Later tonight the third annual Sydney Darts Masters kicks off in front of over 10,000 raucous and quite possibly drunk fans.
For many this will be their first experience with the growing sport of darts and I can guarantee that they will not be disappointed.
For too long darts in Australia was seen as just a pub game played by those with too much time on their hands.
However, over the past 30 years the popularity of the sport has skyrocketed in the United Kingdom, with fans regularly packing out arenas for a night of partying, singing, cheering and high quality darts.
For the players it is also serious business, with many able to forge a full-time career out of the sport, travelling around the UK, and now the world, plying their trade. The winner of the 2014-15 World Championships, Gary Anderson, took home a cool £250,000 (over $500,000) out of a purse of £1.25 million ($2.5 million).
The man widely regarded as the best player in darts history, Phil Taylor, has earned over £6 million in prize money. And that’s before you take into account sponsorship agreements, endorsements and payments from governments to teach young children mathematics.
While for many years the players would spend hours drinking at the pub and not much time training, the script has been completely flipped. Pro darts players spend hours each week training, practicing their throws, working on their maths, trying different maneuvers. While they may not look like the quintessential athlete, with chiselled abs and bulging biceps, they are as much an athlete as Sonny Bill Williams or Israel Folau.
I have had a long running battle with a certain friend about the value of darts as a sport. He had never watched the sport but he held the typical viewpoint held by many; that darts was boring and was not a sport. He had no interest in watching people throw little bits of metal at a 45-centimetre wide circle.
I continually sent him videos of darts highlights, showcasing everything that the sport has to offer. At first he couldn’t understand why I enjoyed watching darts, he claimed that it was dumb and the players did not have any talent.
I kept sending him videos and eventually I won him over. Finally he uttered those words I had been trying to get out of him for over two years “that is actually quite entertaining”.
In case you were wondering, this is the video in question.
If you watch the darts over the weekend, and I implore you to do so, you will likely be quite shocked by what you see. Contrary to popular belief, the sport is a spectator sport. The television broadcasters do an outstanding job ensuring that fans watching at home get as good a view as those at the venue.
And this job is far easier said than done. The staff working back in the production van must accurately predict what region of the board the player will throw his dart towards in order to zoom in on that section. Get that wrong and we see an empty board, get it right and we see a dart landing with a thud.
We then have this guy:
Yelling out the scores for each throw, his name is Russ Bray and he is a legend in the world of darts. Part ground announcer, part referee, part commentator, his voice is one of the most well known in the world of sports. Very few people actually know his name but his voice is instantly recognisable. There are some people who watch darts just to listen to his voice and it’s not hard to see why.
At first glance there is absolutely no technique and skill to darts. The common refrain is that all they do is just try to hit the bull’s-eye every time they throw. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. There is a lot of technique, skill and tactics required to win a darts match.
To win a leg, the equivalent of a game in tennis, a competitor must score 501 points and finish with a double, the outer ring on the board, or a bull’s-eye. The inner ring on the board delivers triple points and the triple 20 is the highest scoring section of the board. It is actually in the thrower’s best interest to avoid the bull’s-eye; it is smaller than the triple 20 and doesn’t deliver as many points.
On top of this, darts throwers have favoured ways of finishing each leg. They must think quickly, calculate how many points they need to get to 501 and then figure out the best way of scoring these points. As you saw in the video above, nine darts is the minimum number of darts required to win a leg and when Michael van Gerwen was faced with two consecutive nine dart finishes he took two different routes to get to nine darts, or 10 in the second case.
The competitors must think on the fly, sometimes the first two darts have covered most of the triple 20 region, making a third triple 20 a very difficult proposition. Knowing that they will need an odd score eventually they may choose to target a triple 19 or a different triple depending on the state of the leg.
These are the sorts of things that you will recognise when you watch darts over the next few days.
All the things that make sport exciting to watch are present in darts. The threat of an upset, the unpredictability, great skill and precision, wonderful atmosphere, thrilling finishes and gripping contests. It’s all there. Just watch the darts and give it a chance. Go in with an open mind and you never know what might happen, you might find yourself with a new favourite sport.
If all else fails get into your best fancy dress and sing along.
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