Darts players today are wrapped in cotton wool, they have minders & don’t drink during matches, says legend Bobby George
FROM Ali G and Super Mario outfits to people kitted out as fried eggs, Smurfs and traffic cones, fancy dress is rarely dafter than among the fans at dart tournaments.
They will be at it again on Friday for the PDC World Darts Championship final at North London’s Alexandra Palace.
But much of the fun is down to one man, oche great Bobby George, who in the Seventies and Eighties was a star of the game — and beyond — as much for his outlandish attire as his skill with the arrows.
Like no one before him, in a cape, sequins and bling, and stepping out for matches to his theme tune of Queen’s We Are The Champions, the natural showman nicknamed Bobby Dazzler inspired spectators to also dress up for the party.
Bobby, 79, features in new Sky Documentaries series Dart Kings, which looks at the legends of the sport and starts on Saturday.
And he reckons what changed the game for ever was the 1980 Embassy World Darts Championship final, where he faced off against Eric “The Crafty Cockney” Bristow.
Bobby stepped out in a sequinned shirt — and officials added to the fun by producing a candelabra for him to hold, in the style of legendary US singer-showman Liberace, who would place one atop his piano at shows.
He tells The Sun: “I thought, if I dress up more, not just a T-shirt, people will never forget me.
“People will say, ‘Did you see what that idiot Bobby George was wearing the other night?’.
Fist pumps
“I came out with this candelabra and everyone got their lighters out.
“Later on, I added the cloak and the walk-on music.”
The introduction music is now a staple of the game, although players’ attire nowadays is as straight as their arrows in comparison to Bobby — and the fancy dress fans who took their inspiration from him.
He adds: “Today, the darts wouldn’t be the same without the walk-on music. But you had to have some bottle to dress up in them days.”
Bobby won a host of top tournaments and made the World Championship finals in 1980 — when he lost to Bristow — and 1994.
But it was not just his showman-ship that marked him out from other players.
Unlike many, he did not booze heavily and had a bodybuilder physique and film star looks.
It all helped make him a celebrity beyond the world of darts as he became a regular on TV chat shows, and most recently enjoyed reality TV fame on BBC series The Real Marigold Hotel.
He has done very nicely for himself, too, and owns a 17-room mansion in Colchester, Essex, with 12 acres of land and a fishing lake.
But before finding fame and fortune through darts, Bobby worked as a nightclub bouncer, floor layer and builder — helping in the Sixties to dig tunnels for the London Underground Victoria Line.
Before turning pro at darts, he grafted by touring pubs and clubs as an amateur to make his name, and he now reckons the new generation of players have gone soft.
They have minders to keep them from adoring fans and are even banned from downing pints at the oche.
Bobby says: “The players today are wrapped up in cotton wool.
“They’re protected, looked after. They can’t go in the crowds. You can only meet them if you pay for a meet-and-greet.
“You can’t go outside and have a fag with them. That’s not allowed.
“When I’ve been with today’s darts players, I’ve had minders around me.
“And they don’t drink with their darts shirt on — they’ve cleaned all that up.”
Bobby was born in Newham, East London, and knew what it was like to have it tough — his mum died when he was three, his dad was blind and he worked a string of labouring jobs before discovering his talent for darts at the age of 30.
He was on a sea fishing trip off the Irish coast near Cork when rough weather set in and meant that he needed to find another way to pass the time.
A pal called Malcolm suggested a game of darts at the local pub and, much to his surprise, beginner Bobby found he could hit his targets with unerring accuracy.
He recalls: “Malcolm told me, ‘You should take it up — you’re better than me and I’ve played for 16 years’. I thought, ‘This is easy’. We played all day and all night — people were coming from different pubs to play and they all bought me drinks. I thought, ‘What a lovely game this is’.”
Until then, Bobby had shown no interest in darts because he reckoned it was not manly enough.
But Bobby suspects that it was throwing knives at a board when he was younger that helped him adapt to the game so quickly.
He says: “I didn’t throw knives at anyone, I just hit a target.” But within just a few years of turning pro at darts, he was raking in the cash.
Aspiring superstar
In 1979, he won the elite News of the World tournament — the UK’s first nationally televised darts event, shown on ITV from 1972 to 1985, then again in 1987 and 1988 — as he also became the first player ever to win a major title without losing a single leg.
He is now regarded as one of the finest players never to win a world championship — after twice coming so very close.
But he was friends with five-time world champ and fellow East Londoner Bristow from a young age — driving the aspiring superstar to matches played around the country when the teenage prodigy was too young to get behind the wheel.
As their careers later hit the heights, their matches against each other were as entertaining as Bobby’s crazy clobber — and never more so than during that famous 1980 final.
They wound each other up by celebrating winning throws with fist pumps.
Bobby says: “We gave it plenty — both of us.”
Eric, who died in 2018 aged 60, also upset a lot of players by boasting about his prowess.
Bobby says: “He was a cocky little sod. He could be rude, but he could play darts.”
Unfortunately for Bobby, Eric was often just too good, including in the 1980 final when he took home the then impressive prize pot of £4,500 — around £20,000 in today’s money — and kissed his defeated opponent on the cheek at the end of the match.
But beneath Eric’s famous bravado, he had to battle with the emotion of the game.
He once suffered from “dartitis” — where players get the jitters — and would sometimes weep in moments of triumph.
Bobby jokes: “Well, he was a baby, wasn’t he? What would he have done if he’d lost?”
The opening episode of three-part series Dart Kings will focus on world-beater Eric.
He was one of the game’s greats, but when a then-record eight million BBC viewers tuned in to watch him play qualifier Keith Deller in the 1983 BDO World Championship final, the red-hot favourite slumped to a shock defeat.
Underdog Deller, from Ipswich, was just 23 and later said Eric “had no time for me”.
Last year, the talk of the darts world was newcomer Luke Littler, who in January made the final of the PDC World Darts Championship final aged just 16, only to fall to world No1 Luke Humphries.
Now 17, and ranked No4 in the world, the kebab-loving lad from Runcorn, Cheshire, has enjoyed a meteoric rise to the top.
Broken back
Bobby sounds a note of caution, though. He says of the wonderkid: “He’s a youngster and knows how to play. But you can go from hero to zero in darts if you’re not careful.”
It is, indeed, a topsy-turvy sport, where shock results are common.
But a big difference in the modern game is that players are a lot fitter than they used to be.
In the Eighties, stars such as two- time world champ Jocky Wilson, who died in 2012 aged 62 and also features in the Sky series, made names for themselves with their heavy drinking on stage.
Bobby was friends with the Scots legend and remembers him once being so drunk, he got confused about which side of the board his score had been chalked up on.
In contrast, Bobby — who has two sons with wife Marie, and a son and daughter from a previous marriage — has preferred to take it easy on the booze.
He says: “I like a drink, but you can’t play when you are p***ed.”
Indeed, it was his biceps that bulged more than his belly.
He says with a laugh: “I had muscles — I used to dig tunnels, but I didn’t go to the gym. When I came on the darts scene, they said I didn’t look like a darts player. But there aren’t many who are overweight now.”
Yet two injuries — including a ruptured spleen in 1981 and a broken back sustained while jumping up and down in celebration during a quarter-final match on his way to the 1994 world final — hindered his career.
It was only a few weeks after the final that he learned he had broken his back, and had to have eight titanium screws inserted into the base of his spine just so that he could stand upright.
But Bobby still remembers the thrill he felt standing at the oche in front of a raucous crowd.
He says: “An atmosphere makes you play. You can’t get a buzz on your own in your living room. You can’t describe it unless you’ve done it.”