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jumped in front of his train on two separate occasions and psychologically he couldn’t handle it. He had to go and give evidence to an inquest and talk about the ordeal in front of the grieving family. It traumatised him for life; he was never the same bloke. It broke him mentally.
    The rest of the guys I played with were just normal fellas. There was Les Rothwell who was happily married with a couple of kids; Robbie Tarr, who worked in a printing factory; a clever bloke called Clive Jennings who ran a bookies; and a lad called Nigel who worked on planes, testing the stress on wings – I could never work out how aeroplanes wings didn’t snap off mid-flight and I nearly wet myself during one bumpy flight, but he said to me, ‘What are you worrying about? It’s impossible to snap a wing off a plane. It doesn’t happen.’ Comforting words, but I still haven’t fully conquered my fear of flying.
    Then there was our treasurer Tony Miles, a lovely old bloke who couldn’t play darts but used to love coming out with us. He was a wealthy businessman, so we knew we could trust him with the money. In all the pubs in the league each player would pay their subs every week, and anything the team won would be shared out at the end of the year – but every year you could guarantee at least two or three treasurers from other pubs would run off with the money. Our treasurer was retired and wealthy and didn’t need our cash, so we knew he’d never do a runner. A black toe did for him in the end. His toe went black and he ignored it. By the time he went to the doctors they had to take it off, but found gangrene had spread to his leg so amputated that below the knee. However, it just carried on going up and up and up, until eventually he died. What a stupid way to go. If you have a black toe, you sort it out.
    Finally there was me, the madman of the team. At seventeen I began to believe I was going to get somewhere in the darts world and I began to tell people I was going to be world champion. That became my sole aim. I was probably a bit too flash for my own good, but I was the main man in our league. I was number one on the team, their best player.
    Unfortunately, coming into the last game of the season I wasn’t number one in the Super League in terms of games won, and there was a prize for the player who won the most games. Although I’d played twenty-seven games of singles – which was one leg of 301, start and finish on a double – and had won all of my games, so too had another guy called Keith Duffy. We had to play his team, the Jerry House, in the last game of the season. It was nine players to each team and each opposing player is paired off at random by their names being drawn out of a hat. I knew this Duffy would beat any other player on our team apart from me, and I didn’t want to share first prize with him, so I was desperate to draw him. First out of the hat was Duffy. Second out of the hat … Bristow. The place erupted. This would be the play-off to decide the best player in the league, and I murdered him. I let everyone know I was the best and it was a fantastic feeling, but I was a small fish in a very large pond, and I wanted to conquer that larger pond. Two significant developments were to help me in this, the British Darts Organisation, otherwise known as the BDO, and television.
    The BDO was founded in January 1973 by Ollie Croft and his wife Lorna, together with three others – Sam Hawkins, Jim Sweeney and Martin O’Sullivan – in the front room of Ollie’s home in Muswell Hill. It was made up of sixty-four member counties in Britain, and organised tournaments – and still does – for grassroots players right the way up to professional level. It set all the rules from the size of the throwing oche to the height and dimensions of the board. The whole system was built on a pyramid structure and players worked their way up. The pinnacle was the World Masters, which preceded the World Championship.