First superstar of darts helped fuel game’s popularity
Eric Bristow, a British labourer’s son who began mastering the pub game of darts as a teenager and became a dominant world champion in the 1980s, died on April 5 in Liverpool. He was 60.
The cause was a heart attack he suffered outside the Echo Arena after a tournament, where he was working as a hospitality host, the Professional Darts Corp., said.
“I’m just a great darts player,” Bristow said in Arrows, a 1979 documentary filmed after he had started winning tournaments.
He became nearly unstoppable in the 1980s. Nicknamed the Crafty Cockney, he won five British Darts Organization world titles from 1980 to 1986 using an unusual technique: Before letting a dart fly, he would raise his right pinky, as if he were daintily lifting a cup of tea.
When Bristow won the 1984 world championship, his third, television commentator Sid Waddell, who was known as the Voice of Darts, said: “When Alexander of Macedonia was 33, he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer. Bristow’s only 27.”
There was more to the chunky Bristow than his deftness at throwing a dart at a board 7-feet-91⁄ 4 inches away. His cheeky personality helped fuel the popularity of the game and move its tournaments from halls with 1,000 seats to arenas with 10,000 or more filled with screaming fans.
Prize money has swelled since the 1980s; when he won the world title in1986, Bristow earned the equivalent of $29,650 (U.S.). The reigning Professional Darts Corp. world champion, Rob Cross, earned the equivalent of $541,000 in taking the title.
“Eric was the first superstar darts player,” Matthew Porter, the PDC’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview. “He was the biggest character — brash and arrogant — and didn’t care what people thought of him. And he backed it up with his talent.”
Patrick Chaplin, a darts historian, wrote in an email that darts would not have reached its potential in the late 1970s and early ’80s without Bristow’s personality and darting skills.
Eric John Bristow was born April 25,1957, in the Hackney borough of London. His father, George, was a plasterer. His mother, Pamela, was a telephone operator.
In all, Bristow won more than 70 tournaments, including a World Masters title at 20.