ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY!!!!

Just for the fun of it - here’ s a piece I wrote for The Independent a few years ago in celebration of darts. I have made no changes, so some of the names I invoke aren’t as household as they were. See it as a sort of museum piece.

Besides, I am working on a victory speech to be delivered by the new World Champion in a couple of days. I won’t be lifting the trophy myself - I am not the player I was - but I have given a few speeches in my time and intend to gift the benefit of my experience to whoever does lift it. How to be magnanimous in victory is the first lesson I mean to teach. How to make it appear that you respect your opponent even though it’s obvious you think he’s a jammy bastard who didn’t deserve to win a leg. Also, how not to bore the worldwide audience with descriptions of how you felt missing the double 18 in the second and fifth leg. All sportsmen and women are bores but darts players excel at tedious reminiscence. How to move seamlessly and gracefully from the particular to the general - from the treble five you kept landing in to ending famine in developing countries - will be another tip I hope to pass on.

All being well, my winner’s speech will appear here tomorrow or the day after.

In the meantime - my museum piece, gratis . . .

TO SEE THE WORLD IN A GRAIN OF SAND AND INFINITY IN A BULLSEYE

Too cold to go out, too cold to stay in, too stuffed with food to bother cooking, no friends to talk to because they're all in the Gambia - or is it the Zambia - every book on my shelves a distraction from the book I'm writing, nothing on television. Is it any wonder I've been lying in bed and watching darts on Sky Sports since the middle of December.

'One hundred and eighty!' I've seen so many of them I think there's nothing to it. Just hand me my arrows. 'One hundred and eighty!'

I was divorced, once, by a woman who had warned me several times that she'd leave me if she had to listen to someone screaming 'One hundred and eighty!' ever again. Couldn't I at least turn the sound down? It was just a game of darts, for Christ's sake. It had no essential aural component. I explained that the sounds a) of the dart going into the board and b) of the compere announcing 'One hundred and eighty!' were intrinsic to the atmosphere of the sport.

'Intrinsic to the atmosphere of the what?'

'The sport.'

'Darts? A sport! Darts is no more a sport than life with you is.'

In those days I had no answer to such ferocity. I would just feebly suggest that she move into a B&B if she couldn't stand the racket. The tournament would be over in a fortnight. I even offered to go halves with her in the cost.

Things have changed since then. Now, everyone knows it's dartist to say darts isn't a sport just because players move less of their bodies than the average viewer does getting up to make a cup of tea and switching on the remote. Not all that long ago, Phil 'The Power' Taylor MBE, fifteen times world champion, and a man, according to Sid Waddell - himself the greatest commentator darts has ever known - 'who could hit the dandruff on a fly's forelock', was voted runner-up to the jockey Tony McCoy, whoever he is, as BBC Sports Personality of the year. I'd have liked to be able to rub my wife's face in that. 'See! Sports personality of the year.'

But she was well gone by then. I think the B&B suggestion was the last straw, though as God is my witness I was only trying to be helpful. In the end she divorced me over a 'One hundred and forty!" Mental cruelty, she got me on.

I put up no defence. I'd have divorced myself had I known how. But we are still somehow together, I and this moronic other half of me who is prepared to sit in front of the television for hour after hour watching charmless men with heart-attack colour in their cheeks and close-together eyes aim at the same narrow band of red cork while 3,000 drunken darts aficionados wave pieces of paper on which is printed 'One hundred and eighty!' - isn't that a strange thing to want to do? - and sing along to Chase the Sun by Planet Funk. 'Oy, Oy, oy.'

Planet Funk - isn't that an Italian band specialising in electronic dance music? What the planet funk does Planet Funk have to do with darts? Nothing. They just wrote the song and darts just ingested it. That's the way of it with popular culture. Anything can turn up anywhere. Take Prince Harry. What does he have to do with darts, you might fairly ask. But he bowled along for the final at the Alexandra Palace. Maybe he just goes to anything called a palace and assumes he owns it. Or maybe that's the future - a royal family that carries its own tungsten around in bejewelled pouches and shouts 'Oy, oy, oy' after every one hundred and eighty. Is it now official? That darts has become the sport of kings?

The 'Oy, oy, oy', in case you've found more rewarding ways of killing off the old year and don't know what I'm talking about, is not a Jewish ejaculation of darts anxiety - 'Oy, oy, oy, he's going to miss the one hundred and eighty!' - but what I suppose you'd have to call the 'refrain' to Chase the Sun. The players walk off for a toilet break, the cameras turn their attention briefly to the audience before the ads begin, and you, if you are there and wearing a Robin Hood or Tarzan outfit, wave your hands above your head and shout 'Oy, oy oy.'

It makes me almost nostalgic for my failed marriage. If she thought 'One hundred and eighty!' was bad she should have heard 'Oy, oy, oy.'

(Actually she did, often, but it was the Jewish version.)

Anyway it's over now and the house is quiet. Even a touch sad. Phil 'the Power' did not win his sixteenth title. Nor did the other one time champion, the Dutchman Raymond van Bernevald, known affectionately to his supporters as Barney, a player immortalised for hitting the first nine dart leg ever in the PDC world championships. That's treble twenty, treble twenty, treble twenty, treble twenty, treble twenty, treble twenty . . but you get the picture. Neither Phil nor Barney even reached the finals. The old order changeth. Suddenly there are younger throwers around - not leaner or fitter exactly, just crueller. For youth is no respecter of old age.

You can tell when a darts player knows he's on the skids. The puffiness goes out of his cheeks. He looks embarrassed and even a touch sulky, as though the other player's darts have been thrown into the treble twenty which is his heart. If things aren't going well for you on the football or rugby pitch you can run up and down a lot, but darts players have nowhere to hide. They knows the cameras are on their faces. That's where they lose. Not in their wrists or fingers, not in the swollen bellies that are indispensable to their balance, but in their light-quenched eyes.

There's no app to find the mind's construction in the face, unless the face in question is that of a darts player, and then it's easy. I knew Phil wasn't going to win this year. He'd stopped believing. Barney too. The pair of them seemed bonded in some secret shame. The degree of hurt a sportsman feels is in inverse proportion to the nobility of the sport. Lose at tennis or the marathon and you can hold your head high. Lost at darts and you compound ingloriousness with disgrace. But it's even worse if all you're doing is watching. The last dart is thrown, the final 'oy' is sung, and what's left to you? Anti-climax, self-contempt and ignominy. But then when doesn't watching television leave you feeling like that?