Cow to Bullseye

By Paul Montague

As a kid, I always thought that to be good at Darts you had to look like a truck driver, or at least look hardened. Looking back, It wasn’t strictly all that true. And it’s even less so now; with deadly accurate professional players who more resemble Accounts clerks or Gamers, such as the current World Champion, England’s Luke ‘Cool Hand’ Humphries.

Only a generation ago, Darts as a pastime or even as a professional sport conjured images of excessive beer-swilling and cigarette-smoking. A game of ‘Arrows’ (the term a lot regulars use for the sport) almost felt incidental to the obligatory pints of lager.

Televised Darts, invariably from Britain, wasn’t even sacrosanct from alcohol: In the early 1980s a Scottish player named Jocky Wilson became almost legendary for his drinking feats during matches. Wilson was twice winner of the Darts World Championship, and isconsidered a genuine great of the sport. It was also said he smoked up to fifty cigarettes a day, and liked eating sweets during matches- he refused to brush his teeth and once told a reporter, “My Gran told me the English poison the water.” Reportedly, Wilson had to give up drinking during matches after being diagnosed with diabetes. He passed in 2012, aged 62.

The TV comedy, Alas Smith and Jones, made a skit of a World Championship game evolving into a drinking competition; the Dartboard becoming erroneous to the whole event.  One of the two players portrayed was quite obviously supposed to be Jocky Wilson.

Even when the concept of Darts originated (in medieval times in England, when bored soldiers decided to pass the time throwing spearheads), it began with a link to drink- the targets of the spearheads were upturned wine casks. The practice became even more commonplace when their officers discovered general aim in battle suddenly improved.

When further competition evolved, original versions of boards were tree trunk cross-sections.  The visible bark rings were used for scoring. The cracks running through the rings were a type of forerunner to the modern dartboard.

Enter the tardis, fast forward a few centuries, and thanks in part to an increasingly global and growing television presence, with events beamed in on our screens here via Sky Sports such as the PDC World Championship every Christmas/New Year, The Darts Masters World Series Tour, and British/European Premier Darts League, Darts is a sports pursuit on the rise in Aotearoa New Zealand- its popularity also driven by ex-pats and growing numbers of locals getting involved in competitive pub and club leagues.

Now, for the first time, a New Zealander has qualified for a spot on the World Darts tour: Haupai Puha, a 39 year-old ex professional golfer and roofer, achieved a coveted place on the tour among the world’s top 128 players back in January.

It must have been a hard slog, too. Puha was required to get past 500 other players in order to make the top 17 at a qualifying school staged in Kalkar, Germany; a small city near the Dutch border. Puha now has his  PDC (Professional Darts Corporation) tour card, which allows him to go from competing in Oceania-only professional events, to having the chance to compete among the world’s best.

Players such as Haupai Puha almost always materialise from traditional Darts hubs, such as the local pub or RSA club.

One such Darts habitat is the club with reputedly the highest number of operational dartboards in the country, the Hamilton Cosmopolitan Darts Club. They have a large group of registered players that meet every Wednesday night.

The members are the self-styled ‘HCDCs’, the moniker coming straight from their hosts, the Hamilton Cosmopolitan Club, or ‘Cossie’ Club, as most New Zealanders of a certain age know it.

The Club captain of the HCDCs is 45 year-old dairy farmer, Derek Barr. It was during a difficult period of mental health that Barr discovered the joy of Darts:

“The radio station The Rock promoted a thing called ‘Day on the Darts’. It was a part of a Gumboot Friday mental health initiative, pre-Covid.” (Gumboot Friday emanated from the ‘I AM HOPE’ charity, begun by Mike King.)

“The main event was up in Auckland, but they had satellite events going on around the country. It sounded quite cool so I thought I’d go down and give it a go. I also took my wife and kids along for a look, and it was pretty interesting because it turned out that some of the guys helping run the day were original members of the Cossie Club darts, though some of them have since moved on.”

Barr says the welcoming and inclusive spirit of that initial day has been an ever-present of the HCDC Darts membership and kinship. “That’s always been the ethos of Cossie darts- to let people in and not be snobs. It’s to have people completely enjoy what they are doing. And we have a wide cross-section of members; we’ve got truck drivers, hospital workers and grandmas playing. Everyone’s considered the same when they come through the doors.”

Farming can be solitary and evoke loneliness. But was it the motivation for Barr going along to the Gumboot Friday/The Rock darts promotion? “No, not as such,” he is quick to point out. “It was more about just needing an outlet for clearing the mind. I never thought I would get this heavily involved into the Darts scene through our club (They are even seeking to host a round of the Oceania Darts Masters circuit), but it’s good for the soul. Work is something I can leave at the farm gate when I go to our Wednesday club nights and other events.”

This is my fourth season at the Cossie club now and I’m truly loving it,” Barr smiles. “We sometimes throw like s*** and often talk it too, but it’s a heap of fun. You’ve also got the mateship and a bit of a competitive edge as well with the throwing.” (With player nicknames on the back of their club shirts like ‘Dov’, ‘Dora’ and ‘Gaz’ I get the idea why it’s hard-case and fun.)

Hamilton, specifically the Claudelands Globox Arena, is the venue for the World Series of Darts’ Masters, where the world’s best players come to compete every August. And, thanks in large part to the New Zealand leg of the Masters’ tour being on their home turf, the HCDC members have had some very famous people in the sport drop in to their Cosmopolitan Club home complex over the past couple of years

Darts always seems unapologetically and brilliantly egalitarian. “The 2023 World Champion, Michael Smith, suddenly turned up at our club one Wednesday afternoon last year when many of the world’s top players were in town for the World Darts’ Masters”, Barr relates.

“I’d been out on the farm with my phone back in the house and when I got back there were a stream of messages saying that Michael Smith was coming down for a throw. In the end he spent three hours practising on our boards and then sat down for a pint and a chat with our clubbies. He just wanted things kept on the down-low. We also had the top Aussie and highly-ranked player Damon Heta in here.”

The Hamilton Cosmopolitan Club has a Darts area that is the envy of many. Barr does a quick add up on his fingers, “We’ve got 14 permanent top of the range Winmau-branded boards, plus a removable wall that holds a further eight for local pro tour events” Barr explains, eyes well alight. “The British Darts commentator and ex-top player Mark Webster was at our Cossie club here and he couldn’t believe the set-up. He said that in Britain they’d be lucky to find five to six boards in a big pub for a competitive Darts league.”

“What we’d really like as well is to be able to get custom boards installed so that potential players who are in a wheelchair can come in and play, because the standard height of a board is actually quite high.”

Barr is quite right on that; when you stand at the marker to throw, known by all as ‘the Oche,’ the route to the board looks somewhat impossibly far. The distance is exactly 2.37 metres. But even ‘worse’, the middle of the board, the Bullseye, or Bull, is set at 1.73 metres (5 feet, 8 inches in old money) above the floor. It feels a bit like you’re aiming into the sky somewhere if you are not that tall

But for all that, the actual darts and Dartboards have made scoring significantly easier than a generation ago.

Ben Blatt, a writer for ‘The Upshot’, a New York Times news site with a focus on data and analytics, writes that, ‘Professional darts is far from the most popular sport in the world, but it is a useful study of progress toward perfection. Its top professional players, on average, post higher scores today than their counterparts did a generation ago.’ Analysis of darts and the board itself is shown by Blatt to be a key component in the higher scoring of today by professionals in leagues around the world:

‘The darts themselves have improved. They’ve become thinner, making it less likely that previously thrown darts will crowd out the board. But the triple-20 region has also grown in size, because of a change in the construction of the board. In the early 1990s, the wires that separate the scoring sections were as thick as 1.8 millimeters in diameter, according to Lee Huxtable, a production designer at Winmau, a board manufacturer. But they are now closer to 0.6 millimeters wide’.

Blatt also describes that the modern and custom-made board makes it far less likely for the darts to bounce out: ‘In addition, the wires are now less rounded and angled toward the target. This means darts are less likely to bounce off the board and more likely to be directed toward the triple-scoring segments.’ – Studying the Limits of Human Perfection Through Darts, By Ben Blatt; The Upshot, The New York Times, August 5, 2023.

In a more beginner and social sense, how long does it take to get consistently good at throwing these slightly lethal- looking pointy little arrows? And is being a top-quality player more down to talent or hard practice?

Derek Barr thinks, “Around 10,000 hours practice can make a top-line player.” (This opinion made me remember Tiger Woods once saying something similar about golf- but he probably wasn’t the first to utter the line.) I wanted to know however, how far you could go on talent alone (the lazy or time-pressed person’s better option?)

Barr was quite adamant that talent can definitely help a player- “There’s so many different ways to throw a dart, but some people are just able to relax and make high-scoring look easy. They get in a zone. Someone like England’s Michael Smith almost looks like he doesn’t care by the speed and nonchalant way he throws. But that’s down to sheer talent. Being relaxed and having your technique going consistently is a big part to doing well.”

As for the term, ‘Darts,’ the word is from the Latin word ‘Dardus’, meaning a javelin, spear or projectile weapon. The French were the first to use the term ‘darts’- France being the first nation to have the first real organised matches in the sport in the nineteenth century. Miniature arrows called ‘flechettes’ were used for throwing (The family name, Fletcher, is also the term for a maker of arrows.)

After a carpenter from Lancashire in England named Brian Gamlin invented the concept for the modern dartboard, with its very equitable number-sequencing rotation, Darts as a pub game exploded in popularity in early twentieth century Britain.

The road to acceptance was bumpy though. An example being in 1908 when a Leeds publican, Jim Garside, was accused by magistrates of facilitating games of ‘chance’ in promoting his pub as a haven for the game. To prove that Darts was a game of skill and not dumb luck, a famous local player landed three consecutive throws in the ’20’ zone; when the Clerk of the Court had a turn he only got one of his darts to land on the board itself. The
case against Garside was summarily dismissed.

Darts can get serious at the higher-competition end, but the social side is what most of its participants are naturally attracted to.

On that front, the HCDCs have found a novel way of making sure they always have a worthwhile end-of-year knees up. Their club function always pays for itself: Barr explains, “If you throw either off the board, score a ’26’, or end up needing to hit a Double 1 to finish, then a dollar is contributed into the club kitty for a restaurant visit for all their members at the end of the season, or whatever else is planned.”

The demographic spread of the HCDC is in good fettle. “We’ve got guys in their seventies still playing, and a young guy called Rhys Hickman who is trying to start a junior programme at one of the local Intermediate schools. People needn’t worry about their age being a factor in Darts; it’s the same in most clubs actually” says Barr.

Interestingly, HCDC’s original Club Captain, Steve Coles, explains that their Darts Club began out of a Lawn Bowling club. “Four of us at Frankton South Bowling Club found we liked Darts and were getting quite competitive. Another four blokes out of the Working Men’s Club were also into their Darts, so the original group was eight and things just grew from that. Even though we hit Covid lockdowns the membership stayed strong.”

Coles is right about the strong membership: HCDC has up to 46 Hamilton Cosmopolitan Club-affiliated regular Wednesday evening players. Sadly, Cosmopolitan Club manager, Ian Morgan, the person instrumental in having the HCDC Darts club set up at his venue, passed away last December. The HCDC membership remains indebted to Ian’s co-operation in beginning their journey.

It is reasonable to suggest then, that the greater Hamilton area is one of the hotbeds of amateur Darts in this country. Darts is being taken more and more seriously. It isn’t practically the excuse for just boozing that it likely once was.

Then there is the impact of the top professional players. Practically rocket-boosting the sport’s popularity currently is the 17 year-old prodigy and World Championship runner-up in the New Year, England’s Luke Littler.

The teenager has become such an instant phenomenon in the sport that casual participation has increased hugely across Britain and into Europe- evidenced by professional Darts events having seen a 204 per cent increase in ticket sales since Littler became instantly famous not much more than three months ago.

HCDC club council captain Neil Booth explains not to underestimate Littler’s impact on the sport itself. “The guy has burst on the scene. He’s so impressive So many more people are interested in Darts now thanks to him. Booth sounded a warning, however. “I just hope he doesn’t burn out because he’s so young. That’s the worry. The good thing, and the word is that he’s got multiple World Champion Phil Taylor looking to mentor him.”

Every second newspaper in Britain seems to have a daily story on Littler. There was even a feature in The Times of London which led with how often he bothered to clean his room and what was in it.

Littler regularly beats the world’s best, and has a rivalry with the iconic, multiple-world championship winning Dutchman, Michael van Gerwen that is simmering nicely, but respectfully and creating genuine excitement in the wider Darts community.

Littler is that good that he won in his World Series of Darts debut tournament earlier this year, held in Bahrain. In his first go at the Players’ Championship recently, he also won. In both those tournaments Littler threw a nine-darter in a single leg; the perfect game in Darts.

Littler is pure publicity gold for Darts. He has been the catalyst for a huge rise in the sale of dartboards to the ordinary hobbyist player in their home or back shed.

He related to media of going to check his Instagram account for messages of support, but of how the page is always jammed with people saying, ‘I’ve got a dartboard, I’ve got a dartboard. It’s just been crazy.’ (The Times of London, 22 February, 2024)

Across the seas in Aotearoa, it’s not known if dartboard sales are close to out of stock, but one thing that can be confirmed as growing is the number of females becoming involved in playing Darts; and competitively too.

One of them is New Zealand’s top-ranked Women’s player, Wendy Harper from Waihi. On Harper’s Darts’ CV is the accolade of throwing at the Women’s World Championship, an event which, not before time, began in 2001.

A competitive player for over ten years and first coming into the sport by sheer accident, as a sober driver for her husband(!), Harper explains that Darts in the female domain is a better place to be now than a couple of decades ago; when a female throwing in a Darts league at a pub or club in this country was very much a rarity.

“The sport is still naturally male-dominated, but there are a lot more opportunities for women to play Darts competitively these days. As well, the men are always supportive- I’ve never come across prejudice. They are very encouraging of the women’s game.”

Even so, there are still discrepancies in tournament participation. “Women are still on the back foot with numbers. At tournaments, for example, you could have 70 males and only 25 females. The prizemoney reflects this also.”

Harper does see a rather ingenious way though for how more young women could be enticed into Darts:

“If the game could somehow be introduced into schools it could also be a tool for using in the Maths curriculum, as it teaches kids to be great with arithmetic, and it’s the youth that will keep our sport alive.”

At the competitive, semi-professional level, and with the current credit squeeze showing no sign of abating anytime soon, what of the conundrum of ways to attract more female players to ranking tournaments?

Harper thinks any form of extra sponsorship would make a difference: “Increasing the payout to be more in line with what men receive would possibly be a help.”

Starting out in Darts

•  The best way to begin is to set up a Dartboard at home, have a practice, and get a few people around for a game and some socialising!
•  The HCDC (Hamilton Cosmopolitan Darts Club) is located at: 32 Claudelands Rd, Hamilton East. A one-year membership to the Cosmopolitan club costs $80.00. Aside from HCDC club night, there is also a Tuesday ‘roll on up and have a throw’ evening at the same venue, organised in conjunction with the NZ Darts Council.
•  A reasonable set of Darts for the beginner or social player can cost anywhere between $15.00-40.00. Darts is fairly cheap compared to many other pursuits. Places such as Rebel Sport usually stock Darts sets. And Dartboards.
•  Many pubs, RSAs or Cosmopolitan Clubs run Darts Leagues. You can also check out clubsnz.org.nz to find a local league or social darts. (The Birkenhead RSA on the Auckland’s North Shore, for example, has a popular Darts scene. Club nights there are run on a Wednesday at 7pm. There is also an Auckland League competition on Saturdays.)
•  For officially-sanctioned, NZ nationwide tournaments, visit:
  www.nzdarts.com/NZDC%20Calendar

Darts needs-to=knows

•  Scoring at competitive levels level counts down from ‘501’ -easy to remember; just think of
  the famous jeans, (or at the lower level, sometimes ‘301’). In this type of game, you are only
  allowed to finish on a ‘Double’ number (The outer segment of each numbered zone), or on
  the Bullseye- aka the Bull.
• The marker you throw Darts from is called ‘The Oche’ (‘ee’ sound on the end)
• A leg is one completed game.
• A set is similar to the tennis equivalent- you need a particular number of games (legs in Darts) to win a set. But unlike in tennis, the number can vary depending on the scale or type of tournament.
• The perfect game/leg is known as ‘A nine-darter’
• The highest checkout (finish) possible is down from 170 to zero.
• The highest possible score for a single throw (or turn) of three darts is ‘180’ (3 x treble 20)

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