2018: The ones I’ll miss most: Eric Bristow – the Crafty Cockney

In this series of pieces, Prost owner Steve Clare looks back on the athletes who died in 2018, that in some way affected his sporting life.

It’s sometimes hard to imagine what the sporting world was like before the internet. We didn’t choose as freely what or who we followed. Television was still king. In the 1970s and 80s,  two sports, previously considered pub games, exploded on to our screens in glorious colour.

Darts was made for the television. The sporting action is confined to a small space, the crowds showed their emotions in full and the players themselves were colourful and mainly extroverted in their demeanour.

Bobby George wore glitter on his shirt. Jocky Wilson wore his emotions on his sleeves and Eric Bristow wore down the opposition with scintillating displays of darts that saw him dominate very skilled contemporaries like Wilson, Leighton Rees, Dennis ‘the Menace’ Priestley, ‘Big’ Cliff Lazarenko, Dave Whitcombe, Mike Gregory  and most of all arch rival John Lowe.

Bristow gave the sport the entire fibre of his being. Trading on the name “The Craft Cockney”, he actually left London and owed much of his success to a life in the Potteries.

Born in 1957 in North East London rather than the Cockney heartland of the East, his father was a plasterer and his mother worked as a telephone operator. In 1971, at the age of 14, he ceased his formal education.

1976 was perhaps his defining year.

Firstly, he obtained the nickname that defined him throughout his career. In California of all places, he visited an ex-pat pub called the Crafty Cockney in Santa Monica for an exhibition. They gave him a shirt with the name on the back and it stuck.

The same year and perhaps more importantly, he left London and moved to Leek about ten miles from Stoke, which he was to call home the rest of his life.

He made the region a centre for darts in England and the area produced more great players including Ted Hankey, Adrian Lewis and of course the man who eventually exceeded his achievements, Bristow’s protege, Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor

In 1980, he won the first of his five World Championships; Every throw of every arrow and every grimace, groan or grin was televised. He reached five more finals. Between 1980 and 1992 he appeared in ten of the twelve finals. Of the five he lost, they were all to different opponents. No one man truly got the better of him on the prime of his career.

Compared to his more staid contemporary in snooker, Steve Davis, Bristow was effervescent and television friendly. Like Davis, everybody loved or hated him, though in Bristow’s case, far more loved him than the famously boring Davis.

Bristow’s five World Championships was thought to be an impossible level of consistency until Taylor broke the mold. Bristow mentored him and gave him £10,000 to develop his career. Bristow never asked for the money back as Taylor went on to become a darts millionaire.

His dominance of the darts in his era was only matched by his public arrogance and he gave his detractors plenty of ammunition. But his popularity endured and he appeared on Jim Bowen’s darts quiz show around 30 times.

Eric Bristow died on 5 April 2018, after a heart attack while attending a Premier League Darts event in Liverpool at the age of 60. The oche will be a poorer place without him.

2018: The ones I’ll miss most: Cyrille Regis, who answered Man United racist boos with a starring role in the “Game of the Century”E