Snobs miss the rare beauty of darts How many maximums did Jane Austen throw?

A world-champion darts player writes home…

Dear Mother and Father,

Shame you can’t congratulate me. I am, I know, a disappointment to you. You hoped I would follow in your footsteps and become a literary critic or expositor of abstruse texts. Instead, I stand before you as winner of the 2025 Paddy Power World Darts Championship, for which the prize-money far exceeds all you’ve earned from the 22 books you’ve written together over the course of 40 years. I don’t gloat. I seek only your approval and your love. Millions of adoring fans around the world applaud my skills and call my name — Frederick “Fatboy” De Selincourt — but you hang your heads in shame every time I enter the arena to Morrisey’s You’re the One for Me, Fatty. I have dedicated every nine dart finish I’ve ever thrown to you, yet still you disown me.

Where did it all go wrong, you ask. Well, the answer to that is straightforward. It went wrong when you, daddy, saw me plucking feathers from my cot pillow and throwing them at mummy. “I’ll buy the boy a set of plastic darts,” you said in an unlikely fit of populism. I remain surprised that you even knew where to buy darts from. Didn’t you once say you only ever shopped at Foyles. “And don’t forget a dartboard,” mummy said, out of concern for the furniture.

Do I need to remind you that I threw my first maximum from the pram and regularly hit nine dart finishes before I could walk. “One hundred and eighty!” were the first words I ever spoke. You could have stopped me then but you were too busy touring Third World universities for the British Council. Faute de mieux, I became a darts player on the altar of your careers. When I told you I was to be apprenticed to Jocky Wilson you raised no objection, thinking horse riding — while not exactly the career you’d wanted for me — at least opened doors to a better class of person than I was ever likely encounter in the Ally Pally.

For 18 months I sharpened Jocky’s arrows and fluffed his feathers and for a further 18 sat at the oche to watch where he placed his feet as he threw. I know what you’re thinking, but had those been Nureyev’s feet you’d have applauded the conscientiousness of my studies. But what’s the difference?  Is not excellence excellence? When people refuse to call darts a sport or even an art because — they say — it amounts to no more than chucking a primitive missile at a narrow strip of sisal fibre, I remind them of Jane Austen’s description of writing as painting with a fine brush on two inches of ivory. How often did you read me that passage when I was growing up! How well I remember you arguing with each other about its applicability to Jane Austen’s prose at its best. You scoffed at me when I said I believed Jane Austen played darts with her sister Cassandra in the garden of the Austen house at Chawton. But could she have described those two inches of ivory had she not been familiar with that narrow band of dartboard in which I earn my living? How many maximums did Jane Austen throw? Which was her double of choice? Those are discussions for another time.

Let’s not argue about nomenclature — sport or art or neither, darts enable the human spirit to achieve greatness not by spraying grand gestures around but by fixing on a fine detail of existence and concentrating all its fire power there. Jane Austen or Tolstoy? Your preference was always for Jane Austen. As is mine. You can keep your Olympics and your Test Matches and your Cup Finals. Give me darts at the Alexandra Palace any time. Precisely because of their smallness, those tiny treble bands on a dartboard are more challenging to creativity than a wicket, a goalmouth or a finishing line. Or the Battle of Borodino, come to that.

You have commented over the years on my adiposity. How can a pair of fleshless neurasthenics such as you, who chew their fingers to the bone for art’s sake, have produced someone my size? Eat less, you have pleaded. Exercise more, you say, forgetting how many miles I walk every day from the oche to the dartboard and back. My dear mother and father, do not think I am fat because I am indolent or because I cannot say no to cakes and ale. I am fat because I love darts.

You don’t need me to tell you that Julius Caesar wanted men about him that were fat. “Sleek-headed men” he feared because they thought too much. Sleek-headed men, for that very reason, make poor darts players. There comes a moment in the life of every darts player when he loses his instinctive rhythm, cannot remember how he throws, how tightly he holds his darts, how much flight he gives them.  Many a promising career has ended that way.  Had listened to you, I would not be Champion of the World today. Let a darts player lose his insouciance and he’s finished. And whoever saw an insouciant thin man?

Our bulk belies our subtlety. More than that: our bulk is integral to our subtlety. Some law of nature decrees that for one dart to follow another into those two inches of darting ivory which determine the difference between success and failure, between genius and mediocrity, they must be thrown by fat men. You cannot think darts into a treble or a bullseye. You dare not pause long enough to give reflection a sniff. You must throw with a sort of cultivated disdain that is not given to the thin.

If only, my dear parents, you had snatched enough time from your cerebral labours to watch a game of darts. Actually watched one. You would, had you done so, I am sure, have marvelled at the contrast between the overflowing physical abundance of the man throwing and the refined and dainty precision with which he throws. It is a contrast at once aesthetically satisfying and philosophically baffling. How can it be? See an arrow fly in slow motion, see how much it arches and how far it deviates, and it is a miracle it ever finds its target. Would you not imagine the thrower of such a missile to be a person of near supernatural exactitude? And now look who he is!; ‘Tis I, your clumsy and in all other regards bumbling and maladroit son.

The crowd who cheer me don’t bother their heads with any of that. They pour beer down their throats and sing Stand up if You Love the Darts. But you, mother and father, aficionados of art in all mysterious manifestations, are just the people to understand dart’s artistry and yet, out of small-minded snobbery, you look away. And so you miss the marvel and the rare beauty of it. A cheetah can run, a tiger burns bright in the forests of the night, but only your fat, clumsy son can, without raising a sweat, hit a treble-20 from eight feet away whenever he wants to.

Shame you aren’t here to see me lift the trophy.

Your loving son and Champion of the World,

“The Fatboy”

Adapted from Howard Jacobson’s substack, Streetwalking with Howard Jacobson.