Before we get to princes, vikings, a nuke and other explosions that took him by surprise, Barry Hearn wishes to discuss his epiphany. It was delivered by horse 30 years ago this month.
The date was Boxing Day, 1994, and the venue was Circus Tavern in Purfleet, Essex. Hearn loves this story. They all do.
Within darts, it’s the go-to double and a flashback to a less certain time, when the PDC World Championship was in its second edition, its infancy, and no idea was considered too wild.
Hence the horse, a 17-hand police hunter. Because how else would one expect Bob Anderson, the Limestone Cowboy of Wiltshire, to make his way through 900 boozed-up fans for the first round?
‘I wasn’t in darts at that point, but I was there,’ says Hearn, who has run the sport since 2001. ‘I’m watching and thinking, “That’s a horse. With a bloke behind it shovelling up the s***. When was the last time you saw anything like that in sport?” I hadn’t and isn’t it brilliant?
‘Look, it was a while before I got properly involved after that, but one step through the door and you’d see people loving every second, drinking beer, smoking, gambling on most 180s. I thought, “I’ve died and gone to heaven”.’
Well-renowned sports promoter Barry Hearn has run the sport of darts since 2001
The PDC World Championships is set to get underway on Sunday 15 December and will run into the new year
Retired player Bob Anderson once walked to the stage accompanied by a horse in 1994 which piqued Hearn’s interest.
He was laughing then and he’s laughing now, all the way to the bank.
The only man laughing louder is the one Mail Sport reached on the phone a few hours later. ‘That horse got more fame than me,’ says Anderson. ‘The whole thing felt like it could go wrong at any moment – what if someone stubbed out a fag on its backside and he bolted?
‘I was walking next to it, not on it because the ceilings were low, and I remember asking one of the Sky Sports production managers, whose idea it was, what they would do if there was c*** on stage. He told me not to worry because the horse had seen worse with the police, but I wasn’t talking about the horse – I was nervous!
‘I gather Barry saw it and decided darts was for him. That was a big a moment in the sport. But bloody hell, health and safety would throw a wobbler these days. Crazy times. Great times.’
Yes, quite. And now it is crazier and greater in different ways.
When the world championships commence at Alexandra Palace on Sunday, it will do so having sold all 90,000 tickets for the next 16 days within half an hour of going on sale. Television figures are even hotter – last year’s final was watched by 4.8m, Sky Sports’ record audience for a non-football event – and a 17-year-old lad from Warrington has just passed the £1million mark for earnings in the past 12 months.
That same enigma was the UK’s most googled athlete in 2024 and is up for the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year award, but Hearn uses a different name for Luke Littler: ‘I don’t call him Luke The Nuke – for me, he’s Luke The Gift That Keeps on Giving.’
In time, Hearn will discuss those areas and why Sky must now show him the money to stay onboard. He will also talk of leaving Ally Pally, of expansion to the Middle East, £50m prize pots and overtaking golf.
Luke Littler took the darts world by storm by making the World Championship final in 2023
The championships are currently held at the infamous Alexandra Palace in London every year
But how did it all happen? How did the simple act of throwing tiny arrows become this jewel in our sporting crown? Those were questions we put to a number of major names in the sport and it’s the only one that stumps Hearn.
‘To be honest, no one could have seen all this coming, how it exploded,’ he says. ‘But I pinch myself every day that it has.’
There’s a cracking yarn about Stephen Fry that illustrates how a well-thrown dart can travel to all corners of society.
Fry loves the game. And he was especially enamoured with the commentary of the late, great Sid Waddell, so he jumped at an invitation to join him at the microphone for Sky Sports in 2010, when the darts’ Premier League rocked up at Wembley Arena.
One problem: there was a power cut and they all went home. But a secondary issue was not documented at the time – Fry had a dinner date the next night, which clashed with the new schedule.
‘I heard suggestions subsequently that it was with someone very important,’ says Anderson. It was, because that person happened to be Prince Charles.
A decision was needed and Fry made one – he returned to Wembley Arena the following evening and sat with Waddell as Phil Taylor threw two nine-darters to beat James Wade. Summing up his excitement, he declared on air: ‘I’m like a pig in chardonnay.’
Taylor, the 16-time world champion and recently retired at 64, is chuckling away at the mention of Fry. It was all so very different in the beginning, long before celebrity fans, longer before Littler, and he remembers that period in vivid detail.
16-time world champion Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor was a catalyst in helping grow the sport
Taylor (right) and his old rival Dennis Priestley (left) used to share prize money until 2000
Taylor was among the 16 top players who split from the British Darts Organisation in 1992, exasperated by a lack of say in how their sport was run and the limited opportunities to make money. After the darts boom of the Seventies and early Eighties, they were a generation withering on the vine in the grips of a downturn.
Together, that group assembled the breakaway faction known as the Professional Darts Corporation for much of the past three decades. ‘It was ugly,’ Taylor tells Mail Sport.
‘It went to court and BDO banned anyone from even talking to us. If a carpenter was working on my house and wanted to play county, they couldn’t talk to us.
‘We were scraping a living at that time. We had great players but there wasn’t much money around. When Dennis Priestley beat me in the final of our first world championships after the split, in 1994, he got £15,000. Now it’s £500,000.
‘We were playing exhibitions to get by – pubs for £300 a night. After taxes, hotels, petrol, you’d have about 100 quid.’
Out of necessity, he and Priestley, the two best players in the world, split every prize down the middle until 2000. ‘At first Phil probably did better out of that,’ says Priestley. ‘When he started winning everything, it worked pretty well for me!’
Those early days were an adventure. One aspect in their advantage, and this pre-dates Hearn’s arrival, was that Sky Sports quickly got onboard as they sought a portfolio alongside football. But even then it was tough.
‘For an event in Blackpool in 1994 we were literally walking down the street handing tickets to anyone,’ says Rory Hopkins, who served as the broadcaster’s darts producer for more than 20 years. ‘We did an event at Salford Rugby Club and there were five people in the crowd when we came on air.’
PDC’s championship started back in 1994 with Taylor one of the first names to join the corporation
The sport now draws in huge crowds all around the world as it grows in stature every year
While Sky were essential to what has followed, for providing the platform and giving the party its sparkle, it was Hearn’s arrival that propelled the show to a new place – more volume, more events, more focus on the personalities, zero inhibition.
His first foray, in 1998, was to step in and lead negotiations for a new TV deal with Sky worth £100,000 a year. By 2001, he was so ‘seduced’ by the potential he took a controlling stake, and in the subsequent 23 years his Matchroom enterprise has quadrupled the number of televised tournaments and increased prize money 26-fold.
‘I’m like a benevolent despot,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to do chairmanships, I do ownership.
‘First thing I wanted to do after starting was deal with the BDO – disputes damage both sides. I wrote to them suggesting a cup of tea and got a one-line answer saying there was no point. I wrote back: “Now you have a problem”.
‘I decided at that stage, I’m putting them out of business, and I’m growing the PDC with even more vigour than I had the day before.’
Year by year, the BDO, whose world championships were once a joy to watch on the BBC, was bled dry by star defections and they had died well in advance of shuttering in 2020. But that’s a dustier story of politics – the darts tale is best viewed in the sights, sounds and costumes of Ally Pally and the nature of the throwers.
‘The darts is probably the only place I’ve been to where I’ve seen Scooby Doo having a pint with Spiderman,’ says Taylor.
‘But that’s all part of it. People can see it’s a good night. It’s a party, right? Even if you’re watching at home, you share in that. And in the middle you have sportsmen who appeal to normal people.’
Sky Sports’ coverage of events has been key to growing the popularity of darts this century
The relatibility of darts’ top professionals is what draws many supporters in to liking the sport
The latter, that relatability, is crucial. Always was and still is, which is an element lost in the buff and shine of some other sports. Taylor worked in a ceramic factory and Priestley, 74, was a coal merchant; today’s champion, Luke Humphries, was a roofer, 2023’s winner Michael Smith was a cattle farmer and Michael van Gerwen was a tiler.
As ever, Littler is an outlier. ‘I get up, go on my Xbox, when I get bored of that, I go on the practice board for half an hour, and when I get bored of that, I go back on my Xbox,’ he told me earlier this year.
‘On the sporting side, Taylor changed the game,’ says Hearn. ‘They could all see his dedication and how it translated into earning, so others followed, but darts players are still more like the man on the street.’
Hearn recalls a memory of Andy Fordham, the larger-than-life force who was nicknamed the Viking and died at the tragically young age of 59. When he was the BDO world champion, in 2004, he was drafted in for a pay-per-view clash with Taylor, the PDC No 1.
‘Andy was a smashing bloke,’ says Hearn. ‘With a few of the darts players, there’s this thing about “getting right”, so the right amount of alcohol to settle nerves and not too much that you can’t play well.
‘Anyway, it was 4pm, he’s on against Phil at 8pm, and I tell the girl at the bar to put his drinks on my tab. When he goes on stage, I head over to settle up – he had 25 Budweisers, white wine and half a dozen chasers. That’s changed now, but he was the kind of person who drew people to the sport. Darts is full of them.
‘I remember a player, Steve Hine, came up to me once, and he said, “I’m a baker. Do you mind if I come in with me baker’s hat on, and I’ll throw muffins to the crowd?” And I said, “Son, best idea I’ve ever heard”. He became known as the Muffin Man. When you’re working with geniuses, the job is easy.
‘But don’t ever forget, the quality of the sport is brilliant. Taylor throwing two nine-darters in a match against Wade. Wow. Littler getting to the final last year as a bloody teenager! Raymond van Barneveld 7, Taylor 6 in the 2007 world final. Proper sport.’
2023 wolrd champion Luke Humphries (right) was a roofer before he became a darts star while Michael Smith (left) was a cattle farmer
Darts is bringing in big sums of money because of the memorable moments it produces
Taylor, who earned over £7m at the oche, plants his tongue in his cheek when he reflects on that old debate. ‘Wish it wasn’t,’ he says. ‘I’d be happy if it was called a hobby – I wouldn’t have had to pay tax on a hobby.’
Hearn is searching for a fresh way to contextualise the brilliance of Littler. It’s not easy when everything else has been said about a phenomenon who won 10 titles in 2024 and launched the boundaries of a sport to new places.
‘He’s a dream for us,’ Hearn says. ‘But he is a nightmare for our spotters – they tell the TV director what shot he’s playing next and with Littler, no one has any idea. The other week, he needed 125 checkout and there’s loads of ways to get there, but what does he do? Bullseye, 25, bullseye. Oh, f*** off!
‘There’s genius in him. Will it be his year? No idea. But my job is easier with him around. We all want to watch someone special.’
We do. But that also takes a conversation about rampant growth to a different place, because Hearn has never bought into the adage about not fixing what isn’t broken.
In the build-up to this year’s world championship, there has been a creeping game of brinksmanship. Sky are believed to pay around £12m a year for PDC rights, with the deal expiring after this tournament – Hearn wants far more if he is to keep the band together.
‘Domestically, it has to be well in excess of £20m,’ he says, and it’s understood his asking price in discussions is actually beyond £30m.
‘I hope they don’t make the same mistake they made in getting complacent with boxing (Matchroom switched to DAZN in 2021). If they don’t come to the table with a sensible approach, I will go to market the day after the championships on the back of what will be another humungous success.’
The wisdom of a split, with Amazon and Netflix circling, will raise eyebrows – it feels like a risk to a good thing. So too the possibility of leaving Alexandra Palace, which has been home to the championships since 2007 but only holds 3,500 fans per session. ‘My team told me we could have sold 300,000 tickets (instead of 90,000),’ Hearn says.
The future of Alexandra Palace within the sport is entering a period of uncertainty due to it’s low capacity
The venue can only hold 3,500 fans in during each session with others being able to hold much more
‘We have to grow because complacency takes you backwards. We won’t underestimate this sport and the people involved in it.
‘When I started, we had a £500,000 total prize fund for the year. Now it’s £20m. I want to get that to £50m, £1m for the winner of the worlds. Why not? Look at the growth areas – golf does fortunes in sponsorship and our viewer numbers are bigger. I don’t see a reason why we can’t be bigger than golf.
‘You can’t put limits on it. We went to Poland last year, 4,500-seater venue, sold out. Went back to a 12,000-capacity, sold out again. It sells out everywhere.’
Around this point, Hearn mentions the Saudis are interested in staging an event. Ever the salesman, he’s listening and thinks it could be a goer in the ‘next year or two’, if laws around alcohol disappear. That seems far-fetched. That seems like a limit.
But Hearn is Hearn and darts fly. Darts is a sport of horses in halls and pigs in chardonnay and somehow it all comes together in the most magical of formulas. Why? How? Hearn still isn’t fully sure.
‘I’ll tell you one thing I do know,’ he says. ‘When I finally go to run the great events in heaven, darts will be the thing I remember as I go through the gates. It’s been mad but I’ve loved every second of it.’
With that, he is laughing again. Laughing the laugh of a showman who styles himself on PT Barnam and will always treasure the day he found the right circus.
