Bar Kid

IN THE RUN
up to the 1983 World Championship I was making good money, not only from darts but from all the TV appearances and exhibitions I was doing. The next big question was what to do with all this cash? I was living in Stoke with Maureen and we got together with Dick Allix and decided the best investment was in property. That’s when I discovered that a local working men’s club just down the road from where we lived was up for sale. To me it was a no-brainer: we had to buy it and turn it into a pub with darts as the main pulling point. I knew it’d succeed and it’d give Maureen and me somewhere to practise. The place was brilliant. It held 350 people and had a big snooker room as well.

The Coal Board sold it to me, but not without a few hiccups. Neighbours were opposed to me buying it on the grounds that the car park wasn’t big enough. We had to go to court to do battle. On the one side was Maureen and me and on the other the objectors. When
the
judge asked if anyone was opposed to the car park all these objectors stood up. ‘It’s not the national anthem,’ I shouted and then got bollocked from the judge for disrupting proceedings which was typical: I’ve never been one for getting on the right side of authority.

I was determined I was not going to be beaten by these nimbys, so to get round the problem I bought half the allotments that were bordering the club and made my car park out of them. When this was revealed to the court I won because the car park would now be big enough. I remember saying to one objector as I left the court with a big beaming smile on my face, ‘Revenge is sweet.’ They tried to stop me having my dream pub so I took their allotments off them. It’s nice to win.

The place was a shell when I got it but by the time I’d finished it looked beautiful. It cost £21,000 just to carpet the place. I called it the Crafty Cockney, and as well as the snooker room it had all the trophies that I’d won on display and forty members had their own room. The pièce de résistance was the bar where I had over a dozen dart boards with pop-up oches. It was a massive success. Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays were hammered, and as people left I had security on the door letting other people in for fifty pence. It was the most popular place in Stoke. If you couldn’t pull a woman in there you were gay, it was as simple as that.

All the local rogues came in, and the gangs, but there was never any trouble because I made sure I had it nipped in the bud before it even started. There was one gang I didn’t recognise and they’d been coming into the place in twos and threes one evening until eventually there were about thirty of them standing at the bar. I didn’t want any problems so I went over to them and said, ‘Who’s the boss round here?’

This young lad stepped forward and said, ‘I suppose I am.’

‘Right,’ I replied, pointing at his gang and addressing him, ‘well, if any of your boys start any trouble in here,
you
are barred.’

People didn’t want to get barred from my place because it was the life and soul of the town, so by saying that I knew he was going to look after his boys and not cause any trouble. They were as good as gold all night. The best thing about my place was it closed at eleven so the gangs would use it to have a drink and then go down town to do their fighting. They’d come in the next day with black eyes, burst lips, all sorts of things. One bloke, a boss man, even came in with a metal brace round his face and there were sharp spikes sticking out from it. He looked like an extra from a Wes Craven horror movie. I said, ‘You can’t come in here with that thing on your head. You’ve only to turn round and one of those spikes will have someone’s eye out.’ So I took him into a small room, the wine room, and got a load
of
corks and stuck them on the end of the spikes. He looked a right plonker.

On another occasion this idiot – I’d never seen him in the place before – got annoyed and took his anger out on one of several great big lamps I had dotted about the place. They looked plastic, but they weren’t; they were made out of reinforced glass and marble. He soon found this out when he nutted one of them. It split his head all the way down the middle. Fortunately for him there was a doctor present who was there to oversee one of the boxing matches which I occasionally put on at the Cockney. He began examining this plonker, who was out cold in a pool of blood. ‘Don’t worry about his head,’ I said, ‘I want that light paying for.’ Then I saw that blood was shooting everywhere because the bloke must have hit an artery and was in a bit of trouble. He was losing pints of the stuff. I don’t like the sight of blood so I just said, ‘Right, bye, bye,’ and was off.

I loved the Cockney. They were fun times. We had a dance floor in the middle of the bar which is where I’d put a boxing ring and organise Army and Navy nights. They were brilliant. I also had a darts team, but the rule was if you didn’t drink ten pints in a night you didn’t make the team. It was great for the pub, but not so great for their league results. I got them all Crafty Cockney shirts and they looked the part, but unfortunately they came bottom of the league. But it was all a bit of fun. There was nothing serious ever went on.

The only real bit of trouble I had in all the years I was there was when these punks came in one night. They had spiky pink hair, piercings through their lips, noses, you name it there was a piercing there, so I told them to leave. It wasn’t the sort of image I wanted for my pub. They left threatening to do me in, which didn’t scare me. In the bar every night used to be this old man in his seventies who’d sit and have four Double Diamonds before leaving to go home to his wife and he was no trouble to anyone. He was just a pleasant old man who liked his routine. Unbeknown to me or this bloke these punks had gone outside and picked up a paving slab. They threw it through the window. It went straight across the top of this old guy’s head, taking the curtain with it, and landed in the middle of the dance floor. If it had been an inch lower it would have taken this old fella’s head off and more than likely killed him. The pub emptied and the punks scarpered, all except one, who we caught. I left the boys to sort him out. They pummelled him, and when they’d finished I got one of the bar staff to go outside and pick his bits of teeth from the pavement. I put them in a glass and kept them on show behind the bar: ‘Next time he comes in,’ I said, ‘he can have his teeth back.’ I used them as a warning to others as to what would happen if they misbehaved in my boozer. I never saw those punks again.

On a more positive note the Cockney was good for my darts and good for my health. By 1983 I had been knackered.
I’d
been travelling all over the place and hardly had time to breathe. My manager didn’t tell me to slow down. He wanted me to work ten days a week because it was more money in his pocket. He also wanted me to have financial security in case anything went wrong, which it nearly did years later! But I knew I had to take the foot off the pedal a bit or I’d burn out and my game would suffer. This is where the Cockney came in. It was good because it became my home where I could practise every night and didn’t need to travel. This is what kills most of the players, even today, the constant travelling up and down the country, especially if they’re the ones who are driving. Keith Deller for example has always got from A to B on his own and if he’s playing an exhibition he’ll drive there, not have a drink, then drive back, sometimes hundreds of miles in a day. That becomes tiring if you’re doing it four or five times a week. If the money had been there years ago, like it is now, a lot of the players back then wouldn’t have had to go on the road, constantly doing exhibitions to earn a living but tiring themselves out. The current number one in the world Phil Taylor doesn’t have to do exhibitions any more. All he has to do is win one of the big ones at least once a year and that’s £100,000 in his pocket. It takes the pressure to earn money off for the rest of the year if you win one of these big events.

Perhaps a new breed of player will emerge because of this, one that doesn’t need to go on the road to earn a living. The trouble with this is that darts could go the
way
of snooker in that snooker players, when the game really took off in the mid- to late 1980s, suddenly started asking for silly money to play exhibitions and many pubs and clubs couldn’t afford them. It’s killed the game because the top players suddenly become inaccessible to the younger wannabes. Why get a snooker player for five grand when you can fill a pub with a darts player for five hundred pounds? Money kills sport in the end and if darts gets too money orientated the same thing will happen.

Look at football. In the seventies and eighties footballers used to love playing the game; now they don’t mind sitting on the bench for a full season because they’re on seventy grand a week. It’s wrong, and it’s also wrong that they get paid for playing for their country. Why should you want to get paid for having the honour of playing for your country? That money should be used to develop the grassroots game. Footballers have lost the plot. They’ve become greedy. You can only earn so much and then money becomes meaningless. Take David Beckham for example. I had a telephone call a couple of years ago, asking if I would go to his house and teach his son Brooklyn how to play darts because he’s a big darts fan and he’d told his dad he wanted to play me for his birthday. It fizzled out because all the American stuff took over with him moving to LA which took priority, but it got me thinking: How meaningless is money to them? They’re into a sport so they pay whatever it takes to get the most famous sportsman to
play
the game at their house. It wasn’t my cup of tea really. I hope that darts won’t go the same way, and that players will stay in touch with their grassroots.