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82

Mervyn King

If Mr King is the raging Caliban of darts, perhaps he has sound cause for his fury. The prospect of a footnote appearance in darting history as only the second-best arrowsman to come out of Ipswich can’t be easy for so resentful and paranoid a man to bear.

In truth, that Suffolk town’s finest chucker is no easy act to follow. No leisure pursuitist has had as powerful an impact on national life, cultural and political, as Keith Deller. His surge in 1983 from unknown qualifier to world champion not only inspired Martin Amis to write London Fields, the lairy yet engaging anti-hero of which, Keith Talent, was modelled directly on Mr Deller, but also shaped British politics. According to the Channel 4 docu-drama When Boris Met Dave, watching Deller beat Bristow by taking out a legendary 138 inspired the undergraduate David Cameron. Apparently this shock victory taught him never to give up in the face of daunting odds – a lesson from which he profited twenty-two years later when coming from nowhere to steal the Tory leadership from the prohibitive favourite David Davis. Who is to deny that but for Deller there would be no coalition today, and that a right-wing Tory Party led by Mr Davis would be languishing on the opposition benches? Here, as the likes of Vernon Bogdanor and Anthony Howard would agree, is one of the great what-ifs of post-war British history.

Set against all that, Mr King’s claims to immortality rest precariously on three achievements. He has the worst nickname even in darts, in which the myopic former Kwik-Fit fitter James Wade flirted with ‘Specstacular’ before settling on ‘The Machine’. If, like Mr King, you share your name with the man in charge of the Bank of England, on what conceivable grounds would you not choose for your sobriquet ‘The Governor’? Or even, going that extra mile down the Kray-esque path trampled half to death by Bobby George, ‘The Guv’nor’? By way of a dramatic lurch into lateral thinking, Mervyn King prefers Mervyn ‘The King’ King, a nickname as stultifyingly obvious as it is, with Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor showing no ambition to abdicate this side of Doomsday, impertinently preumptious.

Secondly, this bristling ball of East Anglian resentment has forged such a close bond with darts crowds that he now wears earplugs on the oche to cocoon himself from their appreciation. They loathe him, and without the panto-villain tone to the barracking that attended ‘One Dart’ Peter Manley before he flipped his reputation by cunningly adopting ‘Is This the Way to Amarillo?’ as his walk-on tune. When Mr King strides to the stage to Motörhead’s metallic dirge ‘Bow Down to the King’, his attempts to feign unconcern serve only to highlight his discomfort.

And thirdly, he has a stylistic affectation even more irksome than Eric Bristow’s raising of the little finger (see no. 64). Mr King’s trademark is a pre-throw twiddle of the dart between thumb and index finger seemingly designed to suggest D’Artagnan nonchalantly caressing his sword before leaping to the defence of Porthos and Aramis.

To his credit, it cannot be denied that Mr King is a man of principle. Livid at suggestions in January 2007 that he was poised to forsake one of darts’ two sanctioning bodies for the other (see Tony Green, no. 94, for a brief account of the split), he threatened to quit the BDO world championships in their midst if the rumours persisted. It speaks to his integrity that he waited a full month before duly announcing his defection to the PDC.

Long after that is forgotten, perhaps, the thing for which this nightclub bouncer manqué will be remembered is an excuse plucked elegantly from the Spassky–Fischer era of insane chess paranoia. After losing a 2003 world semi-final to Raymond van Barneveld, Mr King showed customary grace in defeat by insisting that the air conditioning unit had blown his darts off-course.

Every sport, game or leisure pursuit requires its hate figures. Darts is regally blessed to have Mervyn ‘the King’ King.