No boundaries: The loneliness of the long-distance darts player

17 May 2017 - 10:02 By Archie Henderson
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Sport can be lonely, which is why we less talented participants preferred the team variations. You can hide in a scrum, in the outfield, even in a row of slips: "Yours!" is a useful get-out clause whenever a whizzing cricket ball heads your way off the outside edge.

Holding your nerve is a quality much admired in sport. It's hard to imagine anything more frightening than facing the first ball in a Test yet there are many who appear to relish it.

Chris Gayle, the cool - if louche - Jamaican opening batsman, has no fear. He's looking how far to hit the ball rather than quaking at the prospect of being hit by it.

Even in that most accommodating of team sports, rugby, there is loneliness. Goal-kickers can be extremely isolated. Could it be that those with the most extravagant kicking rituals, such as Dan Biggar, of Wales, and Elton Jantjies, of the Lions, are trying to hide their anxiety with little shakes and shimmies?

Someone described a kicker's approach as "the trots", as with a horse, but it sounded like something running down a leg, which would have been understandable.

All very intimidating but nowhere near as unnerving as in darts. If you think darts is a leisurely recreation, usually played in the most congenial of atmospheres, think again. It's not so much while you're actually throwing the dart. That's a piece of cake, like opening the batting or taking a goal kick. It's the waiting.

In the ritual of darts, the person to throw next must do the scoring. You have to add up the three darts' score, subtract it from the 501 (or subsequent numbers) and write it all down on the blackboard before the thrower has removed his darts. In between people are shouting, doing the maths for you. The embarrassment and humiliation - all of it putting you right off your arithmetic. Getting hit on the box by a new Kookaburra would have been less painful.

Some do it in a flash, which was why, when chasing a total in a cricket match at Mitchells Plain one windy Sunday afternoon, we needed to know the required run rate.

"Four point five an over," came an immediate response.

A droll teammate turned to the person who had answered. "You must be," he said in measured tones, "either an engineer . or a darts player."

For those who struggle to calculate quickly, help is at hand. A company in the UK has developed the Smartboard. It's an auto-scoring dartboard that registers where each dart lands and tracks the score on an accompanying app, which also tells you the score.

If only it had been available all those years ago at Foresters Arms it might have made a congenial evening less stressful.

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