Mick Hartley

Something completely different.

Table-tennis aficionado Howard Jacobson turns his attention to darts after Luke Littler's Ally Pally triumph. A world-champion darts player writes home…

You have commented over the years on my adiposity. How can a pair of fleshless neurasthenics such as you, who chew their fingers to the bone for art’s sake, have produced someone my size? Eat less, you have pleaded. Exercise more, you say, forgetting how many miles I walk every day from the oche to the dartboard and back. My dear mother and father, do not think I am fat because I am indolent or because I cannot say no to cakes and ale. I am fat because I love darts.

You don’t need me to tell you that Julius Caesar wanted men about him that were fat. “Sleek-headed men” he feared because they thought too much. Sleek-headed men, for that very reason, make poor darts players. There comes a moment in the life of every darts player when he loses his instinctive rhythm, cannot remember how he throws, how tightly he holds his darts, how much flight he gives them. Many a promising career has ended that way. Had listened to you, I would not be Champion of the World today. Let a darts player lose his insouciance and he’s finished. And whoever saw an insouciant thin man?

Our bulk belies our subtlety. More than that: our bulk is integral to our subtlety. Some law of nature decrees that for one dart to follow another into those two inches of darting ivory which determine the difference between success and failure, between genius and mediocrity, they must be thrown by fat men. You cannot think darts into a treble or a bullseye. You dare not pause long enough to give reflection a sniff. You must throw with a sort of cultivated disdain that is not given to the thin.

If only, my dear parents, you had snatched enough time from your cerebral labours to watch a game of darts. Actually watched one. You would, had you done so, I am sure, have marvelled at the contrast between the overflowing physical abundance of the man throwing and the refined and dainty precision with which he throws. It is a contrast at once aesthetically satisfying and philosophically baffling. How can it be? See an arrow fly in slow motion, see how much it arches and how far it deviates, and it is a miracle it ever finds its target. Would you not imagine the thrower of such a missile to be a person of near supernatural exactitude? And now look who he is!; ‘Tis I, your clumsy and in all other regards bumbling and maladroit son.

The crowd who cheer me don’t bother their heads with any of that. They pour beer down their throats and sing Stand up if You Love the Darts. But you, mother and father, aficionados of art in all mysterious manifestations, are just the people to understand dart’s artistry and yet, out of small-minded snobbery, you look away. And so you miss the marvel and the rare beauty of it. A cheetah can run, a tiger burns bright in the forests of the night, but only your fat, clumsy son can, without raising a sweat, hit a treble-20 from eight feet away whenever he wants to.

I've cycled up round Ally Pally a few times over the past couple of weeks, and the darts crowd are always fabulous: a phalanx marching up the hill all dressed as traffic cones, or smurfs, or in Ali G outfits, or with dartboards round their heads. Mostly blokes, but by no means all blokes. Already good-naturedly boozed up, with loads more boozing to come.

Janice Turner had this mid-week in the Times:

I love everything about the darts. I love how men who, because of their looks and physiques and social class only get to be minor characters in TV soaps, are fist-pumping heroes here. I love how the audience is seated at long tables, drinking great pitchers of beer, as if at a Hogwarts feast. I admire the players’ lightning mental arithmetic and laser focus despite a raucous, silly crowd. I like Michael van Gerwen’s phrenologically fascinating head and Luke Littler’s pretty eyes. I wish only for a Joan Rivers red-carpet interviewer to ask the fancy-dressed fans why they chose traffic cones/prawns/Mexicans/Oompa Loompas as their team uniform. Otherwise it is a perfect bullseye.