Darts player who lost one of the sport’s greatest ever matches
MIKE GREGORY, who has died aged 65 after suffering from dementia, was a darts player who lost to the great Phil “the Power” Taylor in the 1992 World Championship final, a match hailed as one of the greatest ever played; though he was known as “the Quiet Man of Darts”, Gregory also played his part in the ructions of the early 1990s that led to a disastrously self-destructive schism in the sport.
Gregory had the world crown in his grasp at the Lakeside Country Club, Frimley Green, in 1992, but missed six darts for the title – two each for double 20, double 8 and double 10 – which, given their relative positions on the board, he liked to refer to as “the Bermuda Triangle”.
The match went to a sudden-death leg – the first time in a world championship final – that was won comfortably by Taylor after an early bounceout for Gregory, who became the first man to lose a world final having had darts at double to win (the equivalent of match point in tennis); Mark Mcgeeney would repeat the feat in 2018.
Michael Seward Gregory was born in Bath on December 16 1956 and began playing darts aged four. His rise through the ranks began in the early 1980s, and in 1983 he was runner-up to Eric Bristow in the British Open and the World Masters.
The following year he made his world championship debut but suffered a 5-0 quarter-final wipe-out by Jocky Wilson; he lost to Bristow again in the 1990 semis. He had several big wins, including the 1984 Unipart British Professional, the 1986 MFI World Matchplay and the News of the World Championship in 1987 and 1988.
But during that decade darts slid into decline – sparked in part, some thought, by the celebrated Not the Nine O’clock News
1980 sketch featuring Dave Fatbelly and Jimmy Even Fatter Belly sinking their “doubles”. World of Sport,
which had filled Saturday afternoons on ITV, often with darts, was scrapped in 1985, and three years later the BBC and ITV dropped all darts apart from the World Championship. Drastically reduced coverage meant drastically reduced prize money, and even the top players were soon finding it hard to make a living.
The Professional Darts Players Association had been founded in 1985, and they put pressure on the governing body, the British Darts Organisation (BDO), to sort out the sport’s problems. Then in 1992, seething at the inaction of officialdom, the top 16 darters – Gregory included – broke away to form the World Darts Council.
The BDO responded by suing the WDC and banning the rebels from their events, right down to pub leagues. But the 16 stuck together, and Gregory won their inaugural event, the 1992 Lada UK Masters, beating Dennis Priestley in the final.
He beat Bob Anderson to retain his title in November 1993 – but soon after that he announced that he was returning to the BDO, apparently afraid of losing his house if the inevitable court case went against the rebels.
“I went back because I had a mortgage and three children to support, and my family came first,” he told an interviewer in 2016.
He was joined by Chris Johns but the remaining 14 stood firm, saying that they felt let down by Gregory, who had not told them what he was going to do.
“Some players did stop speaking to me,” he added, “and you’ll be surprised to hear that some still don’t.”
Back in the BDO fold, he had several tournament wins, but after his victory in the 1995 Unipart European Masters his form fell off a cliff, and his last major appearance was at the 2005 Scottish Open, when he reached the last 16. He continued to play locally, and on the exhibition circuit, as well as representing his home county, Somerset.
The game of darts, meanwhile, remained split, and there were two versions of the world championship until 2020, when the BDO collapsed.