Which, while strictly accurate as a description of the winner Fallon Sherrock, arguably fell some way short of providing the full picture. Because while Sherrock may still theoretically be qualified to cut hair, much of her past decade has been spent on darts: playing darts, practising darts, travelling to and from darts, promoting her darts career. Though she may never have held a Professional Darts Corporation tour card, she is – by any sane definition of the term – a professional darts player.
Indeed, as a result of her historic run to the third round of the world championship at Alexandra Palace in late 2019, she may still be the second most famous darts player in the country, after Littler himself. All of which ensured that the double-top Sherrock hit to beat a flagging Littler and end the competition also marked the start of a feverish and fraught discussion over what, exactly, we had just been watching. A show billed explicitly as “20 amateur players” taking on the world champion over a single leg of darts, in which members of the public were invited to apply and queue and audition, had ultimately been won by a player who will appear next month at her 13th world championship.
Another of the contestants on Friday night, the 15‑year‑old prodigy Mitchell Lawrie, is by common consent the best junior player in the world and well capable of beating Littler over a longer format. Sherrock and Lawrie followed the rules, filled out the form, queued up like everyone else. So was this a genuine meritocratic sporting competition?
Or a confected, curated primetime game show? This matters, and not merely for the reason that sporting prize money is taxed while television game show windfalls are not. Across the sporting landscape, from influencer boxing to Baller League to six-figure bonuses for Olympic athletes, what was once a rigid divide has become increasingly porous.
Where does the amateur realm end and the professional realm begin? And to what extent is it even meaningful to draw a distinction between the two? And much of the criticism of the event, beforehand and afterwards, was trained on Netflix for its verbal sleight of hand, selling the event as a golden rags-to-riches opportunity, even filming the promos in a working men’s club, intentionally evoking the spectre of some no-name pub player defenestrating the greatest dartist on earth.
At which point it is probably worth tightening up some of the terminology here. Let’s start, by way of example, with “pub player”. Which in reality encompasses an entire spectrum of ability: from the lad with the sideburns 14 pints deep who can barely see past the point of his dart, to elite pros such as Chris Dobey or Jonny Clayton or Stephen Bunting, who will often still turn out for their local league or Super League team when a punishing schedule allows.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
