Eric Bristow by Eric Bristow Read Free Book Online Page B

on me.’
    But they were adamant. The guy they wanted me to play was called John Parry and he’d never been beaten. ‘We want you to play him for £500,’ they repeated, and they weren’t going to take no for an answer.
    ‘What happens if I lose this game?’ I said.
    ‘Nothing,’ they replied.
    ‘So if I win, you’re going to give me £500, and if I lose the game you’re not bothered?’
    ‘That’s right.’
    ‘Right, I’m up for this,’ I said to my dad, rubbing my hands.
    But he was worried. ‘You have to be careful here, son, you don’t mess with people like them,’ he warned, and I could see his face lined with anxiety.
    ‘Nah, I’ll be all right, no problem,’ I said.
    I agreed to play this guy the best out of five at 3001. They were long legs. I knew you had to be good to win long legs and no one was as good as me – as I proved. I hammered him three–nil and these gypsies gave me my £500 winnings. I was jubilant and spent the rest of the weekend getting smashed and feeling flush. I then found out that these crafty sods had won £2,500 on it. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
    By far the biggest buzz of 1975, however, was when sixty-four of us paid £25 each to play a knockout tournament, with the winner getting all the money plus a three-week trip to America to play in darts tournaments over there with fifty-four other Brits who were making the trip. I
had
to win that tournament, and did, fairly easily, beating Alan Glazier in the final, scooping the dough and a return ticket to the States in the process.
    This was to be my first taste of a jet-set lifestyle that was going to dictate my life over the next three decades. There were three tournaments to play over three weeks: one in Los Angeles, one in ’Frisco and another in Vallejo. The first words my dad said to me when I won were: ‘I’m coming with you.’ I was only seventeen. He wanted to look after me and keep me on the straight and narrow, so he borrowed some money and off we went. Some of the players I had beaten to get there also flew over, but they had to fund their own trip. I had my tickets paid plus $800 to spend from the money I’d won. When we arrived in LA all the darts community who lived there put us up in different houses.
    Dad and I were with a couple called Malcolm and Mary-Ann Harper who had a beautiful big house with a swimming pool; I’d never seen anything like it in my life. And if the houses dwarfed the ones I’d seen at home, the darts tournaments, which were played from Friday to Sunday, were something else. There were hundreds of boards lined up and hundreds of players playing singles, pairs, mixed pairs, four-man teams, and all for money.
    As the tournament progressed, and as more players got knocked out, so more of these boards became free. I was practising on one of these boards when a top player called Nicky Virachkul, originally from Thailand but with American status, said to me, ‘So, you’re the London Lip are you? So you think you’re better than me, do you?’ and all this verbal nonsense – this was before I was known as the Crafty Cockney; back then I was called lots of names, not all of them good.
    I said, ‘Look, you don’t want to play me for money, you’re not good enough to play me for money.’
    My dad was at the side going, ‘Leave it out, son; we’ve only just got here.’
    He was too late. I agreed to play Nicky for $200, and Dad said, ‘No, no, no, we’ve only got eight hundred.’ His face had gone white at this point.
    ‘Don’t panic, Dad,’ I said. ‘I’ll beat him.’
    I played him best of fifteen at 501, and I beat him eight–one. My dad was elated.
    Then Nicky said, ‘I’ll play you again, same format, same amount of money.’
    Again Dad became anxious. ‘Nah, don’t play him again,’ he said. He’d got the money and he was happy.
    Nicky didn’t have the cash on him so he went round his mates and raised the two hundred dollars, came back to me and said,