There has been no shortage of score-settling autobiographies from sports stars.
Most recently, Kevin Pieterson rocked the English cricket world with his “get even” exposé, while former Manchester United footballer Roy Keane used his (second) book to resume his attacks on Alex Ferguson, one of the most successful managers of all time.
Staying Power: A Year in My Life, from darts legend Phil "The Power" Taylor, offers a less jaded view of the sporting world.
The lad from a working-class family in the northern England town of Stoke is probably one of the most successful darts players – or indeed sportsmen – the world has ever seen.
The timing, at a moment when his form has seemed less assured after he crashed out of the World Championship in the early stages, makes for more interesting reading; he also takes stock of life more generally.
Looking back, Taylor has won 16 world championships from 1990 to 2013 and there isn’t a major tournament he has not won. Well, there is one – and it irks him. “I’m determined to win the Dubai Championship – to take home that wonderful trophy,” he says.
The Dubai Duty Free Masters is the only darts tournament to be played outdoors. And he’s not giving up yet. It might have a little to do with the Dh918,000 prize money, but mainly, says Taylor, it is because he wants to display the trophy that he describes as “a work of art”.
He says that he doesn’t keep many of the trophies he has won over the years in his home – “Without bragging,” he writes, “there would not have been much room for anything else in my living room” – but he would certainly give the large silver Arabian-style coffee pot pride of place on his mantelpiece.
He hands over almost a full chapter to Dubai, so enamoured is he with not just the tournament but the city too.
“It’s like no other place I’ve ever known,” he tells me. “I just love it there.”
Competing outdoors in Dubai for close to a million dirhams is a long way from Taylor’s humble origins. He left school when he was still a teenager and worked in several factories in Stoke. In the late 1980s, he lived near the pub of another darts legend, Eric “The Crafty Cockney” Bristow. Taylor began playing there and it soon became apparent that simple factory work was not going to be his fate. At the time he was earning about £52 a week and harboured doubts about playing full-time.
“I suppose it was a bit of a risk leaving a job to play a game professionally but I just knew it was something I had to do,” he says.
Taylor’s rise as a player has coincided with the global expansion of darts as a game. And the book is insightful in examining how this happened. Taylor turned professional in 1988 – and his expertise, as well as the imagination and pure bloody-mindedness of the British sports promoter Barry Hearn, has much to do with that.
Taylor recounts the day in 2000 that he answered a telephone call. “Barry Hearn here, I’m gonna be your manager,” he writes. “Oh really? So when is that going to be?” “Tomorrow,” Hearn replies.
And so started the revival of a game that had fallen from its heights of the days of Bristow, Bobby George, Jocky Wilson and John Lowe – all once household names in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s.
Hearn it was who introduced razzmatazz into the game. The cheering, the chanting, the "walk-on music" – Taylor's is The Power by Snap! – but most importantly for Taylor, the big prize money.
“You make a few quid for me and I’ll make a lot for you,” Hearn told him. And he kept to his word. As Taylor points out: “I would trust him with my life.”
Also instructive is Taylor’s recounting of a particularly dark episode in his career in July 2013.
The very first chapter in the book, entitled simply Cheat, tells of the time he was playing in the Gibraltar Darts Trophy against Dean Winstanley. Taylor needed a double 12 to win, which he promptly got. But actually, he didn’t. The dart had nestled just the wrong side of the wire, but was not spotted by either player or the score caller because of the poor lighting. But TV did catch it. It was from then that one of Taylor’s lowest points began.
Soon after that tournament he was playing at one of his favourite venues, Blackpool’s Winter Gardens, when he heard chanting from the crowd. “At first I couldn’t make out what they were saying. It was just your usual thirsty darts crowd having a good time,” he writes. “When I tried to shut it out like background noise it sounded like ‘cheap’ or ‘chief’. But then the penny dropped … those voluble critics were calling me a cheat.”
It was an incident that even led to criticism from Taylor’s closest friend and mentor, Bristow, who said: “The players know if it’s not in the bed and has to declare it. You don’t want cheats.”
“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” writes Taylor. “It appeared that here was the man who had taken me under his wing as an apprentice, and financed the early stages of my darts career – a man I held in the esteem of a brother – calling my honesty and fair play into question. It felt like the end of the world.”
The incident was eventually cleared up and Taylor is once again friends with Bristow but it is clear from this chapter that the whole matter has made an indelible stain in Taylor’s head.
Another low point for Taylor just happened to be one of the highest points for the game of darts. The 2007 World Final against Holland’s Raymond van Barneveld held the same drama, the same suspense, as the famous 1985 world snooker final between the eventual champion Dennis Taylor and the six-times world champion Steve Davis. Phil Taylor, like Davis, held a comfortable lead and looked to be cruising to yet another world title. But the Dutchman never gave up and eventually beat the man from Stoke in a sudden-death finish.
That final captured a huge television viewership as well as the imagination of millions.
“I suppose my only consolation after losing that final was the explosion in the popularity of darts as a major televised sport,” says Taylor.
But it’s not just about sport, Staying Power also reveals personal trauma, particularly the death of his father from cancer in 1977. It is clear that Douglas Taylor was idolised by his son and says that losing him left a huge void in his life. “The trouble with dads is that you always think they are indestructible; it would be much nearer the truth to say they are irreplaceable.”
Taylor says he has his father to thank for his unerring accuracy on the oche. He writes: “I’ve always been grateful that I inherited my dad’s genes for accuracy with a projectile. In his playing days, he was a decent club cricketer, a formidable fast bowler with a reputation for a nagging line and length. Now I am affluent enough to own two holiday homes. I really wish that after a lifetime of working hard, paying his taxes and bringing up his family as best as he could, my dad could have retired to a life in the sun.”
But he has, however, found a second father, one with a superstar son who is none other than the singer Robbie Williams.
“Pete is now my second dad,” says Taylor. “We spend hours together, just putting the world to rights.”
As sporting autobiographies go, Taylor’s is a good, old-fashioned read. This is what sports stars autobiographies used to be like before they felt the need to be controversial.
You won’t find Taylor blasting any of his rivals, indulging in petty score-settling, or revealing too much, although he does mention van Barneveld being blackmailed. Threats were made against the Dutch master to post footage of him on the internet allegedly having an affair. If he did not pay, the blackmailer said he would hack into his computer and download illegal material onto it.
The blackmailer was eventually arrested and it was Taylor who stuck by van Barneveld – even inviting him to stay at his home when the controversy erupted. “Phil stuck up for me, which speaks volumes for him as a man,” Van Barneveld said.
So is he planning for a quiet life? “Certainly not. I reckon I have at least one more world title left in me yet – and there is, of course, still the matter of taking home that Dubai trophy.”
Charles Whebell is a production editor at The National.