With apologies to the UniBoffin, and to Phil Taylor himself, I am going to tell you a Christmas story that Dickens and the Grimm brothers combined might have concocted.
Once upon a time there was a young lathe worker in Stoke called Phil who had a passion for precise machine work. He could set his lathe so carefully that when he pressed the go-button 2000 split-millimetre perfect toilet chain handles or beer pump grips came off. So in later life, when a wise man told him he could improve his darts-play by totally re-designing his tools, Phil remembered his lathing days and set about the massive task. For a while he kept the re-modelled darts under wraps.
On 28 February 2008, after three Premier League defeats and some media comment that he was ‘finished’, Phil put aside his old knitting needle darts and took up the new tools - which were shorter, thicker and had a different grip. He played Wayne Mardle that night and won 8-0. Despite a bit of difficulty around Double 16, he averaged 107 in the next ten weeks of the League.
After that, darts records fell like chaff in a summer cornfield. Phil beat Ray Barneveld in the 2000 World Championship final with an average of 111, hit 118 against Gary Anderson in the European Championships and had a 111 tournament average in the same event. Some men would rest here and just coast towards a 15th world title, but not Phil.
He got to work with a pair of scissors and trimmed a ‘diamond’ flight for his darts that did two things. It did not touch his face when pulling the darts back for more power and it gave a better line of sight to the target. (You think I’m kidding? Read the Uniboffin.) He skated to victory in the Grand Slam.
The moral of this seasonal tale is this. While others have a pint and a practice or work on their temperament or go out pressy hunting, in a little shed out back of a mansion near Nantwich a former lathe operator is probably fiddling away, cross-legged by gleaming candlelight, with a file and a penknife planning how to turn base tungsten into a crock of more pure gold.
THE JOCKY OCHE.
On 5 December I’ll be in Glasgow with the Sky team for the Jocky Wilson Cup that will set Phil Taylor and James Wade up against Gary Anderson and Robert Thornton at singles and pairs. The pairs will be 11 legs of 1001, the old distance for exhibitions and money matches.
I’ve been digging in the old archives and found some benchmarks for the lads for the long distance.
Best 1001 I can find recorded is 19 darts by Cliff Inglis, 20 by Bob Anderson, 21 by Alan Evans, 22 by Eric Bristow and John Lowe and 23 by Leighton Rees. I myself saw Jocky do 24 in Wiltshire in 1982. I have no doubt the four stars will match these standards.
I also hope the Wee Yin, Jocky himself, pops in for a wee while.