I can still remember the first time I saw Darts on the BBC. Stunned amazement probably best sums up how I reacted. I was both horrified and enthralled all at once. Frightening, beer-swilling men throwing Darts in a beer hall atmosphere conveyed by crowd shots revealing tables full of half-drunk pints of lager. It was riveting. And, I have to admit, I was stunned that these guys could down so many drinks and still hit that triple twenty 3 straight times (180! is the excited PA man's response) when the money was on the line.
I mean, what other athlete competes at the highest level in a state of inebriation? I've had trouble hitting a softball after a few sociable drinks and that was always in a minimal pressure situation.
Not everyone is excited for the American viewing public, however. Lionel Shriver derides the athletes who grace the professional Darts scene and thinks this is more evidence of the decline of American culture.
Abundantly overweight, Andy "the Viking" Fordham is 29 stone [ehm, that's 406lbs, if anyone's counting -- IE] and fond of the odd sip of lager. Even on television, the game is played in a tavern and its fans are no more abstemious, and no more given to an excess of press-ups, than its icons. In all, darts is as cheerfully lowest-common-denominator as you can get, and the direction in which American popular culture seems to be diving is right under the horizontal line of the simple fraction.
