FAREWELL TO THE CRAFTY COCKNEY

ERIC BRISTOW 1957-2018

By the end, Eric Bristow had settled on cats for company. No fewer than 22 were passing through his household in a year — there were 11 at one time — because his wife worked for a charity that rehouses strays.

‘you can trust an animal,’ he said a few months back. ‘An animal doesn’t stab you in the back.’

The bitterness was born of the way sport and society had come to deem him a pariah for posting a series of tweets, at the height of the football sex abuse scandal, suggesting the victims were not ‘proper men’ because they did not ‘ sort out’ their abusers later in life.

Bristow, who died in Liverpool last night aged 60 after a heart attack, had apparently forgotten that the compassion so dismally absent in his ramblings was something he received in abundance when he was afflicted in 1986 by dartitis, a debilitating psychological condition which prevents a player throwing for fear of missing.

‘ you feel like I’m doomed. It does your brains in. Just does your brains in,’ Bristow said of the illness which in 1986 cut him down from his pinnacle as the world’s best darts player which he had held for the best part of 10 years. He regained the No 1 spot briefly in 1990, though he was never the same again.

yet when he was barging in on the darts world — a 16year-old in a man’s world who told them he was 18 to ensure they let him play — the Bristow swagger, with all of its careless, outspoken abandon, was what made him such a compelling sporting personality.

He always claimed he had started out in professional life as a cat burglar, part of a gang calling themselves the Oxton Boys, who roamed the mean streets of Stoke Newington in east London, robbing, joyriding, shoplifting and brawling. They were bandits with a conscience.

‘We were good thieves, if there was such a thing. We didn’t trash people’s houses, we didn’t physically hurt anyone and there wasn’t a sinister side to us.’ Darts rescued him from a life of crime, though it was another way of beating the establishment.

He was ranked World No 1 by the World Darts Federation a record six times between 1980 and 1990. He was a five-time World champion and a five-time World Masters champion. More than that, his skill and personality helped turn darts into a worldwide spectator sport.

‘I was a freak, wasn’t I?’ he said last year. ‘It was an old man’s game and, all of a sudden, you had this kid wiping them out.’

The Crafty Cockney nickname was acquired when he visited an English pub of that name in 1976 during a visit to Santa Monica, California. He seized it, along with the limelight — and the good fortune to be stepping up to the oche just as television began showing increased interest in darts in the late 1970s. (The first World Championship took place in 1978.)

He came across a raw darts talent at Stoke- on-Trent in the late 1980s and sponsored him to the tune of about £10,000. The player, Phil Taylor, went on to usurp his mentor as the greatest player ever, with Bristow often on the receiving end of his brilliance.

HISwork for Sky Sports after he had stepped away from the game revealed an individual fascinated by darts until the end. He felt a gratitude for the opportunity it had given him to represent his country, which he said was his ‘proudest moment’.

But the adage ‘live by the sword, die by the sword’ was one he also always swore by and it was a fitting description of the way that sport cast him out. He went to his grave with no regrets about his Twitter comments, though he wished he had expressed the, differently. ‘What you have to understand is that I was brought up in a different era,’ he said last year.

It was a different Bristow that darts wanted to remember last night. ‘Eric was never afraid of controversy, but he spoke as he found and was honest and straightforward which is what people admired about him,’ said Barry Hearn, head of the Professional Darts Corporation which Bristow helped form.

The inimitable commentator Sid Waddell said of him: ‘When Alexander of Macedonia was 33, he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer … Bristow’s only 27.’

Bristow died at a darts event in Liverpool, among those he called his own people. He would have appreciated the significance of that.