to my London roots and Crafty fitted because I was a cocky little so and so. So I brought five of them back home with me, went on telly wearing one and the rest is history. Those shirts were probably the best things I have ever bought.
The pub was not so lucky. It was sold to an Indian guy who called it the Londoner; then it was knocked down, and now all that remains is a car park. Les’s story is also tragic. After selling up he moved to Canada and made even more money, but his wife ended up killing herself. He found her in the car on his drive with a hosepipe attached to the exhaust. To be fair she was a bit of a scatterbrain and wasn’t all there in the head. He ended up moving to Mexico. I saw him recently, and he gave me a Crafty Cockney leather jacket.
I said to him, ‘What a lovely present.’
‘That’ll be £150,’ he replied.
What a cheeky sod. This is a bloke who is a multi-millionaire. I paid him for it.
There were lots of English pubs in Santa Monica and every bar we went in had these Crafty Cockney style shirts. All the darts lads loved these bars because you could get things like fish and chips, and on Sundays they did roast beef and Yorkshire puds. It was just like being at home.
That was my first taste of America. I went there with my dad, we had $800, and we came back with a lot more. For three weeks I was completely off the rails. How I won two out of three tournaments I’ll never know, it was crackers, but one thing was for certain: I had played on a much bigger stage than anywhere back at home, played the best players from all over the globe, and I had stuffed them. It was time to take the next step up the ladder.
FOUR
England
IN DARTING TERMS I was a freak. Most darts players mature in their late twenties to early thirties, but everything happened for me when I was a teenager. There were other good young players around, but none of them were a patch on me. I was making money from darts, spending it as fast as I made it, and all the time I was on the road playing tournament after tournament, then coming home with packets of fags and crates of Guinness for my nan. There was none of this saving up lark. There were so few people at my age with a pocketful of money and the chance to see the world that I just wasn’t going to let it slip by. You have all these people who work all their lives, they save up their pensions and tell everyone that when they retire they’re going to travel. Half of them don’t even make it to retirement age and the ones that do tend to have health problems so they hardly leave the country. My philosophy was formed when I was seventeen and starting to be successful at darts: I was going to enjoy it while it lasted and sod the future. To a certain extent I still live to that philosophy today.
I lived for the here and now, and at that time darts was getting bigger by the month. Tournaments were being televised all over the place and TV bosses couldn’t get enough of us. There was the World Masters, and Butlins Grand Masters which was in Birmingham; Anglia TV covered a tournament at the Seashore Holiday Village in Caister; all of a sudden there were about fifteen tournaments all attracting good viewing figures and with relatively good prize money on offer. In between there were the non-televised events which were still attractive, with decent payouts. Then there was the annual American three-week beano, which was basically party time, followed by Opens in Denmark, Sweden and Finland. By the time I was eighteen I was a full-time darts player who would look at his diary on the first of January and see that eighty days had been filled already with tournaments, and that was without pencilling in the exhibitions where the majority of the money was made. Also, I still had to play Super League on Mondays to get my ranking points.
My team won the Super League in 1975 and I had great averages in that and in my county games. All the averages of all the players were forwarded
The pub was not so lucky. It was sold to an Indian guy who called it the Londoner; then it was knocked down, and now all that remains is a car park. Les’s story is also tragic. After selling up he moved to Canada and made even more money, but his wife ended up killing herself. He found her in the car on his drive with a hosepipe attached to the exhaust. To be fair she was a bit of a scatterbrain and wasn’t all there in the head. He ended up moving to Mexico. I saw him recently, and he gave me a Crafty Cockney leather jacket.
I said to him, ‘What a lovely present.’
‘That’ll be £150,’ he replied.
What a cheeky sod. This is a bloke who is a multi-millionaire. I paid him for it.
There were lots of English pubs in Santa Monica and every bar we went in had these Crafty Cockney style shirts. All the darts lads loved these bars because you could get things like fish and chips, and on Sundays they did roast beef and Yorkshire puds. It was just like being at home.
That was my first taste of America. I went there with my dad, we had $800, and we came back with a lot more. For three weeks I was completely off the rails. How I won two out of three tournaments I’ll never know, it was crackers, but one thing was for certain: I had played on a much bigger stage than anywhere back at home, played the best players from all over the globe, and I had stuffed them. It was time to take the next step up the ladder.
FOUR
England
IN DARTING TERMS I was a freak. Most darts players mature in their late twenties to early thirties, but everything happened for me when I was a teenager. There were other good young players around, but none of them were a patch on me. I was making money from darts, spending it as fast as I made it, and all the time I was on the road playing tournament after tournament, then coming home with packets of fags and crates of Guinness for my nan. There was none of this saving up lark. There were so few people at my age with a pocketful of money and the chance to see the world that I just wasn’t going to let it slip by. You have all these people who work all their lives, they save up their pensions and tell everyone that when they retire they’re going to travel. Half of them don’t even make it to retirement age and the ones that do tend to have health problems so they hardly leave the country. My philosophy was formed when I was seventeen and starting to be successful at darts: I was going to enjoy it while it lasted and sod the future. To a certain extent I still live to that philosophy today.
I lived for the here and now, and at that time darts was getting bigger by the month. Tournaments were being televised all over the place and TV bosses couldn’t get enough of us. There was the World Masters, and Butlins Grand Masters which was in Birmingham; Anglia TV covered a tournament at the Seashore Holiday Village in Caister; all of a sudden there were about fifteen tournaments all attracting good viewing figures and with relatively good prize money on offer. In between there were the non-televised events which were still attractive, with decent payouts. Then there was the annual American three-week beano, which was basically party time, followed by Opens in Denmark, Sweden and Finland. By the time I was eighteen I was a full-time darts player who would look at his diary on the first of January and see that eighty days had been filled already with tournaments, and that was without pencilling in the exhibitions where the majority of the money was made. Also, I still had to play Super League on Mondays to get my ranking points.
My team won the Super League in 1975 and I had great averages in that and in my county games. All the averages of all the players were forwarded
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