By all accounts, the 17-year-old Luke Littler’s win over the Dutchman Michael van Gerwen in the recent PDC Darts World Championship in North London was making American news bulletins beyond Las Vegas. Why? Because it’s probably fair to say that the Englishman is putting people in mind of a young Tiger Woods.
The £500,000 prize money Littler bagged on 3rd January may not sound much to the Scottie Schefflers of this world. However, with sponsorship deals pouring in all the time, those in the know suggest he will have £20 million stacked away within the next 10 years.
Target Darts, the company that started sponsoring the lad when he was 12, cannot believe their luck. Toy shops ran out of “little Littler” darts over the Christmas period.
You doubt whether too many outdoor types would choose darts over golf. However, Scotland’s Alan Soutar – who won his Professional Darts Corporation tour card in 2021, and a fireman by trade – not so long ago told GGP that darts is making a better fist than golf of moving with the times. First and foremost, this former owner of a 7.1 handicap at Carnoustie struggles to believe the very different pace at which the two sports are played.
A year ago, flashes of the then-amateur Littler playing Luke Humphries in the final of the ’23 World Championship (Humphries won that one) prompted many of the uninitiated to wonder if Sky Sports TV had speed-ramped the film by way of adding to the festive fun.
The 46-year-old Soutar answered with a bemused denial.
“Not a bit of it,” he said. “Thanks to the younger players, darts has quickened noticeably over the last 15 years and the game’s all the better for it. The top guys mostly take no more than six seconds to throw each set of three darts in competition whereas the golfers, in competitive circumstances, tend to slow down.
“I love my golf,” he continued, “and I can understand why the golfing greats might take their time when there’s so much money at stake. But when it comes to regular club golfers like myself, I don’t get it. You see them copy the pre-shot routines of the guys they follow on TV, only to top the ball a few yards off the tee. You have to ask if their preliminaries do them any good.
“Then there’s the putting. Now it’s not difficult to read a green but the friends I play with look at their putts from every angle before leaving the ball 6 to 8 feet from the hole. Surely, there has to be a better way …”
He agreed that the authorities were doing their best to accelerate the game. “Ready golf” got a tick from him, with the same applying to the two-minute time reduction – from five minutes to three – in looking for a lost ball.
In contrast, though, he has not been impressed by the introduction of stadium holes such as the par-3 16th at TPC Scottsdale, which is widely accepted as the loudest hole in golf. “The crowd aren’t there to watch the golf,” he said. “They’re there to drink, to make a noise and to throw their cups onto the course.” All of which puts one in mind of Bunkered magazine’s description of darts fans as “wall-to-wall crowds of John Dalys.”
After making the point that darts has moved on from being purely a pub game, Soutar is not averse to golf’s idea of having music blaring as the golfers walk onto the first tee in Ryder and Solheim Cups. But he is sorry to say that he does not begin to see music as the cure when it comes to making golf more appealing to the young: “If you really want to get youngsters interested, you probably need to do as Carnoustie in laying out nine tiny holes for the kids. It means that they can get round in under an hour without getting bored.”
He has his doubts as to whether the older generation of club golfers in the UK have the urge to set a good example by moving with the times: “The old guard like to play the game their way and it’s the old way.” Even at his age, he said he sometimes felt uncomfortable going into the clubhouse at Carnoustie with the more senior fraternity. He hesitated to say as much, but he never found them as friendly as his pals in the fire service.
“Golfers are good at blaming their clubs if they have a bad day. Darts players not so much.”
Alan Soutar
For a while, he had thought that LIV Golf might do as intended in finding a way to modernise the sport and he could see how the Ian Poulters of this world and the new Saudi-backed league might be a good fit.
Instead, he lost all interest in a hurry. “What I’ve seen of LIV on TV in the last couple of years – and admittedly that’s not very much – has been like watching a car crash.”
Does he marvel at the LIV money? No, other than to wonder why on earth someone like Jon Rahm would want to add millions to his millions. Soutar did not mind adding that he had been beyond satisfied with his darts-playing world when, in ’22, one of his best years, he won £96,000. “Add in my £37,000 earnings as a fireman and what more could I want?”
Soutar revisited the subject of money to mention that club golfers will often spend a fortune buying new putters and drivers, and how one of his chief officers in the fire brigade had happily admitted to storing 10 spanking new drivers in his garage.
“Golfers,” he chuckled, “are good at blaming their clubs if they have a bad day. Darts players not so much.”
He himself, would you believe, used the same set of darts for his first 30 years in the sport.
E-MAIL LEWINE
Top: Champion darts player Luke Littler is in for some rapid riches.
JAMES STACK, GETTY IMAGES