Free Eric Bristow by Eric Bristow Page B

shirt we wore meant we were worse than the devil. I used to love hitting 180s in Scotland. I’d turn round to them and they’d all be booing and I’d raise my hand, cup it to my ear and go ‘What?’
    The Scots were easily the most vocal, followed by the Welsh. It was and still is a win at all costs mentality with the Scots and they tried everything to put me off my game. One supporter shook my hand. When I pulled my hand away it was bleeding, and so was his. He’d put broken glass in his palm. Luckily I could still play darts. He wasn’t so lucky; some of the bouncers took him outside and kicked the living daylights out of him. On another occasion a supporter patted me on the back of my head, which I thought was a little odd. Then I discovered he’d put itching powder down my collar so the game was postponed while I took my shirt off and washed it.
    The supporters were out to get me because they knew I was good – everybody knew I was good – but to prove to myself just how good I was I had to win a big one. I set my sights on the Winmau World Masters. If I could win that I could say with justification that I was the best player in the world. This really was the tournament of tournaments. Not only did you have the best sixteen players in the world competing, you also had the best county players who had come through a knockout stage to qualify plus invited players from every nation across the globe. It was global darts on a massive scale, a real melting pot of talent.
    In 1976 I had narrowly missed out on claiming a top-sixteen spot so had to go through the county qualifying rounds. I got beaten in the London play-off to a player I should have walloped. I played well, but he played at a level he has probably never bettered. As penance I went down to the West Centre Hotel in Fulham where the event was being staged and helped set the dart boards up. When I saw Ollie Croft I said to him, ‘I’ll help you set the gear up, but I’ll never do this again because next year I’ll be playing and I’m going to win it.’
    He just smiled, but he didn’t know how much I was hurting. Not qualifying killed me because I knew, despite not being ranked in the top sixteen, that I could beat 95 per cent of the players there. It was the biggest tournament in the world, it was effectively the world title, and I’d have to wait another twelve months before I could have a shot at it. I watched as John Lowe beat Welshman Phil Obbard in the final.
    I may not have beaten John, but I knew I could have killed the Welshman, so I threw myself into my darts for the next twelve months and ensured I won enough tournaments to get me into the top sixteen and automatic qualification for the next World Masters which, because of its increasing popularity, had been moved to the Wembley Conference Centre. This was a buzz. I remember walking into the centre for the first time and gazing in awe at this huge room in which thirty-two dart boards had been put up with the one on the main stage reserved for the big matches and the later rounds. You could hear the whirr of the television cameras and every nationality of player was there. It was great to see players from Denmark, America, Finland, Australia and the rest, all ready for the tournament of tournaments.
    Although Lowey was favourite to win it, the clever money was on me because I had been winning Opens everywhere; in Lincolnshire, Staffordshire, you name it, I won it. I won more than I lost and unofficially I knew, and the rest of the darting world knew, that I was the number one player in the world, but winning the World Masters was tough.
    It was the best of five legs of 501 all the way through, but when Lowey got knocked out this opened it up for me and I got through to the final where I was up against a Yorkshireman called Paul Reynolds.
    He won the first leg, which left me with a bit of a mountain to climb. In the second leg, I still wasn’t at the top of my game and needed 152 to claw it