Darts Greatest Games by Matt Bozeat

Author:Matt Bozeat
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2017-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE Eighties belonged to Eric Bristow, Phil Taylor dominated the Nineties and maybe the Noughties would be Ted Hankey’s?

Days into the new millennium, he raced to the BDO World Championship with a 46-minute whitewash of Ronnie Baxter, adding an exclamation mark to the shortest final in history with a 170 checkout.

Overwhelmed, Hankey flopped to his knees…

“I didn’t deliberately leave 170,” he said years later. “In exhibitions I had been leaving 170 and could never hit it… darts is a strange game.”

As for the Hankey era, it didn’t happen.

Twelve months later, he reached the final again, losing to John ‘Boy’ Walton, but with fewer televised tournaments on the BDO circuit and more mouths to feed, he had to go out “labouring, working in supermarkets, anything to pay the bills, to keep the family going…”

In the nine years since he won the World Championship, Hankey also got divorced, remarried and gave up drinking…

For all that had changed, something hadn’t. Hankey still couldn’t beat Tony O’Shea in a major tournament.

O’Shea and Hankey went way back…

O’Shea started playing darts when the landlord at his local, the Church Inn in Stockport, doubled the price of a frame of pool to 20 pence.

Encouraged by handing Alan Evans “a couple of good hidings” in the Stockport & District League, the affable greenkeeper decided to take darts more seriously – most of the time.

To keep himself and his team-mates amused on the way to county matches, O’Shea would ‘moon’ at passing cars and was even known to share a joke or two with Hankey.

“I met Ted at the holiday camps and open events in the early days,” said O’Shea, “and we all knew how good he was. We said he would be a world champion…”

In 2000, Hankey did become world champion, but in the following five years, O’Shea beat him twice at the Lakeside Country Club; in the first round in 2003, then in the quarter-finals two years later.

Going into the 2009 championship, O’Shea looked to be throwing possibly the best darts of his career.

Months earlier, he had won the Welsh Open and in the quarter-finals at Frimley Green, he put out No. 1 seed Gary Anderson, who chucked his darts into the lake in frustration.

Think of ‘oche rage’ and you probably think of Hankey.

Passive aggressive on the oche and much nicer than you might imagine off it, he was once warned for punching the board and was known to squabble with the crowd.

For a week in January 2009, this volatile talent held himself together to beat Brian Woods, Ross Montgomery, John Walton and Martin Adams to reach the BDO World Championship final.

The crowd were on O’Shea’s side, just the way Hankey likes it…

“It’s part of Ted’s game plan,” said O’Shea of Hankey’s volatile relationship with the darts public. “It’s for him, not the crowd. It’s how he gets his head on. It’s how Ted motivates himself. He is a bit misunderstood.”

Hankey had never beaten O’Shea on stage in a major tournament, but it didn’t bother him. “Tony had been having the better of me for 20 years,” he said, “but I believe in percentages.

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