How I Got Into Darts: Chapter 9: My First league wins, a Dead Cat and D1

How I Got Into Darts: Chapter 9: My First league wins, a Dead Cat and D1

My first league victories came in a somewhat un-nerving and distracting circumstances. 

I had been driving to Fareham Working Men’s Club (FWMC) when my sat-nav decided to have a funny five minutes and took me on a merry dance as it had some kind of nervous breakdown (“do a u-turn”, and “turnaround if possible” were all offered despite being on main roads with no chance of this being possible) until I had to give up and check my phone. 

It soon became apparent that my sat-nav is ‘insane’ and I was about 3 miles from where I needed to be.  I resumed my journey and eventually found myself  going through a series of blocked off roads before I came across a traffic jam of sorts and several people standing around. 

Initially I thought it was an accident however it turned out that a poor black cat had been hit by a car and was laying there in the road dying and in a bad way. I won’t go into a graphic description but it was bad. 

Now as a cat lover I couldn’t leave this poor moggy to die in pain so I knocked on a few doors to see if I could get someone to give me something so  I could put the poor thing out of its misery.  

Eventually someone answered and I was expecting one of the breeze blocks situated in there driveway however the gentleman re-appeared brandishing a claw hammer and a bin bag. It was all abit ‘Goodfella’s’ for me and as I walked back to the cat I’ll admit that my bottle went abit. It’s one thing to put a thing out of its misery with a brick, it’s another to hit it with a hammer!  

Mercifully the poor thing passed before I could do the deed. By this time we had attracted quite a crowd. I must have looked a sight, standing there in my darts gear holding a claw hammer and bin-liner and standing over a dead cat. I must have looked like a right psycho!

Having held the traffic up for some time a builder had pulled up (you know the type, jeans, vest, covered in tattoo’s, built like a brick shithouse, skinhead and…………..utterly sympathetic to household pets) and we agreed that we couldn’t just leave the poor thing to lay there in the road so we decided to put it in the bin-liner. He was a braver man than me, the cat was soiling itself now at this point however he scooped it up (the sight will haunt me for years) by its front paws and lowered it into the bin-liner. 

Unfortunately the cat wasn’t exactly solid at this point and I got covered in blood. Luckily Mr claw-hammer let me wash off whilst the builder deposited the cat next to a tree and set off to report it. I then resumed my journey to the FWMC.

As you can imagine this wasn’t ideal preparation for my match and I arrived late at the venue. 

My first match was a doubles, as based on my performance in the doubles cup a few weeks earlier the Captain thought it would be good to continue the momentum.  I got off to a blinder and took out the first leg with d11 however I tweaked my back in leg 2 and my performance dipped and therefore I had to rely on my partner to take out the double for a 2-1 win.

My second match of the night was my league singles debut against a guy called ‘Rocket’ Ron. Ron looked like a good player who had been playing a long time.  His practice was consistent and he had the composure of a man whom had done this for years. 

It wasn’t a great scoring game by any standards!

In the first leg I was averaging around 50 but couldn’t take out the double to go 1-0 down.

I came back in the second leg with some high scoring and took out 56 with an unorthodox 3,13, D20 after I somehow hit 3 instead of 16.

The decider was a tight affair again close, he took the bull to start and with both of us nervy we ended up on D1

Neither of us could hit D1 in about 30 darts until I eventually hit it to finish up. And take my first league singles victory!

You never forget your first competitive singles win!